Signing Apple promotional offers with JWS
We wanted to give existing subscribers a promotional price. Someone who subscribed before, who has lapsed or is about to lapse, and we want to win them back with a...
Posts
Technical writing, personal experiences, and portfolio showcase
Don't create a new row for every retry
We had a recurring-payment flow in our Rails app. Over a few months, it quietly created thousands of failed transaction rows for only a few users. The database kept growing,...
Moving from VS Code to Neovim
About two months ago, I switched my main editor from VS Code to Neovim. And I think this time it will stay.
Verifying rewarded-ad callbacks server-side
Rewarded ads are the ones where a user watches a video and gets something back. Finish the ad, get some energy, or coins, or an extra life. When it works,...
Refactoring a Go service to 90% coverage
Last quarter I spent some weeks refactoring a Go service that runs behind our ads. It grew the way these services often do: one big package, functions that each did...
Autoscaling workers on queue depth, not CPU
We had some background workers that read messages from a queue and processed them. The queue is Google Pub/Sub. The workers run on Kubernetes. An HPA scaled them based on...
The worker that kept eating its own memory
For a few weeks, we had a background worker that slowly ate the memory. The pod got killed, then restarted, then did it again. It runs a heavy detection job...
Pairing and TDD changed how I work
The team I joined practices Extreme Programming, or XP. For me, in practice, that mostly meant two things: pair programming and test-driven development. I had not done either one in...
What I took from Design Patterns in Ruby
I read “Design Patterns in Ruby” recently. It goes through the classic Gang of Four patterns, but written the way you really write them in Ruby, not Java translated word...
Learning Go after years of dynamic languages
I started writing Go about six months ago. At work, the backend ad services are in Go, so I did not really have a choice. Now I am glad about...
From PHP to Ruby on Rails: what tripped me up
I wrote PHP for many years. A lot of it with Symfony. Then I changed jobs, and the main app here is Ruby on Rails. So for the last few...