After spending the past 4 hours attempting to solve what boiled down to a rather simple problem, I figure I’d better blog about it to save someone else the time and effort. If you’ve been leveraging Passenger’s new –nginx-config-template command line option to add CORS headers to static assets served … Continue reading
In part 2 we coded our PDF generator as a background job. But the PDF is still being stored on the local file system. Let’s store it in S3 instead and give our users a URL so they can download it. First let’s add the AWS SDK gem to our … Continue reading
In part 1 we learned why backgrounding is important. Now let’s dive into some code. First things first. Add wicked_pdf and delayed_job to your Gemfile: Now we can generate a PDF from inside our Rails app with this simple command: You’ll notice that the more complex the HTML, the longer … Continue reading
What do you get when you combine the slick PDF generation capabilities of wicked_pdf with the elegance and efficiency of delayed_job? A high performance way to convert HTML pages into beautiful PDF documents. I’ve been leveraging wicked_pdf to generate high school transcripts from my SaaS app, Teascript, since 2009. Prior … Continue reading
I’ve been hosting my flagship SaaS app on Heroku since 2008. Overall it’s been a stable, if a bit overpriced, platform. Over the past year, however, I’ve been experiencing mysterious performance problems. The app runs fine for several weeks. Then suddenly I begin receiving exception reports about certain methods not … Continue reading
It was January, 2005. Google had launched its invitation-only beta release of Gmail just a few months ago. The initial storage capacity of 1 GB was dramatic, with its closest competitors offering an anemic 15 or 20 MB. My beta invite had finally arrived and I was in the process … Continue reading
I love OS X. It’s an incredibly reliable operating system and it’s usually a joy to operate. Unfortunately, since upgrading from OS X Mavericks to Yosemite I had been plagued with Bluetooth connectivity problems: My Apple keyboard would randomly disconnect from the computer. Once this happened, it became impossible to … Continue reading
Today’s post is a bit self-serving and for that I apologize, but I’m hoping that telling my story publicly will accomplish 2 things: first, it will warn my readers that they do business with Virgin Mobile at their own risk. Second, and it’s a long shot, but it might provoke … Continue reading
Pricing a SaaS app is hard. Really hard. My flagship product Teascript launched with a subscription-based pricing model in 2007. This was primarily due to a limitation in the payment system I was integrating with. I did a bit of “market research” before settling on $19 per year for unlimited use of the app. … Continue reading
It’s time to re-visit nomadic programming. Read part 1 to get caught up. nomad [noh-mad]: (1) a member of a people or tribe that has no permanent abode but moves about from place to place, usually seasonally and often following a traditional route or circuit according to the state of the … Continue reading