The Solidus Blog

I'm John Hawthorn. I work at Stembolt in Victoria, the only warm place in Canada. I've been using Ruby and Rails since 2009.

My name is Jose Pio. I’ve studied Electronic Engineering and during my career I became more interested in the web world. So now I continue in this area. I'm a Senior/Full Stack Dev at Bitspire. I've been working with Ruby for 6 years now and before I was working mostly with PHP.

There is a buzz around the office as SolidusConf 2017 gets closer. We want to share a little piece of that excitement in the weeks leading up to the conference. That’s why we’ve created a series of speaker interviews that include teasers from their talks, their story, and what motivates them to contribute to solidus. Our series begins with the Master of Ceremonies and speaker, Gregor MacDougall.  #### Please give us a quick introduction for those who don't know you My name is Gregor MacDougall. I work remotely out of Toronto, Canada for Stembolt. I've been working with Spree and Rails for approximately 5 years now and have been a member of the Solidus core team since its founding. #### What do you use Solidus for? Over the years I've worked with a variety of clients selling physical and digital goods; lots of different things. In my daily job, I operate as a developer on a team helping to organize our planning process while also turning out code. #### What is your talk going to be about? My talk is entitled Scaling Solidus: Handling the Traffic of a Successful Business. Over the years, I've worked on a variety of stores, from small businesses happy to sell a few hundred dollars a day to multi-million dollar enterprises. The needs of each of these sites is very different. I want to show how Solidus can be a platform that can serve both of these types of companies adequately. For any successful online business, being able to stay on top of your growth is one of the keys to maintaining that level of growth. If your site is being slow or encountering errors, people are going to be dissatisfied and turn away a potential new customer and advocate of yours. I think every successful business goes through several phases where the business has grown faster than the technology powering it. I plan to review the structure of the stack that we use to power the sites we maintain and look at common signs that you're having performance issues. Additionally, I'll talk about problems that you're likely to encounter in Solidus as you scale and how you can limit their impact on your site. #### What are you most looking forward to at SolidusConf? I look forward to meeting some new people and spending time with friends and coworkers. As someone who works remotely, I don't often get face to face with the people I work with on a daily basis. It's also nice to meet some people in the greater community who I have spoken with in Slack or on Github. #### Do you have any other plans for London? It will be my first time in the UK. I'm probably going to be a bit of a tourist and walk down the Thames for an afternoon. I'm also a big theatre fan, so I'll be escorting some of my coworkers to the West End for a play and a musical. #### Thanks for your time! **SolidusConf 2017 is May 22 - 25 in London, UK. See more details at the [SolidusConf Website](https://conf2017.solidus.io/).**

I'm happy to announce the release of Solidus 2.1.0! An exciting change in this release is taxes are now always fully recalculated on an order.update!. order.create_tax_charge! is no longer required! We hope that this is simpler for developers and should help us better support external tax services in the future.

SolidusConf tickets are now available! Head over to the conference site or let's go on the Eventbrite website to purchase tickets.

We have two new Solidus versions: Solidus 2.0.1 and Solidus 2.1.0.rc1. Solidus 2.0.1 contains only a small fix to support the upcoming Ruby 2.4.0, which Matz usually carefully wraps under the tree. The recently released Rails 5.0.1 is required for ruby 2.4.0.

The Solidus core team would like to publicly thank and acknowledge Jordan Brough for his contributions to both the Solidus community and the codebase over the past few years. Jordan has been dedicated to working with Solidus since its inception back in 2013 when Jordan helped migrate a large fashion-based company from Spree to Solidus.  Motivated by the benefits and potential of open source, Jordan began contributing to what now amounts to an impressive [331 commits](https://github.com/solidusio/solidus/commits?author=jordan-brough) in the [Solidus Github repository](https://github.com/solidusio/solidus). However, before his work with the Spree and Solidus open source platforms, 99% of Jordan’s code was written for closed source platforms. The switch from closed to open source software has allowed him to experience firsthand the value of open source platforms for companies needing a custom store and the ability to grow without the limits of a packaged product. Jordan found his next career move when his current employer, [Lost My Name](https://www.lostmy.name/), advertised for an open source ecommerce champion. Jordan’s current role as tech lead finds him guiding his team in best practices and encouraging them to contribute back to the Solidus platform. Within the Solidus community, Jordan enjoys the teamwork and the feedback he receives. “You see all these pull requests and bug reports coming in from all over the world, from different types of companies. It helps me understand other’s perspectives and make better software.” Jordan is primarily focussed on the Solidus backend, improving tax integration, US taxes, and payment methods. When he’s not on his computer, Jordan practices his unicycling and inspires his five children to be active and enjoy the outdoors in their beautiful home state of Utah. Jordan has worked remotely for most of his career and finds that lunches with his family help to balance his focussed work ethic. You can find Jordan on Slack as jordan and Github as [jordan-brough](https://github.com/jordan-brough). Thank you Jordan for your involvement in the Solidus community!

We're proud to announce that SolidusConf 2017 will take place on the 24th and 25th of May. It is presented by Lost My Name and will be hosted at The Rainmaking Loft in London next to the iconic Tower Bridge.

Solidus versions 2.0.0 and 1.4.0 are out! Solidus 2.0.0 is our first release supporting Rails 5. See the Rails documentation on how to upgrade to Rails 5.

We've released Solidus 2.0.0.beta1 and 1.4.0.beta1! One of our primary concerns when developing Solidus is allowing easy upgrades.

In this blog post, I want to talk about three areas that we have improved massively in Solidus 1.3: Internationalization, Support for Value Added Tax, More flexible Pricing

Introducing Solidus 1.3.0, the "international" release. This release introduces major changes intended to support VAT taxation and per-country pricing better. Martin's SolidusConf 2016 talk gives an introduction to these changes and their motivation. A blog post focusing on upgrading is to come.