From Excel to Rails: A Path to Enlightened Internal Software
summary
Claims Rails is practical for internal tools and replaces fragile Excel workflows by turning flattened buy sheets from ten team spreadsheets into normalized Postgres models and a de‑normalized search index that uses Postgres and Elasticsearch. Built features: unique PO enforcement, constrained enums, derived fields, photos, pinable rollovers, CSV export. Outcome: single source of truth across five warehouses, fewer manual copies and mistakes, easier aggregation than Excel, adoption via iterative feature work, slower tests because of Elasticsearch integration.
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chapters (31)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:43Nick Reavill
- 1:58Internal Software
- 3:09Joel Spolsky
- 4:57Usability is a lower priority
- 6:53Why is Excel so popular
- 8:59Why do we build internal software
- 11:10Why Rails
- 11:57Case Study
- 12:49Buy Sheets
- 15:08Reference Data
- 15:23Targets
- 15:40Summary Tables
- 15:50Summary Sheets
- 16:07What can we do
- 18:00Problems we can solve
- 19:18Single source of truth
- 20:35Visual Semantics
- 22:41Buy Sheet
- 23:06Pagination
- 24:26Semantic Meaning
- 25:10Grouping
- 25:53Horizontal scrolling
- 26:36Rollovers
- 26:52Summary Tab
- 27:30Access to Excel
- 28:02Testing
- 28:32Easier in Excel
- 29:49Is it hard to get people to use Rails
- 30:54Favorite Rails gems
- 31:27Active admin
