Great Question Makes It Easy for Teams to Perform Customer Research

In this episode of Running in Production, PJ Murray goes over building a customer research app with Ruby on Rails. It’s hosted on Heroku and has been up and running since mid-2020.

PJ talks about using feature flags, integrating Stripe with Jumpstart Pro, building out a React front-end, the value of having business metrics, taking data security very seriously, having a pragmatic approach around test coverage and tons more.

Topics Include

• 4:16 – It took about a month to get the MVP out and a few months after for it to be sellable
• 6:52 – Motivation for using Rails
• 8:54 – How the app works and going over some of its screens
• 13:21 – ActiveJob is such a good abstraction it’s easy to forget what job library you use
• 14:14 – A bunch of useful gems that are being used
• 18:14 – The user experience can often impact the technical complexity of what you’re building
• 21:53 – Feature flags and swinging back to JSONB columns
• 26:21 – Stripe handles all of the payments
• 28:24 – The app is pretty much one big monolith and it’s a good thing
• 29:55 – About 25k lines of Ruby code and 40k lines of Typescript on the front-end
• 33:04 – If Turbo were around for years would you have used it over React?
• 36:37 – You shouldn’t be afraid to touch code in your codebase
• 38:42 – Getting a decent amount of things planned out before implementing the code
• 44:00 – Postgres, Redis, Mixpanel and Datadog for app and business alerts / logging
• 49:19 – Limiting access to production data from developers
• 51:17 – Heroku helped them get to market faster and they had YCombinator credits
• 54:36 – The deploy process from development to production
• 1:01:20 – Limiting access at the GitHub repo level and Heroku
• 1:04:48 – In general backups are handled by the providers they use (Heroku, S3, etc.)
• 1:07:21 – Heroku will send out alerts if something unexpected is happening with the site
• 1:09:31 – Best tips? Be pragmatic about testing and code coverage
• 1:11:58 – User design and UX is handled by a specific team member
• 1:14:09 – Check out https://greatquestion.co and they’re hiring too

Links 📄 References

• https://github.com/excid3/jumpstart
• DHH’s YouTube video using esbuild and Tailwind’s CLI
• https://github.com/nickjj/docker-rails-example
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_and_Organization_Controls

⚙️ Tech Stack

• rails →
• ruby →
• react →
• algolia →
• datadog →
• github-actions →
• mixpanel →
• mux →
• postgres →
• redis →
• s3 →
• sentry →
• stripe →