It’s five o’clock on a Friday afternoon. There are no new bug reports and everything is looking smooth. Your plan of a relaxing weekend is in sight when you get a call—the website you look after isn’t responding. Yikes. AWS Lambda minimizes the chance of this truly terrifying event from happening by taking care of server maintenance while you focus …
About a decade ago, the Ruby programming language made a big splash in the software engineering industry thanks to the Ruby on Rails web framework. The terse and friendly syntax of Ruby and the “they thought of everything” feeling of Rails offered web startups the ability to move quickly and nimbly. However, as an interpreted language, Ruby is slow compared to compiled languages. The …
In this post, you are going to learn how to install Ruby on Ubuntu. Specifically, we’re going to install it on the current LTS (Long-Term Support) version of Ubuntu, 18.04.2. If you’re totally new to this, don’t worry! I’ve written this guide with the assumption that you have no prior experience installing packages on Ubuntu. I will attempt to explain …
Ruby is a well-established and well-regarded programming language. Once upon a time, installing Ruby on Windows came with problems, but things have come a long way. Today, there’s no reason someone couldn’t write Ruby code on any platform. First released in the mid-1990s, Ruby’s popularity soared with the release of Ruby on Rails in 2005. Ruby is primarily an object-oriented programming language (OOP), …
It’s the night before a big deadline, and just before you press the button to deploy, you notice a small but important bug! You open a terminal, type in the command to run the code—and all you see is a page of errors. It’s these palm-sweating moments that make us wonder whether we made the correct career decision. Configuring our …
In this post, we’re going to show you how to install Ruby on your Mac. Along the way, we’ll learn about the steps involved and various bits of knowledge required to get up and going. So if you’re totally new, don’t worry! I’ll list each step and follow it with an “extra credit” section where I’ll explain that step in …
There are dozens of great languages to learn. Today we’ll be breaking down the differences between two of the best: PHP vs Python. Which one is best for your application? Which is going to give you the best return on your development time? We’ll pit these two head-to-head and find out which is the best choice for you. Ease of …
Ruby on Rails makes writing web applications a pleasure. It’s a powerful and intuitive platform, built on an equally powerful and intuitive language. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking the time to check your code for bottlenecks and performance problems before you ship. In this post, I’ll cover how to use Rack Mini Profiler to profile your Rails …
Have you ever been confused about the different ways to handle missing data in the Ruby language? I know I have, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that. The options Ruby offers come in the form of several methods: “present?”, “blank?”, “nil?”, and “empty?”. There are all somewhat related since all of them check for the absence of data …
Authentication for web apps is a difficult problem. Anyone who’s ever tried to create their own authentication system will tell you that there are a lot of unexpected edge cases. What’s more, your authentication system is an externally-facing part of your application. This means if someone is trying to hack into your application, your login system’s security will be one of …
AKS is the managed service from Azure for Kubernetes. When you create an AKS cluster, Azure creates and operates the Kubernetes control plane for you at no cost. The only thing you do as a user is to say how many worker nodes you’d like, plus other configurations we’ll see in this post. So, with that in mind, how can …
A Rails migration is a tool for changing an application’s database schema. Instead of managing SQL scripts, you define database changes in a domain-specific language (DSL). The code is database-independent, so you can easily move your app to a new platform. You can roll migrations back, and manage them alongside your application source code. Let’s take a look at what Rails migrations …
If you’re thinking about using containers to manage an application, there are a lot of options for technologies to use. It can be difficult to even know where to begin to make a decision. One common question is whether someone should use Docker vs Kubernetes for managing their application containers. This is a misleading question. In truth, Docker and Kubernetes …
Everybody climb aboard the hype train with me. Today, we’re going to study a new job title: the DevOps engineer. This role is getting popular in the same way that the full-stack developer role became popular before it. In fact, one could argue that the DevOps engineer is an extension of the full-stack developer in that both seek to extend …
Docker is a powerful tool for creating and deploying applications. It simplifies rolling out applications across multiple systems and is a useful tool for integrating new technologies. An application that runs using Docker will start up the same every time on every system. This means that if the application works on your local computer, it’ll work anywhere that supports Docker. …
No matter how carefully coded, reviewed, and tested your Ruby code is, odds are good that at some point you’ll cause a catastrophic failure to at least one system you’re responsible for. How do you prepare yourself? You need a Ruby debugger. In this post, I’ll cover the whole Ruby debugger process—from finding the issue to determining the root cause. …
New Relic is one of the industry leaders for SaaS-based application performance management. However, many are starting to look for new relic alternatives. Probably about half of those alternatives are available as SaaS APM. New Relic Pricing Forcing You to Look for Alternatives? We talk to companies every day that are currently using New Relic but are looking for alternatives …
We’re on the verge of something here, people. A growing number of companies are shipping software in minutes. Yeah, you read that right. Minutes. Not hours, not weeks, months, or longer. Minutes. Often, teams struggle to ship software into the customer’s hands due to lack of consistency and excessive manual labor. Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) deliver software …
