Live url: https://bestbuddies.sweebleapp.com
Best Buddies is a microsite to find which of your friends likes your photos the most on Instagram. Since launch, it's been used by over 20,000 people and analyzed 30 million likes by 6.6 million different accounts on Instagram.
Note: It's a microsite and I put it together quickly, so it has some really ugly code, but I'm going to open source it anyway in case anyone finds it interesting.
Within a day of launching, Best Buddies was featured on the home page of Product Hunt and stayed on the popular page for close to a week. Best Buddies was also written about in numerous other places, like Business Insider, where it was listed on the home page. It was also shared extensively on social media sites. Not a bad launch!
If you look through the code, it's a pretty standard Rails app. Since analyzing each account takes some time, these are pushed in a background job (handled by Delayed Job) and polling occurs to find when it is finished.
Screenshots use PhantomJS to create images that are easy to share on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and elsewhere.
Since I expected heavy usage and the need to easily scale, I chose to host the site with Heroku, which I'm super glad I did. I've had nothing but good experiences with Heroku and they've written about how I've used their service before.
At one point right after launch, there were 12 web servers and 80 background servers running. Since the launch occured at night, and I was working during the day the next few days, I monitored how the microsite was doing with Heroku's amazing Saber iOS app which let me easily spin up and down servers and run rails console on my phone to keep an eye on how many background jobs were in the queue. Fairly soon after launch one of the tables started to have over a million records and I needed to change an index on one of the tables. With Heroku, I was able to scale up the background servers up to handle the back log until I could make the change.
The database is Postgres and has close to 4gb's of data in it now. When I was running a bunch of servers, I was able to easily bump to a larger database server with Heroku's amazing setup to handle more simultaneous database connections.
Caching is done with MemCachier. Images are stored on S3 and Cloudfront is used as a CDN for assets. Phusion Passenger with Nginx was used as the web app server. Raygun and New Relic were used for monitoring errors and the servers.
