cool tools, cool project

i’ve had the good fortune to work on a green field Rails project. Here are some of the “i would not want to do without” tools used on this project

• ruby 1.9.3 – so much faster than 1.8. wow. 
  
• rails 3.2 –  rails just keeps getting better and better.
• mini-profiler –everyone should want a fast app. found lots of unoptimized queries.
• sass — sass makes css fun!
• coffeescript — coffeescript makes javascript feel like ruby.  that’s a good thing IMO.
• poltergeist/phantomjs – headless javascript testing. so much better than having Firefox popup.
• rspec — i love the rspec DSL.
• capybara — super useful for our request specs.
• devise — it works.  easy to use.
• vcr — essential for service tests. call out once, but cache after that.
• cancan — great role system, easy to use.
• kaminari — works great for paging (along w/ jquery.pageless)
• sendgrid — send notification emails, easy w/ sendgrid
• librato — low level metrics like rows written on some models,
• machinist — love blueprints that are either persisted to db or not.  easy to use.
• redis — super fast key value storage.  great for caching.
• resque & resque-scheduler.  for asyn and cron jobs, easy to use, fast.
• simple_form — a great improvement over standard Rails forms
• airbrake.  you want to know when exceptions happen!
• activeadmin.  most everyone needs a admin backdoor to their app right?  here it is!

 

Neat stuff that we use that i’m not huge on

• inherited_resources — i prefer seeing the controller actions explicitly.  it makes peer review on-boarding new people easier.  less magic.

Other essential tools & practices

• a great, easy to use CI system.  We use CircleCI.  nearly turnkey and hooks into github nicely. 
• incremental checkins.  We use git, github, topic branches, pull requests, and ey cloud deployment commands.
• peer review of pull requests:  either the code is pair programmed or the pull request is peer reviewed prior to merging into master
• Pivotal Tracker.  A great simple tool that does the job.
• NewRelic:  essential for app performance monitoring.
• Mixpanel:  great for funnel analysis.  we measure all activities in our app and important properties for those activities.
• Twitter bootstrap.  it’d be great to have the luxury of a talented designer, but we didnt.  this did a great job.  it’s important to get a designer in there eventually, or your app will look like a twitter bootstrap app.  this might be ok for a captive audience, but not mass consumption.

Using this great toolset has made this project a joy to work on.  Hope this helps others.