Podia Has Everything You Need to Sell Online Courses

04/05/21 • 71 min

In this episode of Running in Production, Jason Charnes goes over building a video course hosting platform. It’s built with Ruby on Rails and is hosted on Heroku. It’s been running in production since 2014.

Jason talks about using StimulusReflex / Action Cable, upgrading to Sidekiq Enterprise, writing tons of tests, setting up auto scaling on Heroku, tips to run zero down database migrations at scale, ways to reduce 3rd party API calls and more.

Topics Include

2:39 – Motivation for using Ruby on Rails (and yes Rails does scale!)
3:50 – Using interactors and Action Cable with StimulusReflex
6:06 – Things to think about for using Hotwire Turbo Streams vs other solutions
10:56 – Action Cable is embedded into the main web server
12:25 – The workflow gem and how payments are handled with Stripe and PayPal
16:15 – Recently upgrading to Sidekiq Enterprise and also using flipper for feature flags
19:40 – Using Knapsack Pro to help speed up tests in CI
21:18 – Code to test radio is about 1 to 1.5 and there’s about 38k lines of non-test code
24:03 – Examples of when they’re using Sidekiq’s batching feature
26:38 – Mostly using the asset pipeline but also using Webpacker and using StimulusJS
30:07 – Most developers at Podia touch most areas of the code base
31:37 – The run down on how the site editor works and using Trix plus Active Storage
34:41 – It’s 2021 and uploads still aren’t a fully solved problem
36:57 – Handling bulk video uploads from Podia to Wistia
38:38 – PostgreSQL is the main database, Docker isn’t being used and on-boarding new devs
40:53 – How they’re using Caddy and Let’s Encrypt to link custom domains to customers
42:48 – Using Postmark for transactional emails and SparkPost for email campaigns
44:18 – Full text search with PostgreSQL and building the Podia admin dashboard
47:38 – It’s hosted on Heroku and they use the Rails Autoscale add-on
49:43 – Surviving Black Friday without any problems
51:25 – The end to end process and time to deploy code from development to production
53:01 – Gems and strategies to help run database migrations at scale
56:44 – Using Diffend to audit gems and switching from Heroku’s scheduler to Sidekiq
1:01:42 – The DB is backed up on Heroku’s schedule and everything else is backed up too
1:03:21 – Avoiding tons of third party API calls by storing certain things locally
1:05:16 – Their payment code builds upon the official Ruby SDKs from Stripe and PayPal
1:06:11 – Using Uptime Robot, Cronitor, OpsGenie and Slack for monitoring and alerts
1:09:13 – Best tips? Build a friendly team of co-workers and automate as much as you can
1:11:03 – You can find Jason on Twitter at @jmcharnes

Links

📄 References

⚙️ Tech Stack

Topics Include

2:39 – Motivation for using Ruby on Rails (and yes Rails does scale!)
3:50 – Using interactors and Action Cable with StimulusReflex
6:06 – Things to think about for using Hotwire Turbo Streams vs other solutions
10:56 – Action Cable is embedded into the main web server
12:25 – The workflow gem and how payments are handled with Stripe and PayPal
16:15 – Recently upgrading to Sidekiq Enterprise and also using flipper for feature flags
19:40 – Using Knapsack Pro to help speed up tests in CI
21:18 – Code to test radio is about 1 to 1.5 and there’s about 38k lines of non-test code
24:03 – Examples of when they’re using Sidekiq’s batching feature
26:38 – Mostly using the asset pipeline but also using Webpacker and using StimulusJS
30:07 – Most developers at Podia touch most areas of the code base
31:37 – The run down on how the site editor works and using Trix plus Active Storage
34:41 – It’s 2021 and uploads still aren’t a fully solved problem
36:57 – Handling bulk video uploads from Podia to Wistia
38:38 – PostgreSQL is the main database, Docker isn’t being used and on-boarding new devs
40:53 – How they’re using Caddy and Let’s Encrypt to link custom domains to customers
42:48 – Using Postmark for transactional emails and SparkPost for email campaigns
44:18 – Full text search with PostgreSQL and building the Podia admin dashboard
47:38 – It’s hosted on Heroku and they use the Rails Autoscale add-on
49:43 – Surviving Black Friday without any problems
51:25 – The end to end process and time to deploy code from development to production
53:01 – Gems and strategies to help run database migrations at scale
56:44 – Using Diffend to audit gems and switching from Heroku’s scheduler to Sidekiq
1:01:42 – The DB is backed up on Heroku’s schedule and everything else is backed up too
1:03:21 – Avoiding tons of third party API calls by storing certain things locally
1:05:16 – Their payment code builds upon the official Ruby SDKs from Stripe and PayPal
1:06:11 – Using Uptime Robot, Cronitor, OpsGenie and Slack for monitoring and alerts
1:09:13 – Best tips? Build a friendly team of co-workers and automate as much as you can
1:11:03 – You can find Jason on Twitter at @jmcharnes

Links

📄 References

⚙️ Tech Stack

Previous Episode

Building an Internal App to Track 1,200+ VMs and Servers at REI

In this episode of Running in Production, Sean Callaway talks about building an app to help manage REI’s server infrastructure. It was built with Django and it’s mostly hosted on premises in their own data center.

Sean covers keeping the app mostly server rendered and goes into detail about using Ansible, Kubernetes and Rancher to help manage things.

Topics Include

4:16 – Motivation for using Django and Python
6:27 – The Django admin is not being used
8:20 – Using Ansible to automate spinning up VMware based VMs
10:17 – It’s a monolithic application and it does use Django apps
12:14 – A high level overview of what the app does to help visualize it
15:14 – It’s using Django templates and they tuned a few database queries
18:19 – PostgreSQL is used for some data and maybe Celery will be used soon
21:07 – nginx is serving static files and Kubernetes’ ingress controller handles SSL certs
23:43 – Docker Compose is being used in dev and what Kubernetes has been like so far
28:42 – Pretty much all of their servers are hosted on premises
31:17 – Using Grafana, Splunk and Prometheus for logging and monitoring
34:26 – For the Linux servers, they’re running CentOS with Rancher
38:50 – The entire flow for pushing code from development to production
45:37 – Database backups and planning for disasters
51:50 – Best tips? Containerize your app quickly
55:05 – You can find Sean on GitHub, Twitter and he has a blog at https://callaway.dev

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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Next Episode

AbstractCRE Helps Extract Key Data from Real Estate Property Documents

In this episode of Running in Production, Cole Simmons goes over building an AI driven service for commercial real estate professionals with Flask and Python. It’s hosted on Google Cloud using GKE (Kubernetes) and has been up and running since 2017.

Cole talks about rewriting the initial prototype, the dangers of not using an ORM, splitting out the front-end from the back-end, using Google Functions, the importance in making sure you’re building what your users want and so much more.

Topics Include

1:05 – The inefficiencies when dealing with commercial real estate
6:51 – From an MVP in 2016 to the main app in 2017 to the first paying customer in 2019
16:48 – Motivation for choosing Flask and Python and backing out from using Go
21:59 – Losing (recoverable) data by accidentally running a bad raw SQL query
24:14 – Using openpyxl to handle Excel files and Weasy print to export PDFs
25:31 – The API is a separate service in its own repo and the AI stuff runs on App Engine
30:47 – The API is built with Flask straight up, no external packages
32:19 – The front-end is built using React and Redux
34:24 – Creating an amazing data tables solution is still not a generic solved problem
39:43 – Payments are handled in a custom way (ACH, check, etc.)
44:06 – Going with Google Cloud, Google Functions and GKE (Kubernetes Engine)
49:18 – A DNS related GCP bug caused ~80% of their requests to 404 for 2-3 days
54:00 – Developing local functions and what it’s like to deploy everything
1:03:04 – Making sure the back-end and front-end deployments are sync’d up
1:05:15 – Dealing with secret management using Google’s key management service
1:07:48 – Currently using Mailgun but looking to switch over to Postmark
1:13:43 – Database and file backups are happening regularly
1:19:31 – GCP’s logging and error reporting has been good so far, using LogRocket too
1:21:25 – The TL;DR on what Webflow is and how they use it for their landing page
1:27:10 – Best tips? Listen to advice but make and follow your own path
1:29:41 – Customer discovery is important as well as asking the right questions
1:32:15 – It’s probably going to take you longer to build your app than you initially think
1:38:30 – Cole’s on Twitter and you can email him if you’re an engineer that is interested in this problem space

Links

📄 References

⚙️ Tech Stack

🛠 Libraries Used

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.