PLAY PODCASTS
uscreen Is a Platform That Helps Content Creators Build a Business

uscreen Is a Platform That Helps Content Creators Build a Business

with Nick Janetakis and Nick Savrov

Running in Production · Nick Janetakis

October 11, 20211h 26m
Original episode page

Show Notes

In this episode of Running in Production, Nick Savrov goes over building a platform to help content creators build a business with Ruby on Rails. It’s hosted on Heroku and has been up and running in production since 2014.

Nick talks about supporting 6.5 million users, using Turbolinks, having a 19 developer team working on a monolithic app, sending millions of weekly emails, storing billions of weekly events, using ShapeUp to help manage the project and much more.

Topics Include

  • 2:49 – They support 6.5 million users on the platform which helped creators make $100m+
  • 4:19 – There’s 2 parts to the system, the admin for creators and the user experience
  • 8:49 – BREAKING NEWS: Rails can scale and it’s working out nicely for them as a monolith
  • 10:47 – Turbolinks and Liquid helped their app a lot
  • 14:10 – It feels like a Rails app but uses VueJS and InertiaJS on the front-end
  • 18:47 – A couple of interesting gems in their Gemfile, including using Fastly
  • 21:38 – They have a great relationship with Mux for streaming video
  • 25:25 – Approaching the latest stable version of Rails
  • 27:05 – 19 Rails engineers are working on the monolithic code base
  • 28:33 – Payments are supported with Stripe, PayPal and Authorize.net
  • 31:42 – About 10 million emails are sent out every week through SendGrid
  • 34:29 – Custom domains for customers and using Heroku with nginx / Let’s Encrypt
  • 39:51 – Postgres is the main database along with ClickHouse (billions of events a week)
  • 42:33 – What types of events are being logged and how can it be viewed?
  • 46:20 – A custom nginx router that sits in front of Heroku
  • 50:11 – Reasons for using Heroku and setting up an auto-scaler
  • 54:51 – A couple of Heroku add-ons and using New Relic (NOTE: 10 billion rows = 250GB)
  • 57:38 – The deployment process from dev to prod (CI, code reviews, GitHub discussions)
  • 1:07:57 – What is ShapeUp which is Basecamp’s methodology around project management
  • 1:09:06 – Backing up user data and more info about ClickHouse
  • 1:14:51 – There’s value in performing soft deletes as long as you really delete it later
  • 1:16:03 – OpsGenie, New Relic and Uptime Robot are used for alerting and being on-call
  • 1:22:34 – Best tips? Follow standards when you can such as using built in Rails features
  • 1:26:03 – You can find Nick on GitHub and Telegram
📄 References
⚙️ Tech Stack
← All episodes of Running in Production