We’ve previously posted about measuring what’s happening on Redbubble, but with NewRelic’s new plugin system our lives just got a bit easier. We’ve been using NewRelic for a while now and frequently make use of it’s application and server monitoring for diagnosing problems. Generally the timescales it keeps data for are sane, integration with other tools is good and the UI is easy to use. There are already a plethora of plugins waiting for you to install, although NewRelic’s definition of a plugin is not what we expected. The plugins are small applications (agents) that poll your apps and report back to NewRelic using your licence key and an agent_guid for identification. So installation isn’t all that straightforward, depending on what you want to monitor.
Redbubble’s rocky road to Rails 3.0 and Ruby 1.9
The task Here at Redbubble we’ve been running Ruby on Rails since day one. We’re a small development team, so keeping up with even the latest stable release has been a struggle. Earlier this year we had a gap in product development and took the opportunity to move our stack forward. We’d been on Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.3 for a year or two. After some investigation we decided we’d first move to Rails 3.0 which would make Ruby 1.9 an easier option. After significant library updates and code compatibility changes, we were ready to release Rails 3.0 on Ruby 1.8.7.