Developing "the" Backend!

Another little write up! Please don't get tired of me! Another critical part on the new learning cohort I joined was to discuss a previous problem I had encountered while writing some for of backend application in the past and how I was able to navigate through it and the challenges of it all. I've mostly joined the cohort to have some accountability in upping my tech skills in this little professional "vacation". I'm also here to grow my network and meet a few new developers navigating the challemge of growing their careers! They also do something cool and hire the best African tech freelancers and get them out to th world through here!

In one of my recent projects, I faced the challenge of tracking user changes to documents in an asynchronous manner using Rails. The goal was to ensure that whenever a user made changes to a document, these changes would be recorded in an associated database table without blocking the main application flow.

To achieve this, I leveraged Sidekiq, a background processing library for Ruby. Sidekiq allowed me to queue jobs that could be processed asynchronously, ensuring that the main application remained responsive while the database updates were handled in the background. I created a new worker class responsible for handling the database updates. This worker encapsulated the logic required to record user changes asynchronously. The worker was designed to be idempotent, ensuring that repeated executions would not cause inconsistent states. In the controller where users made changes to documents, I integrated the logic to queue the background job using Sidekiq. This ensured that every time a specific action was performed, a corresponding job was enqueued for processing. By implementing this solution, I was able to ensure that document changes were tracked efficiently without impacting the user experience. Sidekiq handled the background processing seamlessly, allowing the main application to remain performant and responsive. This approach not only improved the application's scalability but also provided a reliable way to maintain an audit trail of user actions.