This year I participated in SpawnFest 2017, a two day hackathon focused around the BEAM virtual machine. With judging finished, I felt this an appropriate time to reflect on the architecture and process of my submission.
Read MoreIn our design lab, each request to add a new piece of clipart or process a user upload touches our clipart service. Historically, this application has been hosted on EC2 which has led to some problems for us. A combination of inconsistent load and random hangups on certain files has led to it becoming an operational and financial burden. We chose to undertake the work to migrate the code path which was the worst offender to AWS Lambda. While not...
Read MoreRails has never played nice with using multiple databases. While it is very easy to go and set up a new connection via ActiveRecord.establish_connection, the niceties that rails provides just don't exist for your second database. Fixtures don't work without explicitly calling set_fixture_class and you do not have access to any of the database tasks or generators that are provided by rails. To help alleviate this pain point for us at CustomInk, Karle Durante wrote SecondBase five years ago to...
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