Ruby

I have never felt as productive as I do in Rails. Yet, with front-end seemingly moving further away from server-rendered views toward React, Angular, Vue, and Ember, I was unsure where Rails fit into this picture. Would it be relegated only to apps with “simple” front-ends, where holding things together with jQuery still managed to work, or perhaps to its ...

Docker is an amazing tool for developers. It allows us to build and replicate images on any host, removing the inconsistencies of dev environments and reducing onboarding timelines considerably. To provide an example of how you might move to containerized development, I built a simple todo API with Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL using Docker Compose for development, testing, and ...

Crystal is a language written to be very much like Ruby but as a compiled language rather than an interpreted one. This gives us the advantage of compile time optimizations which will make our code run much faster. Another difference in Crystal’s design is that it’s a Typed language rather than a Dynamically Typed one. This helps with the languages ...

Writing efficient queries that balance performance and memory footprint is the most crucial part of writing good software. Doing this is not super easy, but keeping an eye on logs and how your queries are executed under the hood will definitely help you a lot. But you know the situation: requirements keep changing, new useless features on top of changed ...

ActionCable was introduced to Rails as of version 5. It allows you to create pub/sub WebSocket connections in your Rails application, which brings live updates to your user experience. ActionCable upgrades an HTTP connection between the server and client to a WebSocket. Some of the benefits of a WebSocket is that the amount of data transferred per transmission is considerably ...

Currently the world of integration testing is overwhelmed with complexity. Industry standards require adding more layers of abstraction with tools like Cucumber, SitePrism, and others, and as a result it becomes more difficult and tedious for a developer to write a simple test. But as any other part of the codebase, testing scenarios should be simple and fun. They should ...

Elixir gives you the tools to easily write concurrent code. In an earlier post, I introduced concurrency in Elixir by looking at the building blocks of concurrency. Processes follow the actor model of concurrency and are the core underlying construct with which you can then send and receive messages between other processes. What you might have seen is that there ...

When I first started getting into Elixir, one thing that never quite made sense to me was the type system. It worked…but it wasn’t clear why it was set up the way it was or what benefits come from it. Hopefully, I can get you through some of my initial confusion about Elixir types. The Why: Message Passing My initial ...

When it comes to software development, a majority of the tools available to us are command-line applications. It is also well worth noting that many of the tools used on the command line are quite powerful in what they can accomplish, from the trivial to the tedious. Taking this further, you can combine command-line applications to chain together a sequence ...