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…

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…

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…

10 Tips for Becoming an Efficient Vim User

At Reverb we use MacVim to standardize the developer environment, make pairing easier, and increase efficiency. When I started at Reverb, I had never used Vim before. It took a few weeks for me to start feeling comfortable, but without tips like these, it…

Documenting architecture decisions, the Reverb way

Ever make a decision in your codebase and then come back 6 months later and have no recollection of why the code is the way it is? I certainly have.

A Simple Priority Queue With Redis in Ruby

At Reverb, we do a lot of search indexing. Anytime a listing is updated, added, or removed, we have to do an index operation to our Elastic Search Cluster. For a while, we were able to do this at near real-time by pushing our indexing work to a Sidekiq…

How not to fail at Timezones in Rails

We recently discovered a test that was failing only at night. Of course this set off all kinds of alarms in my head — we must be screwing something up with timezones! Time for an audit. Let’s review how Rails deals with timezones.

Shopify Rate Limits, Sidekiq, and You

We’re just about to launch our Shopify App, which allows Shopify shops on Reverb to sync their inventory from Shopify to Reverb.

Working with Shopify at any decent scale requires respecting their rate limits, which makes API access rather…