ListenAddict Lets You Subscribe to a Person Like You Would to a Show

In this episode of Running in Production, David Parker talks about building a service to subscribe to people with Ruby on Rails and Sapper. It’s hosted on Heroku ($30 / month) and has been up and running since November 2020.

David talks about creating an API back-end with Rails, trying out Svelte and Sapper, the challenges of scraping names from websites, figuring out and fixing PostgreSQL performance issues, finding a good work / life balance and more.

Topics Include

• 3:27 – Motivation for using Ruby on Rails and Sapper / Svelte
• 6:18 – Writing raw SQL queries before translating them to ActiveRecord
• 7:36 – A few Ruby libraries that helped build this project
• 9:37 – The challenges around scraping human names from various websites
• 13:17 – The API Rails back-end is a monolithic app with about 100 endpoints
• 15:44 – David pulls from 94 different sources to find new content
• 19:06 – The Engtagger gem helps figure out stop words
• 20:25 – Why did you go with an API back-end?
• 21:43 – What Svelte and Sapper are and how they help build UIs
• 25:34 – How the back-end and front-end communicate with each other
• 28:29 – ~11k LOC on the back-end and ~5 LOC on the front-end
• 30:49 – At the moment it’s a free service and there’s no ads too
• 33:23 – What Sidekiq is being used for in terms of background jobs
• 35:30 – Mailgun is being used to send all transactional emails
• 37:34 – How the service might be monetized in the future (it’s $30 / month for hosting now)
• 40:31 – Break down of Heroku Dynos and add-ons
• 43:17 – Figuring out how to add new people and also using Cloudflare
• 45:40 – The deployment process from development to production
• 49:16 – The database is being backed up through Heroku
• 52:00 – A features table is in the database to enable features for himself
• 54:37 – Logentries will send out a notification if something goes down
• 57:50 – What to look out for and how to fix certain performance issues with PostgreSQL
• 1:01:09 – An example of when to consider breaking up a wide table into multiple tables
• 1:05:22 – Best tips? Figure out your work / life balance and try the back-end / front-end split
• 1:11:21 – Find David on Twitter, https://www.programmingtil.com/ and his YouTube channel

Links 📄 References

• https://www.mturk.com/
• https://github.com/evanw/esbuild
• https://www.snowpack.dev/
• https://dev.to/svelte-radio/building-listenaddict-with-david-w-parker
• https://github.com/heroku/heroku-pg-extras
• http://rachbelaid.com/postgres-full-text-search-is-good-enough/
• https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

⚙️ Tech Stack

• rails →
• ruby →
• svelte →
• sapper →
• cloudflare →
• honeybadger →
• logentries →
• mailgun →
• new-relic →
• postgres →
• redis →
• vercel →