Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
43 lines (35 loc) · 3.05 KB

01_brittany_wald_jen_eisenberg.md

File metadata and controls

43 lines (35 loc) · 3.05 KB
Raw

/ruby/go

Presenters: Brittany Wald (@joyousbanana) & Jen Eisenberg (@jeisenberg0), Paperless Post

  • Internal Tools team, fairly new team
  • Create new service to run alongside Rails app
  • Rollouts: assign features to users in modular way (10% users, 50% logged in), need more granular insights than currently have
  • specs: high performance, microservice, data analysis
  • Rails app limited in scalability
  • First microservice built specifically for data need
  • Why Go? Ruby great for concise business logic, Rails is powerful for web apps, but not for backend API. C not realistic given the resources they had.
  • Brittany went to Ardan Labs workshop at GothamGo '14. Go provided low latency. Go runtime is fast and compiles to a binary. They both enjoyed learning Go.
  • Felt like they were in a maze and could only see a couple of steps ahead.
  • Data Typing: map JSON to SQL. Go can't scan null values out of Postgres. CreatedAt is not null, but RemovedAt can be - that's why it's a pointer.
type Strategy struct {
  CreatedAt time.Time
  RemovedAt *time.Time
}

  • StackOverflow for similar question: custom marshaler - 0 upvotes, sounded scary.

  • How about using 2 structs? Asked Bill Kennedy which is more idomatic. Ended up using a pointer to time.Time.

  • Intermediate step between JSON and SQL. Senior developer suggested using pointer.

  • There isn't a Rails-like framework for DB, middleware, routing, etc. missing - started writing own ORM. Reading Design Patterns at the time and started using Factory pattern.

  • Stored Queries - minimize business logic in Go

  • Go Tour, How to Write Go Code, Effective Go -> read about concurrency! It felt inescapable. "Escape is only an illusion, and gaps in your knowledge resurface as bugs in your code."

  • Ruby vs Go: Ruby creates thread off main thread while Go starts coroutine.

  • Awesome live demo of parallel vs concurrent execution! They've been speaking concurrently, and presenter notes act like a scheduler, but when they speak in parallel (at the same time), you can't really process both... because audience is like a single-core CPU.

  • Parallelism in Ruby (MRI) is actually concurrency. Illusion that Ruby is thread-safe because only one thread can hold the GIL at a time, but thread can be passed during blocking I/O. Leads to race conditions.

  • Start working towards v1. Use MC (MVC without the V) framework - JSON server and client.

  • "Old habits don't die. You have to kill them."

  • Initially tried to write Rails MVC in Go. But architectural patterns in Rail -> lots of coupling.

  • Repository Pattern. Ultimately needed to test DB access and separate domain entities. Function-based abstractions. Collection of entities and implement in layers (pattern is implemented by the caller level).

  • Could have used mixins/modules in Ruby, but they enjoyed writing this in Go.

  • Great performance benchmarks even without explicitly using Go's perf-enhancing elements.

  • Open-sourcing soon at github.com/paperlesspost/rollouts