I was recently tasked with migrating a large, legacy, self-managed PostgreSQL 9.6 database hosted on AWS EC2 to AWS RDS running PostgreSQL 12.3.

The goal was to complete the migration in under 30 minutes and I needed to perform the following within that time frame:

1. Put the application in maintenance mode.
2. Stop services (jobs, cron, etc.).
3. Run the pg_dumpand pg_restore routines.
4. Validate that all tables and their contents were transferred.
5. Bring the application out of maintenance mode and resume services.

Here are some of the lessons I learned along the way and some tips for those of you migrating a…

This guide covers configuring Docker for Rails development on your local machine. My goal is to walk you through setting up an ergonomic and reproducible development environment for building Ruby on Rails applications.

The Docker configuration was created with the following goals in mind:

1. Run tests in a separate Docker container and tear down the supporting infrastructure after the suite runs
2. Support Rails hot reloading in development mode using Docker bind mounts (no copying source code to the Docker container)
3. Gems installed on a separate volume
4. byebug/pry support
5. Allow running Rails generators from inside the app volume and writing to…

I recently started implementing a highly interactive, web-based productivity tool using Elixir and React. Here’s how I added React components to Phoenix views where needed. You can find the source code here.

Hotwire is a shiny new HTML-over-WebSocket framework developed by Basecamp. Its purpose is to perform real-time DOM-patching using ActionCable and JavaScript. You can compare it to Phoenix LiveView, but unlike LiveView, Hotwire is stateless.

I took Hotwire for a test drive along with ActionText and was able to build a real-time Twitter feed in less than 30 minutes. You can find the complete source code on GitHub.

One of my goals for 2020 was to get better at DevOps-related tasks. I had practically no experience with AWS, except for using Rekognition and S3 to implement a facial recognition feature in an application I had built over two years ago.

The Motivation

The biggest reason to run your database out of EC2 would be cost savings. As of writing this article, the cheapest/smallest RDS deployment costs around $30.88 USD/month. In contrast, we can run a t2.micro EC2 instance with 8GB of storage for around $6 USD/month. This cost can be further reduced if you opt for reserved billing.

Caveats / When You Should Opt for RDS

As a rule of thumb, if budget allows, always opt for RDS. It provides replication via a standby instance in a different availability zone and handles automatic fail-over. This is desirable for two reasons:

1. Amazon guarantees 99.99999% up-time for regions, not availability zones. So…

Having worked in the software development industry for a few years, I have noticed 2 things: first, app downtime is not cool and it shatters customer trust — and second, monitoring tools are often expensive and difficult to setup.

I wanted a platform where I could simply specify a web address and be notified if problems are detected. I wanted it to be cheap (preferably, free) and easy to setup — and for the life of me I couldn’t find an off-the-shelf solution.

So I went ahead and built one, check it out here.

I was recently tasked with building a web API for fruit classification. I realized that such a product would need to have the ability to detect general objects to weed out images of non-fruits. So I decided that I would start the project by getting my hands dirty by exposing a TensorFlow model to the web.

In this article, I will cover the functionality and architecture of this app from a practical, code-first approach. …