One of the tremendous benefits of building with a high-level framework like Ruby on Rails is that you are afforded both mental space and an abundance of tools to optimize your application with a thoughtful caching strategy. Caching can be done at several levels in the stack and I wanted to provide an overview of the most common caching strategies for Rails applications and the tradeoffs inherent in each.
In our work as software developers we regularly have to evaluate architectural tradeoffs. We have voices, either external or internal, telling us to think about, for example:
There is often a tension in these matters between practical and “correct”.
Marshall McLuhan once said “Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools”. There’s not a lot of technology that we interact with on a day-to-day basis that’s stayed in continuous operation for 230 years. The faculties by which we interact, gather, and exchange ideas in social and professional realms have dramatically evolved in this span of time. Our systems of government, at both philosophical and practical levels, largely have not.
Every day I work with teammates in Germany, New York, California and British Columbia. “Presence” means something quite different today than it has for much of human history. It is a divided concept, and virtual presence often has equal or greater consequence than physical presence.
UJS is a small javascript library that manages interactions with endpoints implementing SJR (Server-generated Javascript Responses), in addition to providing a few behaviors such as non-GET HTTP verbs for links, simple confirm UIs, and the disabling of elements with optional loading text while remote requests are processing. UJS and SJR are a fantastic solution for keeping a web application’s frontend code minimal, in an age where wild over-engineering in this area is increasingly the norm.
UJS behavior binding is declarative, and happens via data attributes (for instance you can use the attribute-value pair data-disable-with='Processing' to disable a submit button with the loading text “Processing” during a form POST).
For all that is great about UJS, one thing that it does not offer is any formal suggestion of a practice for introducing your own custom unobtrusive javascript behaviors to your application. For this we need to look beyond the library and to the broader developer community surrounding Rails and UJS.
I am an under-engineer-er. The default lens through which I approach problems is one that prioritizes Less Code.
Usually the highest-leverage additions to your app are not complex ones, though having already increased your complexity surface area for nebulous ends or a distant vision will quickly make them so.
I am a student of Martin Fowler’s First Law.
I am also a strong believer that the documentation of any mature framework you may lean on inevitably proves an order of magnitude more comprehensive and approachable than that which your team may draft for any home-grown framework.
One of the things I am most proud of, and that I am most surprised to find distinguishes me when I look around at other people in my professional circles, is how often I finish things. To me, finishing is credibility, and a person’s record not just of starting or working on projects, but of finishing them, should be a factor in the weight you give to their opinions or the degree of leadership you entrust them with.
A good friend sent me Jason Kester’s article Happiness is a Boring Stack a few weeks ago. The friend knows me well and knew the words of the piece would resonate strongly. The piece is worth a read. Its essential point is that while Hacker News, Medium, or certain of your colleagues may give you the impression that you have woefully mis-stepped if you aren’t building your application atop the latest and greatest JavaScript framework and containerization solution, from a perspective of pragmatism and quality of life this is often not at all the case:
Hi, my name is Nicholas and Hacker Notes is my personal blog. It is a collection of practical things I’ve picked up through my work in software, as well as writings on other subjects like travel, art and life in New York. You can read more about the site and me by clicking here
