– The app was initially released after 2 days of part time development

– The data is pulled in from the Johns Hopkins CSV data on GitHub

– Scott’s partner for this app works for the DOD (Department of Defense)

– The site is much more than just an infection counter for countries

– All of the crowd sourced data is anonymous and encrypted at rest

– They are using FDA protocols and everything is signed off by a doctor

– NY state has 15,000+ cases and it’s very hard to get tested

– Scott has been using Ruby on Rails since 2007, that’s why he used Rails

– Getting an MVP up and running quickly

– Jumpstart Pro was used to create the base application

– You can use Jumpstart Pro for more than a typical SAAS app

– Jumpstart Pro gives you a base application to build upon using Rails best practices

– Jumpstart Pro uses TailwindCSS and it looks nice out of the box

– Websockets are not being used, they are trying to keep things simple

– A rake task uses the Mechanize gem to grab the data from GitHub on a cron job

– How do the Coronavirus numbers compare to Worldometers?

– Doctor validated crowd sourced reports will help provide per county infection rates

– A few notable gems that were helpful for building this app

– Hatchbox is used to deploy the application ($99 / month for the cluster edition)

– Simple Analytics is used for basic analytics ($19 / month)

– Honey Badger is used for error reporting (~$20 / month)

– Google Suite is used for email and other business things

– Tuple.app is used for pair programming sessions on MacOS systems ($25 / month)

– All in all after server costs ($100 / month) , it’s about $300 / month for everything

– Not all side projects are close to free, these tools cost money

– Why not just throw it all on a single $20 / month DigitalOcean server?

– The Rails core team puts the burden of deployment on each developer

– Hatchbox helped remove some of the pain of managing servers yourself

– 650+ commits in about 10 days of development, so iteration speed is fast

– ~11,000 lines of code, most of which are separate from Jumpstart Pro

– Jumpstart is a base application to work off of, it’s not a gem you install

– Docker is not being used in development or production

– Something funky in happening with Rails 6 and code reloading in development

– Jumpstart uses Webpacker and Yarn

– PostgreSQL, Redis and Sidekiq are being used

– Sidekiq is used to move encrypted data from server 1 to server 2

– Having a partner in the DOD / FDA helped keep Scott on track with data security

– Hosting is being moved to Google Cloud for storing more sensitive information

– What exactly is clustered mode with Hatchbox?

– It took about 30 minutes to deploy everything to GCP thanks to Hatchbox

– Most side projects fall apart when it comes time to deploy things

– How Hatchbox manages project isolation since you can deploy multiple apps

– This Covid-19 site has 2 web servers that are load balanced to serve traffic

– Currently Hatchbox doesn’t appear to handle rolling restarts

– Hatchbox sets up nginx as the load balancer and also uses Let’s Encrypt (SSL certs)

– How code gets from development to production

– Creating a deploy script to help remove human errors from deploying

– The risk wizard feature was rolled out quickly to determine your risk factor

– The current situation in Italy is a tragedy

– Data is backed up daily but most of it can be recreated from source files

– Hatchbox and Jumpstart don’t help you out with backing up your data

– Deployment is hard with Ruby on Rails

– Basecamp, Shopify, GitHub and others all deploy things much differently

– Hatchbox helps, but it’s expensive and does lack some useful features

– There’s always Heroku, but that’s also expensive with a opaque pricing model

– Uptime Robot is being used for free notification if the site goes down

– It would be cool if Hatchbox hooked into each hosting provider’s monitoring APIs

– Dealing with secrets in development and production using environment variables

– Scott is the primary developer of this project

– A really brilliant way to handle internationalization by leveraging restaurants

– Best tips? Get your workflows right and then automate them with scripts

– Also, focus on keeping all of your URL shortcuts in 1 place for easy access

– Should these URLs be in your admin back-end? Maybe, maybe not

– Testing is important but it doesn’t always need to be classical tests

– Rubocop isn’t being used, but it’s a good tool once properly configured

– Scott’s code is very organic and not perfect but he ships working things quickly

– Scott is a prolific blogger and most posts are based on what he’s learning at the time

– Learn more about Scott by reading his blog and following him on Twitter / GitHub, there’s also his other projects at https://netlabeler.com/ and https://scottsfeedfinder.com/