Software development

In my last blog post about Traveling Ruby's future, I said that it's hard to democratize the development of Traveling Ruby because of System Integrity Protection (SIP). Traveling Ruby's build process relies on DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH, which is blocked by SIP. This means that:

• Contributors that build Traveling Ruby on their own laptops, must disable SIP.
• Traveling Ruby cannot be built on many CI hosting services, such as Azure DevOps and Github Actions, because it's not possible to disable SIP there.

After some research and experimentation, I've found an alternative to DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH, meaning that it's no longer necessary to disable SIP. This significantly changes the ability to democratize Traveling Ruby's development.

The development and deployment of modern apps is very different from how it used to be. Networked applications are now very common. Development at scale is now common: hundreds of developers working on a system, which may be split into many microservices. Deployment at scale is now also common: apps serving millions of users. Various practices emerged, or became popular, to deal with these new challenges. I've learned many practices over the past decade, but resources that describe these practices appear to be scattered. This post is an attempt to inventorize the various practices that are used for the development, deployment and management of modern apps.