Social food photos

I have a new project under Bistro Digital. This time is maintain and fix some web services for an iOS app based on Mexico city. The backend it’s on Ruby on Rails using many (many) gems.

My first problem was know how the authentication system was made; for my surprise it was made entire by hand. So I can`t fix that because some services use methods from that module. Also the project has many gems (I don’t know why they don’t have devise gem). They used Capistrano and with Unicorn as a web server, but had many problems in the deployment to staging and production environment because the application consumes a lot of CPU and memory. They had like 8 workers in a m3.large instance only for the web application; and others 8 workers for background jobs. The invoice from AWS was a problem.

My first move was try to improve the code, but I can’t because many methods in the services module were strong linked with the authentication and the model has a bad design (many references and so on).

I had to develop a statistic system, I liked too much because from a simple rake command they can run any SQL statement and storage to view the Records and Sets from the application. Maybe later I can publish that model and simple module as a open source.

After 2 months they ask me if I know a way to improve the balance and make the application deployment easier. So I think: maybe we can use Puma and AWS Elastic Beanstalk and (because the other developer) move all the services they used to different products on AWS. They have a Postgres instance inside the server, I moved out to the AWS RDS. In the application for the background jobs they had Resque this gem use a Reddis service, but also they had on the main server and I moved out to AWS Elastic Cache. At the end only had left the main production environment moved out to the Elastic Beanstalk and removed Capistrano. I setup the staging environment and that it. Everything was good.

That was my work on the application for social food photos.