Silent Killers: Lessons from the Brink
summary
Diagnoses are concrete: four production rollbacks in four months, main builds failing 7/25 and 11/25, 140–160k LOC with 1,500 ignored CodeClimate warnings, estimated technical debt dropping from 16,000 to 2,000 hours after focused work. Remediations and tools are explicit: removed direct DB coupling using ActiveResource plus VCR and pact contract tests, automated review apps via a private gem, implemented Dora metrics (GitHub Actions prototype), extracted services with interactor and Statesman, added React Testing Library and incremental SQL-to-ActiveRecord migration.
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chapters (5)
- 0:00Silent Killers in Rails
- 3:38Modularity Mirage anti-pattern
- 12:39Leviathan Beneath complexity
- 22:37Silt Below logic
- 29:16Closing lessons & Q&A
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