Surviving the Big Rewrite
summary
Describes extracting a realtime product from a monolithic Rails app into static single‑page sites built with middleman and served from S3/CDNs, reusing a sprockets asset gem (pull_of_assets) across projects. Replaces Flex with Backbone/js libraries, builds a custom streaming API with graceful fallback to short polling, demos booting the app from a floppy, reuses the same assets in a PowerPoint 2013 app, and reports Flash once ran on ~99% of machines.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Start
- 0:11Surviving the Big Rewrite
- 2:49Middleman is modular with a rich ecosystem of extensions
- 4:25Middleman is multi-environment aware
- 5:19A simple two step deploy process
- 11:38We broke the Flex app into its own project so that our Flex contractor could deploy independently from the Rails app team
- 14:42Our first single page HTML application
- 20:42To reduce latency, a Stream API was deployed to production
- 23:21Create a sprockets asset gem to share assets between apps
- 29:21Extract content from Rails app so marketing team can move faster
- 30:31Some dynamic components are still required
- 31:21Why bother with a static content website?
- 32:04a few things I didn't cover
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