All posts tagged with 'ruby on rails'
FreeAgent is now on Rails 5.2!
As of Monday, 24th of September 2018 FreeAgent is now running on the latest version of Rails. We were inspired by Eileen’s blog post about how GitHub upgraded from Rails 3.2 to 5.2 and we wanted to share with you the challenges we faced and how we managed to overcome them. We faced similar challenges to GitHub and we believe it is worth reiterating them to highlight their significance. Motivation… Continue reading
Rails migration aliases with fzf
Ever find yourself re-running Rails migrations? Up, down, redo-ing etc. Have you forgotten that long VERSION number again? Or what the migration actually migrates? These handy aliases just might be for you. I've been running individual migrations a lot recently, so I took some time to set up these aliases with fzf (a command-line fuzzy finder). rdbm # bundle exec rake db:migrate (no auto-completion) rdbmu # bundle exec rake db:migrate:up… Continue reading
Staying On Track
We were fortunate to start FreeAgent at a point in time when things had just taken a turn for the better for web developers. Prior to 2005, I was writing web apps in Java using technologies such as Spring, Velocity and (sorry for swearing) Struts. Then along came Ruby on Rails. Rails was perfect for our bootstrapped startup. Its conventions allowed us to focus on rapidly developing the core functionality… Continue reading
Revving the engine
At FreeAgent we deal with a lot of accounting data - every invoice, bank transaction, expense and VAT return in the system must be processed, and its tax and accounting effects calculated and recorded. In the early days of FreeAgent this was something that was baked directly into the business objects – reporting data was pulled directly from the day-to-day business records. As the number of users grew and the… Continue reading
Switching wings mid-flight
How would you choose to release a completely redesigned version of your web application? Capistrano? Git hooks? Copying files over SFTP? Now imagine your application serves over 21,000 active, multi-user accounts. It’s a very busy app, and forms the backbone of many of those users’ livelihoods. At that point, the question perhaps becomes less about “how”, and more about “when”. 1am? And how long is the downtime going to be?… Continue reading
! ‘CoffeeScript: two sugars, no bitter aftertaste’
This is part one of a two part intro to CoffeeScript. part one part two The FreeAgent web application runs on Rails, and around the corner for us is an upgrade to Rails 3.1. This will bring many benefits to performance, but one of the things I'm most excited about is the asset pipeline. This makes JS and CSS assets first-class Rails citizens, and as a bonus, allows us built-in… Continue reading
Understanding the Rails Logger
I've lost track of why now, but I've spent a bit of time this afternoon trying to understand how the Rails logger works in production. For years we've been using a Hodel 3000 Compliant Logger, which is dead straightforward. Recently, though, we switched back to using the built in logger with Rails, which is a little more subtle. The default logger in Rails is the BufferedLogger from ActiveSupport. It can… Continue reading