Nimble Industries
This really was the best decision we made before launching: We recently launched VimTricks, an email newsletter serving up tips and tricks about the Vim text editor. After reviewing many email platforms, we went with Substack for it’s easy of use and seemingly well-documented path to transitioning from free to paid newsletter. One problem we wanted to solve before we even launched was...
One of my consulting clients recently asked me to investigate a bug causing an unhandled exception in their production Rails app. The Bugsnag issue looked like countless others any Rubyist has no doubt reviewed before: undefined method `invitation_accepted_at' for nil:NilClass. This type of error indicates the code was expecting an object to have been returned when it wasn’t. A method was being...
Is your software up to date? Have you been applying those gem security patches? Are you keeping up to date with python version upgrades? Have you ever been surprised at just how far behind one of your packages is? We need a metric to measure and track the age of source code dependencies. The software industry has settled on great practices like static code analysis, as well as automated...
GitHub acquired Dependabot and made it free so we tried it out. The results were better than expected. We have long been advocates for consistent software maintenance. It might seem obvious, but software simply must be maintained and kept up to date with its dependencies or it risks atrophying until it becomes an unmaintainable pile of trash. Dependabot is an excellent tool for preventing...
When reviewing Rails apps, I often find many uses of Time.now and Date.today, each of which comes from Ruby itself. Although these methods seem convenient and accessible, they should be avoided inside of Rails apps, as they aren’t converted to the local time zone set inside Rails. Imagine the following (admittedly naive) method inside an Order model: def shipped? shipping_date < Date...
One of the many benefits of the Heroku platform is its ease of integration into modern Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) workflows. Heroku’s built-in CI makes it incredibly easy to keep all your code running in a single platform, without the need to rely on third party tools and without the need to configure and maintain them separately. It’s also extremely...
Recently, we began using IP geolocation within StatusGator to learn where are users are located. We are happy to say that it’s working out well. We hoped to use these insights to tune our marketing. To that end, we added the Ahoy gem to help collect information related to how our advertising campaigns are going. The Ahoy gem also uses the geolocation gem to lookup IP addresses. This...
StatusGator is built on Ruby on Rails, a popular choice for rapid web application development for more than a decade. One of the many benefits of Rails is its rich ecosystem of open source gems which can provide massive value quickly. We discovered one such gem, Ahoy, on our recent quest to understand how our users find out about StatusGator. StatusGator gets about 3,000 visitors and 20 sign ups...
In custom software, the cycle of write, atrophy, rewrite is all too common. Many product owners too reluctant to embrace maintenance and sustaining engineering. A vicious cycle of expensive rewrites ensues. Businesses feel bruised by developers and experience unhealthy surges in cost and business disruption. Think hard before deciding to throw away what you have in pursuit of the greenfield:...
StatusGator has a few thousand users. Recently I grew curious as to where you all are. Surely it would be interesting to learn a little about where they are from. The results are pretty interesting. I’m pleased to report StatusGator helps users in 85 different countries! The top ten are: USA – 1,061 UK – 207 Canada – 115 India – 72 Australia – 70 Germany...
Nimble Industries