#tatft

[seinsi-writes]

Harry Writes Fanfiction (Unknowingly)

Harry wrote a book. When Hermione read it—it all seemed so obvious to her, it was a love letter to Draco Malfoy. This is how the whole misunderstanding began.

This is part of my Author/Actor AU - Series

Basically a story of how Harry unknowingly wrote a Hogwarts AU fanfic, and no one had the heart to tell him.

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[wyvernshollow]

I Know I Can’t People Two Days In A Row.

I know

Now I just need to remember that I know.

[fourstack-blog]

Upgrading a Rails app, part 2

We recently moved a Rails app from 2.3 to 3.0 and noticed a big performance increase.

Last week we upgraded the same app from REE to 1.9. Just as upgrading Rails, upgrading Ruby is easy if you have good tests. 

The performance more than doubled once again. Average response time dropped from 164ms to 63ms. See graph below.

As you can see we use New Relic to monitor this system. It is a great tool for gaining insight in your apps performance (issues).

[fourstack-blog]

Secret weapon against vulnerabilities

Recently there have been confronted with a number of vulnerabilities.

Whenever a vulnerability is found, it is important to act swiftly. This is a moment where it becomes (sometimes painfully) visible how good or bad your development process is:

How long did it take you to find out about the vulnerability?

How quickly can you identify apps that are vulnerable?

How quickly can you update an app?

How quickly can you make sure that the update does not break anything?

How quickly can you deploy the app?

Is this all a matter of minutes or days? Are you vulnerable? Which apps are vulnerable? Do you have a list of all the apps you are running? Do you have to check everything manually? How long will it take to apply the fix? 

Some things you might want to look into:

Subscribe to the different security related mailing lists. This allows you to roll out fixes before most people know they exist.

Have an automated way of determining which of your apps are vulnerable. We can do this in a matter of seconds across ALL our apps. If you use provisioning tools, writing a script that queries all apps should be trivial to implement.

Have your code always ready for deployment. Use a SCM like Git and have a stable branch ready for deploy (usually master). Applying a fix should, in general, take a couple of minutes.

Write tests and make sure they are green. Use real TDD and don't try to cheat by writing only a few high level tests afterwards. Your tests should cover all aspects of your app and should always be green.

Write tests and make sure they are fast. Test suites that run 30 minutes are usually an indication of poor test and/or code quality.

Automate your deployment and deploy often. Deploying should be a matter of seconds and you should never be afraid to deploy. If you have no confidence, find deployment scary, something is wrong with your code and/or tests and/or deployment process.

If you do all the above right, you are basically ready for doing continuous deployment. This is a great weapon for combating vulnerabilities. 

Applying a fix for a vulnerability will then no longer be something special, just business as usual. That is a great position to be in.

[fourstack-blog]

Upgrading a Rails app

We just upgraded a long running Rails 2.3 app to 3.0. The graph clearly shows a drop in response times. We think this is largely due to the optimized partial rendering in 3.x.

This is a medium sized app with about 7k lines of code and 11k lines of tests.

This migration was made easy in large part to the extensive test suite. Don't get me wrong, it was still quite a bit of work. It was tedious, not hard. Our test suite pointed us to all the things that needed to be changed. 

After the upgrade we had only a few tiny bugs that were trivial to fix. 

We are now in the process of upgrading it to the very latest Rails and Ruby 1.9. We have already fixed all deprecation warnings, so moving forward from here should be trivial. Again, thanks to the test suite. Without it this would have been impossible.

Writing tests takes time and some people question their value. Their benefits are not always visible short term. In the long term it really makes everyone happy: less bugs, no hassle deploys and easier changes.