We've used this extensively at my work and it has been great. As someone else pointed out it's a bit tricky if the code isn't idempotent. We used this as part of a data migration project and for writing we ran the experiment 100% of the time and read back the result to check it was correct - a bit of a performance impact but nothing that was noticeable. One super useful extension we've made to the gem is to have it update Prometheus metrics so you can easily see how often your experiment is showing that the candidate is different from the control.
These might be the clunky way your talking about but you can have “private” git ignored either in ‘.git/info/exclude’ in the repo or in the ‘core.excludesfile’ set in your git config. The later is quite nice because you could actually version control that elsewhere if you version control your system config.
Got me to start thinking about reliability and able to express my thoughts on it.
2. Design of Everyday things
Read it as a junior and it got me thinking about UX and putting the user first.
3. The Pragmatic Programmer
Another one I read as a junior that had some really interesting ideas in it. Along with Release it! it gave me the language to talk about the ideas as well.
Thinking about this now, I’m keen to give the Design of Everyday Things a read. I now work in a different area and it’d be interesting putting it in that light.
I think I recall from a previous post on HN that they use Mailgun. I can't speak for forlater but at my work we use mailgun because email delivery is a pain, as you've found. Using a third-party service is a lot easier because it's their bread and butter and you can let them worry about it.
This is awesome! I've been looking for something that could be a link between PDFs and Instapaper[0] for a while. This looks like it'll be perfect to build such a tool with.
[^1]: https://github.com/mystor/git-revise