Inspired by the Rubber Duck Debugging methodology and my love for cats, there is a simple way I try to optimize our Rails App at Anarock Tech. Let's call it the Purrsuit of optimization method for now. It goes something like this:
- Use a monitoring and alert tool to figure out the code smells/inefficient flows just like my cat uses his heightened sense of smell to sniff out the leftovers from last night. We use New Relic.
- Check on it regularly and pick out slow-performing APIs or queries just as my cat hovers around the garbage bins waiting for anything he can gobble up.
- Pick up an issue every sprint and explore till you find the root cause, be curious and there is a lot of learning to be gained. I don't think I need to expand on cats and curiosity
- Work on it, fix it and always write code that's just a cat. Cats have the greatest compromise between being human-like and low maintenance and are extremely clean, similarly, your code should be such that it is easily refactorable and easy to understand.
- We are all familiar with the proverb Curiosity killed the cat but very few people know this is only half of it, the complete proverb is Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back. The satisfaction of improving something while learning from it is unmatched.
Don't worry if you don't have a cat, you can look at the millions of cat videos online (if you haven't check out catswithjobs, it's my favorite) and still follow the Purrsuit of optimization method.
This is a start of a series in which I'll share my findings and learnings along the way as I try to improve our Backend services.
PS- We are hiring at Anarock Tech across multiple roles, apply [here](linkedin.com/company