CompanyCam Helps Contractors Document Their Job

In this episode of Running in Production, Chad Wilken goes over building a service to help contractors document their job and communicate with their crew. It’s been up since 2014.

Chad talks about handling ~800k photo uploads per day, building a Rails API driven app, creating a great mobile experience with React Native, handling millions of daily Sidekiq (pro) jobs, transitioning to AWS ECS with Fargate, deploying with Capistrano and so much more.

Topics Include

• 3:04 – Motivation for switching from .NET to Rails
• 5:59 – It’s a Rails API with a React front-end, first class mobile support is important
• 9:34 – What type of screens does this app have?
• 11:58 – As the CTO, Chad doesn’t get a chance to code as much as he used to
• 13:15 – A few Rails features and gems being used (interactor, wisper and more)
• 16:35 – Third party sites that they integrate with
• 18:11 – Contracting companies are a lot more technical than you might think
• 22:39 – Every photo upload hits the Rails back-end but it’s not processed there
• 25:30 – Millions of jobs are being run through Sidekiq per day and payments
• 28:46 – Spending time on the company admin back-end vs user features
• 33:20 – Postgres (RDS), MongoDB, Elasticsearch and Redis are being used
• 36:13 – The Flipper gem is being used for feature flags
• 37:44 – Docker is being used in development with a transition to using them in production
• 39:30 – How things are currently deployed and where they’re going with AWS Fargate
• 41:03 – From Chef to Ansible with Capistrano handling app deployments
• 43:35 – Ubuntu is their distro of choice
• 44:00 – Moving over to ECS with Fargate and hiring dedicated ops folks
• 48:28 – A run down of which AWS resources they’re using
• 49:25 – The deployment process from development to production
• 54:59 – All developers on the team can use whichever OS they prefer
• 55:37 – Handling backups of all user data
• 58:22 – Logging, error monitoring and alerts
• 1:01:40 – Best tips? Design patterns are important, so is caching and saying no
• 1:03:48 – Their AWS bill is about $38,000 a month
• 1:05:03 – Check out https://companycam.com, they’re hiring!

Links

📄 References

• https://readme.com/
• https://buildbot.net/

⚙️ Tech Stack

• rails →
• ruby →
• react →
• react-native →
• ansible →
• aws →
• cloudfront →
• datadog →
• docker →
• elasticache →
• elasticsearch →
• graphql →
• honeybadger →
• lambda →
• mongodb →
• nginx →
• postgres →
• pusher →
• rds →
• redis →
• route53 →
• s3 →
• scout →
• ses →
• slack →
• stripe →
• ubuntu →

🛠 Libraries Used

• https://github.com/collectiveidea/interactor
• https://github.com/krisleech/wisper
• https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq
• https://github.com/rubocop/rubocop
• https://github.com/ankane/searchkick
• https://github.com/mrkamel/search_flip
• https://github.com/jnunemaker/flipper
• https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano

Support the Show

This episode does not have a sponsor and this podcast is a labor of love. If you want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my courses or suggest one to a friend.

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