Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Developer Tips, Tricks & Resources”
Like many of our client successes, this one also starts in a basement. Three friends: Zach Calmus, Ross Van Eck, and Josh Holt came together over a love for motorsports and a passion for technology. A few years later, what had become one of the fastest growing motorsports web development companies had grown into the MyRacePass, a platform that would …
Anyone developing software will sooner or later want to debug their code. It’s very clarifying to see your code execute step by step and inspect the values of variables at runtime. Developing with PHP is no different. In this article, we’ll have a look at PHP debugging, and I’ll also provide some tips and tricks. Debugging The term “bug” was first …
Ensuring your apps work as designed and deliver a productive user experience starts with monitoring applications metrics. This helps you understand whether your software is performing at optimal levels. Many developers use JBoss (now called WildFly and maintained by Red Hat) to build, deploy, and host transactional applications written in Java. JBoss boasts several awesome features, like fast startup speeds, lightweight functionality, …
When developing new applications, it’s typical to run into a variety of competitors with similar goals. This is one reason why it is not enough to create an application without ways to monitor and manage it. In fact, usually market leaders emerge rather quickly. So who are these market leaders? We often see these people and companies are the ones …
Docker is now everywhere. Over the past few years, a lot of modern-day software has now moved to become packaged in a Docker container, and with good reason. One of the biggest benefits touted about Docker containers is their speed. You don’t get lightning-fast performance out of the box without Docker performance tuning. We’re going to discuss some of the tips and …
Learning to build webapps is an exciting process, but it comes with its own set of challenges. As a newer developer, deciding what programming language will bring your big idea to life is a common challenge. There are lots of terrific choices for building webapps on the market. Today, we’ll focus on two of 2019’s most popular options: Node.js vs …
Running PHP on IIS might not seem like a logical choice, but it can make sense. Luckily, getting PHP to run on IIS isn’t very hard, and gives you access to all the great PHP work that this community has produced. What is PHP? PHP was originally an acronym for personal home page, but now it’s short for PHP: Hypertext …
Choosing a good PHP framework provides the right building blocks to make developing your app a breeze. Today we’re going to look at two PHP frameworks: Laravel and Symfony. We’ll compare them, score them, and declare a winner. Along the way, you’ll choose the framework that’s right for you and your product. PHP Framework Similarities Both Symfony and Laravel provide …
Python is one of the most popular programming languages, and its usage is only accelerating. It was named the TIOBE language of the year in 2018 due to its growth rate. Python’s ease of use and large community have made it a popular fit for data analysis, web applications, and task automation. In this post, we’ll cover the details of garbage collection …
Oracle will soon roll out Java 12 in March 2019 and new releases will drop once every six months thereafter. The goal is to make new releases more frequent for the Java ecosystem, with certain releases earmarked as long-term support (LTS). And by support, we mean the allocation of update releases for bug fixes and critical security patches. This latest …
Serious software development calls for performance optimization. When you start optimizing application performance, you can’t escape looking at profilers. Whether monitoring production servers or tracking frequency and duration of method calls, profilers run the gamut. In this article, I’ll cover the basics of using a Python profiler, breaking down the key concepts, and introducing the various libraries and tools for …
Background: After dealing with a large, difficult APM vendor, ClearSale was in dire need to switch to a reliable solution that was easy to implement, able to provide all the information they needed in one place, and provide enough value to speed up quality application building. Solution: After checking out a live demo of Retrace, Stackify’s APM tool, it was …
JavaScript has come a long way in recent years. Browsers are becoming more robust and machines are growing more powerful. Pair this with the recent development of Node.js for execution of JavaScript on servers, and you can understand why JavaScript has exploded in popularity. Developers continue to push the boundaries of what can be done with JavaScript, which leads to ever more …
As applications are getting more complex, it’s becoming harder to deliver high-quality applications. Tools like Application Performance Monitoring (APM) are essential for the development process. To get good performance data, developers need to deal with the rising trends of containerization, microservices, heterogeneous cloud services, and big data. To simplify this, and mitigate the amount of in-depth involvement and the time developers spend …
PHP is one of the most popular server-side scripting languages for building web applications because it’s easy to use. No matter what you build, making it easy to log errors is key to ensuring a short code-test-learn feedback cycle. Because PHP was developed way before today’s modern browsers, it didn’t really have an easy way to log errors to the …
Logging provides critical value to applications with insight to usage, stats, and metrics, and saves us when debugging a problem. But we often leave logging to poorly implemented afterthoughts. So what should we know to get the most out of our logging? We will look at the Rails logger and some logging best practices. What is the Rails Logger? When …
When developing PHP applications, error logs tend to be underutilized due to their apparent complexity. The reality is that PHP error logs are extremely helpful, especially when configured and used properly. While there are advanced tricks to truly squeeze every last drop of utility out of error logs, this article will cover the basics of configuration and the most common …
Troubleshooting is a critical skill for developers and DevOps. As our software grows more sophisticated, our problems do too. The cloud adds a new layer of complexity since we need to know how to find a problem that doesn’t occur locally, but has cropped up on a remote system. In this tutorial, we’ll look at how to troubleshoot Ruby applications. …
Many online applications use a web server as the primary point of contact for their clients. At least 43% of those systems are running the Apache HTTP Server. If you’re responsible for one of those systems, you need to work with the Apache error log. Apache provides comprehensive logging via several different files, but the error log is the most important. You can even say …
If you’re a software developer, then you understand how vital application logging is in software development and a critical part of logging is something called logging levels. Log entries generally contain essential information—such as a timestamp, a message, and sometimes additional stuff like an exception’s stack trace. Those pieces of information are useful because they allow someone reading the log entry to …
