Signing Apple promotional offers with JWS
We wanted to give existing subscribers a promotional price. Someone who already subscribed before, has lapsed or is about to, and we want to win them back with a discount....
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 that, over a few months, quietly created thousands of failed transaction rows for a handful of users. The database kept growing...
Moving from VS Code to Neovim
I switched my main editor from VS Code to Neovim about two months ago, and I think it is going to stick.
Verifying rewarded-ad callbacks server-side
Rewarded ads are the ones where a user watches a video and gets something in return. Finish the ad, get some energy, or coins, or an extra life. The flow...
Refactoring a Go service to 90% coverage
I spent a chunk of last quarter refactoring a Go service that backs our ads. It had grown the way these services do: one big package, functions that did three...
Autoscaling workers on queue depth, not CPU
We had a set of background workers that read messages off a queue and processed them. The queue is Google Pub/Sub. The workers run on Kubernetes, and they were autoscaled...
The worker that kept eating its own memory
For a few weeks we had a background worker that slowly ate memory until the pod got killed, restarted, and did it all over again. It ran a heavy detection...
Pairing and TDD changed how I work
The team I joined practices Extreme Programming, or XP. In practice, for me, that has mostly meant two things: pair programming and test-driven development. I had done neither in any...
What I took from Design Patterns in Ruby
I read “Design Patterns in Ruby” recently. It walks through the classic Gang of Four patterns but written the way you would actually write them in Ruby, not Java translated...
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, and I am glad about...
From PHP to Ruby on Rails: what tripped me up
I spent years writing PHP. A lot of it with Symfony. Then I changed jobs, and the main app here is Ruby on Rails. So for the last couple of...