Christian Hollinger
Appearances
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Reverse rug pull, so cool? (Friends)
We did not pay Eileen for that quote, to be clear, but we do very much appreciate her sharing it. Yeah, we had the great fortune to work with Eileen and Aaron Patterson on the upgrade of GitHub's Ruby Rails framework. And that's a relatively complex problem. It's a very large system. There's a lot of engineers actively working on it. at the same time that we were performing that upgrade.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Reverse rug pull, so cool? (Friends)
So being able to collaborate with them, achieve the outcome of getting them upgraded to the latest and greatest Ruby on Rails that has all of the security patches and everything that you would expect of the more modern versions of the framework, while still like not holding their business back from delivering features, we felt was a pretty significant accomplishment. And it's great to, you know,
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Reverse rug pull, so cool? (Friends)
work with someone like Eileen and Aaron, because we obviously learned a lot. We were able to collaborate effectively with them. But to hear that they were delighted by the outcome as well is very humbling for sure.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Reverse rug pull, so cool? (Friends)
Yeah, I think we had between two and four people at any phase of the engagement. So we tend to run with relatively small teams. We do believe smaller teams tend to be more efficient and more productive. So wherever possible, we try to get by with as few people as we can. This was a fairly clear set of expectations. We wanted to get to Rails, I believe, 5.2 at the time and Ruby 2.5.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Reverse rug pull, so cool? (Friends)
Don't hold me to those numbers, but we had clear expectations at the outset. So from there, it was just a matter of figuring out the process that we were going to pursue to get these upgrades done without having a sizable impact on their team. A lot of the consultants on the project had some experience doing Rails upgrades, maybe not at that scale at that point.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Reverse rug pull, so cool? (Friends)
But it was really exciting because we were able to kind of develop a process that we think is very consistent in allowing Rails upgrades to be done without like providing a lot of risk to the client. So there's not a fear that, hey, we've missed something or, you know, this thing's going to fall over under scale.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Reverse rug pull, so cool? (Friends)
We do it very incrementally so that the team can, like I said, keep working on feature delivery without being impacted. but also so that we are very certain that we've covered all the bases and really got the system to a state where it's functionally equivalent to the last version, just on a newer version of Rails and Ruby.