React on Rails

Reverb’s main application is a well loved Rails monolith. It serves our API and view level traffic admirably. As we’ve grown, we’ve added more interactive UI elements, and as we did we followed the Rails Way™. We decorated our behavior with jQuery and we left templating to Rails. This approach, yes…

Using EXPLAIN ANALYZE to debug a slow SQL query

As a software developer, performance problems are a “good” problem to have, because it means your product is being used! Here at Reverb, we are lucky to be in a position where fixing and preventing performance issues is of real value. And when it…

Stay safe while using html_safe in Rails

Whether you’re a junior dev, product designer or senior level software engineer, it’s easy to fall on your face when using `html_safe` in Rails.

The thing about this method is: it’s terribly named. I mean really, it’s a horrible…

First Line of Defense: Blocking Bad POST Requests Using NGINX Rate Limiting

When I started at Reverb, we were using Loggly for our log aggregation. Loggly is great, and I recommend them for startups just getting air under their wings. However, there is a point in time where…

Disabling Animations in Espresso for Android Testing

When using Espresso for Android automated UI testing, it’s recommended that you disable system animations to prevent flakiness and ensure consistent, repeatable results. The Espresso docs provide a sample of how to disable animations…

How to write an NSQ consumer in Go

Recently Reverb began using NSQ as a distributed message queue. After establishing producers in our Rails app, we wrote a simple Go consumer for some of our services to use the new queue.

What the NSQ?

Encryption on Rails — A Primer

After building an encryption/key-rotation scheme to allow the safe storage of bank account information in Reverb, I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve learned. Let me preface by saying that storing sensitive user data in your database is a topic that shouldn’t be…

Mocking React Modal with Jest

I love testing and am always looking for quality-of-life improvements that decrease the barriers to writing good tests. Here’s a small one with a big impact.

Problem: I can’t access react-modal from the component I’m…

Conditional Validations with Rails

Adding validations to your ActiveRecord models always starts out pretty simple. But as your app grows, your business rules compound in complexity and your data can become untidy. Oftentimes we require that certain models are validated differently under different…

Ditch SSH - Using SSM to control your AWS Instances

Amazon SSM is a hidden gem. Today we’ll take a look at how you can stop dealing with SSH in order to issue remote commands to fleets of instances using SSM’s SendCommand functionality.