When it comes to data, let’s start with the obvious. Averages suck. As developers, we all know that percentiles are much more useful. Metrics like P90, P95, P99 give us a much better indication of how our software is performing. The challenge, historically, is how to track the underlying data and calculate the percentiles. Today I will show you how amazingly easy it is to aggregate and create SQL based percentile rollups with Postgresql and t-digest histograms!

When visiting a new website, it is quite normal to get carried away by the bells and whistles of the fancy UI and UX and not be able to appreciate all the lower level, back-end code that runs tirelessly to ensure a smooth and fast website experience. This is because your front-end HTML code has a visually rich browser page interface as a platform to showcase its output. Whereas your back-end, server-side code usually only has a console at its disposal.

From now on, you can check code coverage and use the Test Reports add-on with your Flutter apps as well. Woo-hoo! 🎉

You know the feeling. You’ve just deployed a new version to production and are monitoring the Rollbar dashboard for any new errors or looking out for any Slack notifications. You’re keeping an eye on the number of new or reactivated errors, their severity level, and triaging to see which errors need to be assigned and to whom. Now what if you could automate these tasks?

Few things are more frustrating than slow, flaky test suites. You're ready to deploy, wait 20 minutes for CI to run, only to find that a test failure in code you've never touched is blocking you. You dig into the source and find the problem: an external API call. It works (slowly) most of the time. But sometimes the network glitches and it fails. What do you do? In this article, José Manuel shows us several techniques for removing external API dependencies from our tests.

Welcome to another one of our Community Roundups, folks! Looks like summer really kicked in with all the heat, so we thought we’d bring you some refreshments in the form of some tweets and articles. Let’s see what we have this time!

Hans Ulrich Obrist once said that “everything I do is somehow connected to velocity”. We couldn’t agree more. As is in most companies, there’s always something affecting your team’s velocity, whether that’s a new work from home routine, a change in budget, or a variety of other reasons. So many influences are out of your control- how do you make sure that your devs are working at optimal velocity?

In today’s post, we’ll look at two Elixir HTTP client libraries: Mint and Finch. Finch is built on top of Mint. We’ll see the benefits offered by this abstraction layer. We’ll also talk about some of the existing HTTP client libraries in the ecosystem and discuss some of the things that make Mint and Finch different. Finally, we’ll put together a quick project that makes use of Finch to put all of our learning into action. Let’s jump right in!

As they say in the sports world, “instinctively knowing when to run forward, when to ease back, and when to let someone else take over...these are the marks of a great team and a great team player”. Here, in the tech world, we couldn’t agree more.