Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

September 2022

Minimize Heap Allocations in Node.js

Memory management has always been a source of huge concern in Computer Science. Each piece of software is assigned a small portion of a computer’s finite memory; this memory has to be well-managed (carefully allocated and deallocated). With its efficient automatic garbage collection mechanism, Node.js tries to handle the tedious task of memory management and free up developers to work on other tasks.

How to Build AWS Lambdas with TypeScript

Serverless computing is an exciting alternative to hosting apps on the AWS cloud. In this four-part series, we’ll run through how to build AWS Lambdas with TypeScript, improve the dev experience, optimize it, and finally, use AWS Cognito for security. In this take, I would like to take you on a journey to explore AWS Lambdas using TypeScript. We will build a pizza API, use Claudia to help deploy the app, and use the AWS CLI tool to set up a DynamoDB database.

Debugging in Ruby with AppSignal

An application monitoring tool (APM) is not just useful for seeing how your application performs through graphs and visuals. We can go deeper and use an APM to understand how your application behaves in a certain environment. As developers, we should aim to be less reactive to errors and more predictive, avoiding crashes for end-users. One way to accomplish this is by using monitoring tools to debug our application when an error occurs.

Fix Process Bottlenecks with Elixir 1.14's Partition Supervisor

Elixir v1.14 shipped earlier this month with a bunch of new goodies. In this post, we'll explore Elixir's new PartitionSupervisor. We'll take a look at some code that suffers from the exact bottleneck issue that partitions supervisors are designed to solve. Then, we'll fix that bottleneck. Along the way, you'll learn how partition supervisors work under the hood to prevent process bottlenecks. Let's get started!

Secure Your Node.js App with JSON Web Tokens

A JSON Web Token (JWT) is an open standard (RFC 7519) that securely sends and receives data between parties (in the form of a JSON object). In this article, we’ll implement JWT authentication to secure a Node.js application. We’ll also find out what JWT is all about and build a demo app. Let's get going!

Elixir 1.14: Better Debugging with dbg/2 and More

The latest Elixir release introduces new features to improve your developer and debugging experience. In this post, we'll take a look at the new dbg() functionality, along with some improvements to Inspect and binary evaluation error messaging. All these changes come together to make you an even more productive Elixirist. Let's get started!

JIT Compilers for Ruby and Rails: An Overview

A program is compiled at runtime using a different method from pre-execution compilation. This process is known as just-in-time compilation or dynamic translation. In this post, we'll look at why JIT compilation can be a good choice for your Ruby on Rails app, before looking at some of the options available (YJIT, MJIT, and TenderJIT) and how to install them. But first: how does JIT compilation work?

Benchmark Your Elixir App's Performance with Benchee

At some point, every software engineer will find themselves in a situation where they need to benchmark system performance and test the limits of what a given system can handle. This is a common problem in software engineering, and even more so in the applications that are well suited for Elixir. Finding bottlenecks early on in an application can save a lot of time, money, and effort in the long run, and give developers confidence in the upper limit of a system.