Developer Conference Dan and Damon, skipped most of the sessions to write this new Rails application Dan focused on the front-end application Damon was focused on back-end pieces
development organization worked Tension of building out features vs. interrupt- driven research Teams had managers, but work dictated directly by the business Developer interaction with direct manager was minimal
mindset of "ship it as soon as possible" Building things to be (more) testable Lifting some of the business pressure Agile practices introduced Product manager role brought on
A plan was made to get the applications upgraded How? CTO made it clear that security was at issue Most support mechanisms for Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.3 had ceased
getting to Rails 3.0 Moving off of RJS templates to native JavaScript Transitioning fully to ERb Incorporating the Asset Pipeline Restructuring ActiveRecord queries
in early 2016, a new product started taking shape. It was not as strongly coupled to the existing database, instead using the API-layer where needed instead Rails on the server-side, React on the client-side
and pull requests vs. merge and pray Moved essential reviews from before production deployment to before QA deployment Moved reviews away from a single lead engineer to a team-based approach
critical business functionality Developing a technical culture of keeping the build green Identifying and rectifying obstacles to keeping builds green (like coupling) Writing code to be easier to test Leading with test automation for new feature work
overworked and needed more automation and better tooling Switching from internal access to allowing customers into the tool was a big shift that, years later, we are still reacting to Waiting so long to upgrade was somewhat painful, stalling innovation