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Today, we are releasing Hotwire Spark, a live-reloading system for Rails Applications. Reloading the browser automatically on source changes is a problem that has been well-solved for a long time. Here, we wanted to put an accent on smoothness. If the reload operation is very noticeable, the feedback loop is similar to just reloading the page yourself. But if it’s smooth enough—if you only perceive the intended change—the feedback loop becomes terrific. To use, just install the gem in development: group :development do gem "hotwire-spark" end It will update the current page on three types of change: HTML content, CSS, and Stimulus controllers. How do we achieve that desired smoothness with each? For HTML content, it morphs the <body> of the page into the new <body>. Also, it disconnects and reconnects all the Stimulus controllers on the page. For CSS, it reloads the changed stylesheet. For Stimulus controllers, it fetches the changed controller, replaces its module in Stimulus, and reconnects all the controllers. We designed Hotwire Spark to shine with the #nobuildapproach we use and recommend. Serving CSS and JS assets as standalone files is ideal when you want to fetch and update only what has changed. There is no need to use bundling or any tooling. Hot Module Replacement for Stimulus controllers without any frontend building tool is pretty cool! 2024 has been a very special year for Rails. We’re thrilled to share Hotwire Spark before the year wraps up. Wishing you all a joyful holiday season and a fantastic start to 2025.
If you have the luxury of starting a new Rails app today, here’s our recommendation: go vanilla. Fight hard before adding Ruby dependencies. Keep that Gemfile that Rails generates as close to the original one as possible. Fight even harder before adding Javascript dependencies. You don’t need React or any other front-end frameworks, nor a JSON API to feed those. Hotwire is a fantastic, pragmatic, and ridiculously productive technology for the front end. Use it. The same goes for mobile apps: use Hotwire Native. With a hybrid approach you can combine the very same web app you have built with a wonderful native experience right where you want it. The productivity compared to a purely native approach is night and day. Embrace and celebrate rendering things on the server. It has become cool again. ERB templates and view helpers will take you as long as you need, and they are a fantastic common ground for designers to collaborate hands-on with the code. #nobuild is the simplest way to go; don’t close this door with your choices. Instead of bundling Javascript, use import maps. Don’t bundle CSS, just use modern standard CSS goodies and serve them all with Propshaft. If you have 100 Javascript files and 100 stylesheets, serve 200 standalone requests multiplexed over HTTP2. You will be delighted. Don’t add Redis to the mix. Use solid_cache for caching, solid_queue for jobs, and solid_cable for Action Cable. They will all work on your beloved relational database and are battle-tested. Test your apps with Minitest. Use fixtures and build a realistic set of those as you cook your app. Make your app a PWA, which is fully supported by Rails 8. This may be more than enough before caring about mobile apps at all. Deploy your app with Kamal. If you want heuristics, your importmap.rb should import Turbo, Stimulus, your app controllers, and little else. Your Gemfile should be almost identical to the one that Rails generates. I know it sounds radical, but going vanilla is a radical stance in this convoluted world of endless choices. This is the Rails 8 stack we have chosen for our new apps at 37signals. We are a tiny crew, so we care a lot about productivity. And we sell products, not stacks, so we care a lot about delighting our users. This is our Omakase stack because it offers the optimal balance for achieving both. Vanilla means your app stays nimble. Fewer dependencies mean fewer future headaches. You get a tight integration out of the box, so you can focus on building things. It also maximizes the odds of having smoother future upgrades. Vanilla requires determination, though, because new dependencies always look shiny and shinier. It’s always clear what you get when you add them, but never what you lose in the long term. It is certainly up to you. Rails is a wonderful big tent. These are our opinions. If it resonates, choose vanilla! Guess what our advice is for architecting your app internals?
We’ve just released Mission Control — Jobs v1.0.0, the dashboard and set of extensions to operate background jobs that we introduced earlier this year. This new version is the result of 92 pull requests, 67 issues and the help of 35 different contributors. It includes many bugfixes and improvements, such as: Support for Solid Queue’s recurring tasks, including running them on-demand. Support for API-only apps. Allowing immediate dispatching of scheduled and blocked jobs. Backtrace cleaning for failed jobs’ backtraces. A safer default for authentication, with Basic HTTP authentication enabled and initially closed unless configured or explicitly disabled. Recurring tasks in Mission Control — Jobs, with a subset of the tasks we run in production We use Mission Control — Jobs daily to manage jobs HEY and Basecamp 4, with both Solid Queue and Resque, and it’s the dashboard we recommend if you’re using Solid Queue for your jobs. Our plan is to upstream some of the extensions we’ve made to Active Job and continue improving it until it’s ready to be included by default in Rails together with Solid Queue. If you want to help us with that, are interested in learning more or have any issues or questions, head over to the repo in GitHub. We hope you like it!
Quality Assurance (QA) is a team of two at 37signals: Michael, who created the department 12 years ago, and Gabriel, who joined the team in 2022. Together, we have a hand in projects across all of our products, from kickoff to release. Our goal is to help designers and programmers ship their best work. Our process revolves around manual testing and has been tuned to match the rhythm of Shape Up. Here, we’ll share the ins and outs of our methods and touch on a few of the tools we use along the way. Kicking things off At 37signals we run projects in six-week cycles informed by Shape Up. At the beginning of each cycle, Brian, our Head of Product, posts a kick-off message detailing what we plan to ship. This usually consists of new features and improvements for Basecamp, HEY, or a ONCE product. Each gets its own Basecamp project, and each project includes a pitch. The pitch lays out the problem or need, a proposed solution, and the “appetite” or time budget. The kick-off is also QA’s cue to dive in! We offer early feedback, ask questions or illuminate things that aren’t covered, and give extra consideration to flows and interactions that may require extra work on the accessibility front. We then step back and let the teams focus, design, and build things for a while. The right time to test We wait until the feature or product reaches a usable state to start testing in earnest. This helps us keep a fresh perspective, unencumbered by the knowledge of compromises made along the way. We use a Card Table within our QA Team project to track what’s ready for testing or in progress. Teams add a card to the Ready for QA (Triage) section when the time is right. The table is kept simple with just two columns, In Progress and Pending Input, for when we’ve completed our test run and the team is addressing the feedback. Depending on the breadth and complexity of the work being tested, this flow can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days. A holistic approach to QA Once we take on a request, we explore and scrutinize the feature much like an (extremely zealous!) customer would. We want to help teams ship the most polished features they can. We look out for bugs of all kinds: performance issues, visual glitches, unexpected changes, and so on, but perhaps most importantly, we offer feedback on the usability of the feature. We guide our feedback with questions like: Is this feature easy to discover and access? Is it in the right spot? Does it interact in an unexpected way with another part of the app? How does the change play with our mobile apps? Does this solve the problem in a way that customers will find obvious? Critically, what we raise with this type of QA testing are suggestions, not must-haves. The designer and programmer working on the feature make the call on what to address and what to shelve. We document this feedback in a dedicated Card Table within the feature’s Basecamp project. The designer and programmer will then review the cards we’ve added to Triage and direct them to the In Progress and Not Now columns as appropriate. From In Progress, cards are moved to a column called QA to confirm fixed, then finally to Done. More focus, less bloat Our overall approach to testing is guided exploration. We don’t maintain an exhaustive collection of test cases to dogmatically review each time we test a feature. We’ve tried using dedicated test plan tools and comprehensive spreadsheets of test cases upon test cases; the time spent certifying every little thing was considerable, yet it didn’t translate into finding more issues. Worse, it left us with less time to spend sitting with the feature in a more subjective way. We’ve landed on a more pragmatic approach. We’ve boiled down the test plan to a concise list of considerations that live in Basecamp as to-do list templates, one for each product. Instead of a multitude of test cases, each template contains around 100 items. These act as pointers, touching on overall concepts (like commenting, dark mode, email notifications), specific areas of the app, and platform-specific considerations. We reflect on the work presented and how it ties into these areas. Some examples from recent projects have been: Did we update exporting to consider this new addition of time tracking entries? Are email notifications properly reflecting the new Steps feature we added to Card Table? How about print styles, do they look good? QA Considerations for Basecamp 4 We create a to-do list via the template directly in the project we are working on, and use that as our reference for reviewing the work. We also ask the feature team if there are areas that deserve extra attention. Being flexible and discerning about how much time and coverage we use in our testing allows us to cover anywhere from 4 to 12+ projects in a very short span of time. We love working as a team of two and being able to riff on how to approach testing a feature. Sometimes, we divide and conquer; other times, both of us review the work. Fresh eyes provide a good chance of catching something new. Gabriel has a better knack for Android conventions and Michael for iOS, but we actively avoid over-specializing. Keeping up with multiple platforms requires extra effort, but it’s worth it when considering the consistency of the experience across all of them. Accessibility As part of our review, we test the accessibility of the changes. We use a combination of keyboard navigation and at least one screen reader on each platform to vet how well the feature will work for someone who relies on accessible technology. We also use browser extensions like axe and Accessibility Insights for Web to validate semantics of the code and Headings Map to make sure heading levels are sequential. At times, we bring in customers who use a screen reader full-time to help us validate whether everything makes sense and learn where things can improve. Our new colleague, Bruno, is a full-time user of the NVDA screen reader and can offer this sort of direct feedback on how a feature or flow works for him. Explorations in tooling A recent addition to our toolkit is a visual regression tool built on BackstopJS with the help of our colleague Lewis. Whenever we review work, we can run the suite of tests — mostly a list of URLs for various pages around the app — first pointed to production, then against a beta environment where the new feature is staged. Any visual differences will be flagged in a report we review, then write up bug report cards for the team if needed. Walking the walk Part of what enables us to keep our process minimal is that we use our products daily, both on the job and in our everyday lives. This affords us an intimate understanding of how they work and how they can be improved. We’re passionate about what we do. We find ourselves fortunate to work with each other and with so many talented colleagues. We hope this post has given you some helpful insight into the way we do things! If you have questions or if there are topics you’d like us to cover in future posts, drop us an email at qa@37signals.com.
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