I replaced UIPath in a weekend
Our customer's RPA platform failed silently for five and a half days — 592 tasks, zero errors reported. How we knew anyway, and what I built over the weekend to replace it.
David Sommers Blog
David Sommers on software engineering, web performance, and the occasional yak shave.
Latest posts
Why Google threw out FP and FCP in favor of LCP (Correlation study)
I wrote an article for the RentPath company blog on a correlation study into different web metrics .
Stop building websites for iPhones
I wrote an article for the RentPath company blog on mobile performance with slow web sites .
Splitting out your marketing pages from your main web application
I read an article last month on Adding static pages to your Rails app and I’ve been meaning to write up how we do the same thing at Clockwise.MD . In fact, it’s been a very long time since I’ve written on my blog. It’s funny that I’m finding time to write in the middle of a hackathon at 48-in-48 . After joining three teams, it seems I’ve completed everything on my list and I’m waiting on Stephanie…
Docker is great, slow Rails apps is not
It’s apparently a known issue to have slow Rails apps under Docker in development due to folder sharing in VirtualBox. There are many suggestions as to how to fix this, so I tried a few. Sharing Host Volumes with Docker Containers is a good overview of multiple things to try by Oliver Günther. I started with docker-osx-dev but received rsync errors after running it for a few minutes. Switched to…
Upgrading to Mountain Lion
So I finally got around to upgrading to Mountain Lion. Required Steps My first stop was to follow Thoughtbot’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Riding a Mountain Lion . Get Xcode and Command Line Tools installed Fix homebrew permissions with sudo chown -R $USER /usr/local Update homebrew with brew update Install gcc 4.2 to install older rubies with brew tap homebrew/dupes; brew install autoconf automake…
Help Club
We are all craftsman and we all learn something new every week if not every day. We learn through the process of having a problem then solving it and sometimes we need help. In New York, I’ve attended and helped many developers in the local NYC on Rails meetups through a weekly meeting called Hacker Hours. It’s a nice change of pace from the normal Ruby meetups because Hacker Hours attracts a lot…
Heroku the Magician!
In an earlier blog post entitled Heroku’s uptime numbers are off , Heroku claimed their uptime was 99.28% and I calculated it closer to 96.25%. Status page a few days ago: Now, they’re combining multiple months together to decrease the number. Status page today: The numbers are looking better and better eh? Three questions: Why are they listing July separate (which was a good month right?) and…
Don’t confuse popular or easiest with best
I recently bumped into someone who proclaimed PHP as the greatest language for web development and he had zero desire to learn another framework, especially not Ruby on Rails. I, for one, couldn’t care less if you used Ruby or Rails, Python or Django, C# or ASP.NET. I do care that you would a) only stick with what you know and b) choose PHP. For the former, it’s simple - you should assume you…
Being a Productive Developer at a New Startup
Meetups are always fun because you get to meet a wide range of developers. A great event in NYC is Hacker Hours by NYC on Rails which offers programming help for any developer regardless of the problem. A developer I helped out there recently learned Rails and joined a new startup. He asked me an interesting question regarding working at the new startup: The other dev is very productive. I feel…