doxo delivers innovation that transforms the bill pay experience for consumers, billers and financial technology providers. For over eight million consumers, doxo’s all-in-one bill pay makes it simple to organize and pay any bill on any device through a secure checkout.

Since 2017 we have been focusing on upgrading Ruby on Rails applications. It’s been quite a fulfilling learning process as we continuously improve our workflow best practices, and internal tooling.

In this article I will go into detail to explain how we determine the best approach to create the roadmap for a successful upgrade project.

Smile.io is the world’s largest rewards program provider. Providing solutions for merchants and e-commerce businesses, its loyalty management software integrates with Shopify, BigCommerce, and Wix to reward customers with points and perks for purchases, referrals, and sharing content.

To automate the Ruby gem release process, we will only need to configure two things, the GitHub Actions workflow, and using conventional commit messages.

Does this sound interesting? Come and let’s dig into it.

A race condition is a type of software bug that occurs when multiple threads or processes access a shared resource simultaneously, and the outcome of the execution depends on the timing of these accesses.

When we allow users to upload images, they usually upload files without any optimization for the web. It’s up to us to add some measure to prevent those images from slowing down our app. Luckily, the different gems commonly used to handle user uploads also give us solutions for this problem.

This is the second part of the Optimizing Images series. In the first article we talked about the basic concepts and techniques to optimize raster images, and today we’ll talk about techniques to optimize SVG files.

Imagine this scenario: you open a website on your phone, you see an image loading really really slowly, you wonder what’s going on and download the image to see more details… turns out the image is 3000x3000px with a size of 1.5Mb!

So, let’s talk about different ways to optimize images, common problems, and ways to find these issues early.

As of May 1st, 2023, Heroku will no longer be supporting the Heroku-18 stack. The reason for this deprecation is to maintain synchronization with the Ubuntu Long Term Support releases. If you are currently running your Rails application on this stack, when you navigate to the Heroku dashboard you will notice a warning to upgrade to either Heroku-20 or Heroku-22 before the end of the Heroku-18 stack life on April 30th, 2023.

While Heroku-18 will not be supported, do not be alarmed or concerned that the apps running on this stack will stop working. Heroku has confirmed that all existing applications will not be interrupted and non-build functionality will still be available. However, to maintain access to security updates, technical support and the ability to perform new builds, an upgrade will be necessary and is highly recommended.

You might have extended classes or instances in Rails, but do you know you can also extend Rails associations?

class Account < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :people, -> { extending FindOrCreateByNameExtension }
end

In this article I’ll discuss a strategy for different readability: a simple way to split your routes file on a Ruby on Rails project.

Gems are a central part in a Rails application, they help us add new functionality to our apps so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but also allows us to extract code to better organize the codebase and to share logic between multiple apps. In many cases, we have custom made gems, and we need to ensure they will work properly with the two Rails versions we run when we use the Dual Boot technique during upgrades. But… How do you dual boot the gems?

SoundCloud is the world’s largest music and audio platform. With a diverse creator community, the platform is renowned for its unique content and features, including the ability for artists to share music and connect directly with fans.

If you search online for using SSH keys with Docker, to access private Github repositories, you will get a lot of search results, but the solutions you’ll find are almost all out of date, insecure, or fragmentary (i.e. they provide a small snippet of information but not a complete solution). Given how popular both Docker and Github are, I found this quite surprising. We recently had to set up Docker with a Rails application that fetches gems from private repositories. We’re also using Docker Compose, which added to the challenge. This comment on the Docker project, which is from February 2021, unfortunately is still accurate:

There are several questions and answers out there about how to pull from a private repository (using the hosts ssh key & config). A lot of them are not working, not secure or unanswered

After several hours of research and testing, we have a good solution to share. But first let’s take a look at the different approaches to consider.

Let’s begin with a simple question:

Have you seen config.load_defaults 6 in any application?

6 is an argument and could vary, I’m just giving an example.