Running a Government Department on Ruby for over 13 Years
summary
13 years of Ruby as the exclusive stack, small projects delivered fast (most initial features in about a week, almost all initial builds under a month), and Roda and Sequel powering web apps with 93–100% test coverage. Concrete operational tooling: OpenBSD servers, nginx + Unicorn with fork+exec, chroot and syscall filtering, and database security definer functions. Examples include a recruiting workflow with a 75‑question timed exam (≈30% pass rate), and processing ~3000 PDFs for auditors. The security posture is defense‑in‑depth with separate DB users.
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chapters (41)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:51Personal Opinions
- 2:01Typical Government Software Development
- 2:43Project Approval
- 3:04Request Proposal
- 4:31Enterprise Resource Planning
- 5:00Oversight
- 5:37Alternative Approach
- 7:18Build Incrementally
- 8:03Typical Projects
- 8:43Scope Reduction
- 10:52Stakeholder Reviews
- 11:14Automated Tests
- 13:32Profile
- 13:57Focus Automation
- 14:31Process Dependent Review
- 14:52Recruiting
- 15:47Assessment
- 16:34Recommendations
- 16:593 Parts
- 18:19Static Simplicity
- 18:51Static Relia
- 19:05Dynamic Necessary
- 19:26Authentication
- 20:47Improved Security
- 21:40Headless hrome
- 22:13File System Permissions
- 22:35Free Space
- 22:56Policy Compliance
- 26:38Run Tests
- 28:22Focus security
- 28:34Scripting
- 28:53Parameter Types
- 29:25Content Security Policy
- 29:36Defense Depth
- 30:06Reduced Database
- 30:47Database Functions
- 35:25Control
- 35:42Sensitive Multiple Database Users
- 36:47New Approaches
- 37:35Developers
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