Our documentation setup (photo by Michael D Beckwith, flickr)

As our team and codebase grow, we sometimes find the need to cast a look back at how things changed, and remember fondly the code we wrote and deleted, the abstractions we built and scrapped, how our code used to be, and how much fun it was to get it to where it is now.

Recently, the product team has been mentioning the need for a better search solution in our apps. That’s why I took the time to look into Elasticsearch after a two year break. For me, it was amazing to see how easy it was to set up a proof of concept that was even integrated into CI. The last part is quite important for us because we are very keen on testing in general — especially when it comes to CI.

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When store2be started 3 years ago we were searching for a nice way to handle email templating and sending. I came across Sendwithus, an email template service that connects to a lot of different email providers, like SendGrid, Mailjet, etc.

At store2be we noticed a problem when running our Rails test suites in our two main development environments, on Mac OS X we had a test that would consistently fail, while on Linux it would pass fine every time, which in a way proves the old software development adage about the importance of having development machines as similar as possible to the the ones your production code will be running on.

TL;DR see this demo project for the final solution.

One of the features we wanted in the recent push to release a 0.2 version of Papers was debugging output uploaded to an S3 bucket for generated documents. One of the major things we want in that debug archive is the logs from the service itself - this means having a second sink for our logs on a per-document-generation basis, ideally with a higher log level. Fortunately, this is possible in a boilerplate-free way with slog 2.0, since loggers are now also sinks.

While working with tmux and fzf I came across another interesting fzf use case: Use a fuzzy finder to simplify the use of the Heroku CLI.