Abstretta has been upgraded to Rails 6. This opens up a lot of new features and performance enhancements (not the least of which is moving all the JavaScript code into WebPacker). There may still be a few bugs, but it looks like things are holding up.

Along with this change, the system is now hosted on DigitalOcean (http://digitalocean.com) and deployed via Hatchbox (http://hatchbox.io). This is both for cost-savings and more functionality. I was hosted on Heroku, which works fine and I’ve used for years. But to get some features like Redis and background workers requires expensive add-ons.

This was a pretty substantial change. In addition to a whole new release of Rails and upgrading all the gems, plus upgrading Ruby, the stack now uses a proper background job system. In the prior release, it was using background threads to send emails and perform more time-consuming tasks. This was because of the surcharges Heroku imposes to run Redis and additional workers. Now on Hatchbox/DigitalOcean, we’re free of those costs and the system now uses Sidekiq to run background jobs. Much more robust and scalable.

The final big change to end 2019 was to move the blog and release notes over to Jekyll. This makes it easier to keep users updated.