Aside of all the posts about recruiting (recruiter spam dropped by 75%, amazing, thank you very much), website performance and the importance of source code, I wrote a few posts recently on the Artsy Engineering Blog and made some open-source gem releases and contributions. It feels really good and there’s a whole new week ahead!
I got very excited with getting my hands into em-proxy and writing Beat Heroku’s 60 Seconds Application Boot Timeout with a Proxy using the heroku-forward gem. I even contributed to em-proxy itself, adding support for unix domain sockets. It’s exciting because em-proxy is written by @igrigorik, who is one of those impressive people that I still don’t have the pleasure to know personally. The post was accompanied by a more philosophical piece on Losing Control to the Heroku PaaS. Speaking of losing control, I annoyed the crap out of Heroku developers trying to figure out why an application was timing out during bundle install on Heroku, which turned into an already well trafficked blog post on Debugging Bundler Issues on Heroku. Sorry everyone.
Today I released mongoid-cached-json 1.4 and garner 0.2 with some significant performance optimizations for the former, described in today’s blog post. This was some pretty exciting, although relatively basic CS work, that didn’t always turn out the way you’d expect from performance improvements. My first optimization ran 20% slower than the original – you cannot make assumptions about the runtime characteristics of theoretically better algorithms until you actually benchmark them.
Grape got a lot of love with the release of 0.2.6 after a ton of formatter-related work and security fixes via multi_xml (upgrade!) and I plan to push 3.0 really soon. Generally, Grape is getting much skinnier, faster and lighter: I simplified a lot of internals and entities were taken out into the grape-entity gem by @agileanimal.
Last week I released guard-rack 1.3.1 in which @viking got rid of .pid files and I finished by making it compatible with all versions of Ruby using the awesome spoon gem (solid replacement for not-so-cross-platform posix-spawn).
Finally, I posted an amazing study of a horse by George Stubbs on Artsy. You can follow me there for all the art, and for my tech stuff, on Twitter.