– Avoiding burn out by having a 2nd project to work on

– Scratching your own business needs is a healthy way to drive a project

– GoRails gets 2 million page views a year (~500k unique visitors)

– Looking at Laravel for inspiration when it comes to batteries included

– Talking a bit about Bootstrap vs Tailwind CSS

– Being aware of developer driven vs user driven features

– GoRails uses server side templates with Turbolinks

– Using Turbolinks has been good but there are gotchas

– Flatpickr is a really nice datetime picker with minimal dependencies

– Websockets and Action Cable aren’t used in GoRails but it is with Hatchbox

– Introducing just enough JavaScript complexity as needed, but no more

– Trying to avoid heavy client side JS for performance issues on low end devices

– GoRails is using Rails 6.x with Webpacker but it’s not using Sidekiq

– Docker isn’t being used in development or production to keep complexity low

– PostgreSQL is used as a primary database along with Redis for caching

– Using the strong migrations gem to help make production migrations less scary

– Hopefully more advanced database related features make its way into Rails

– The entire GoRails site is hosted on a single $20 / month DigitalOcean server

– Making extensive use of multi-level caching helps a lot for performance

– Passenger is being used as the web server (it’s an nginx module)

– Let’s Encrypt is still being used on the server for end to end encryption

– Errbit is being used for catching errors which gets emailed back to him

– Keeping tracking in house with Ahoy to keep costs down and help against fraud

– Wistia is used for hosting / streaming videos and it has useful built in metrics

– Manually transcoding video is hard and expensive (Wistia does the dirty work here)

– Both Stripe and BrainTree are being used as payment gateways

– Inspired by Laravel, Chris wrote a Rails Engine called Pay

– It took 3 months to get payments to work with Stripe’s new SCA APIs

– Accepting payments went from being simple to outrageously complex

– You should deal with SCA now in the US to future proof yourself later

– Even the database is hosted on that single $20 server (2 CPU cores / 4 GB of memory)

– Honestly the database for GoRails is pretty tiny but it’s heavily backed up

– Walking through the deployment process from development to production

– GoRails isn’t using Hatchbox yet, but it will be eventually

– Upgrading Ubuntu LTS releases gets tricky without a 2nd web server

– Having a managed database would help with upgrading servers with minimal risk

– There’s a few seconds of down time for each deploy at the moment

– Passenger isn’t just for Ruby apps, it works with Python and Node too

– Everything will come up automatically after a system reboot

– Environment variables are protected with Rails’ encrypted credentials

– Best tips? Things are more changeable than you think, keep it simple initially

– Always keep your master branch deployable with automated tests

– Open sourcing and writing about the tools you’ve built helps everyone

– Chris is on twitter @excid3, also check out GoRails, Hatchbox.io and Jumpstart