PHP isn't typically thought of as a solution when creating worker or background processes, jobs that typically can last for an extended period. These can be tasks such as image processing, file repair, and mass email batch jobs. Typically, PHP is linked with HTTP requests, requests which are short in duration and stateless in nature. However, just because of this enduring association, it doesn't mean that PHP can't be used for background processes. On the contrary.

Have you ever looked at your website logs and realized they don’t make sense to you? Maybe your log levels have been abused, and now every log categorizes as “Error.” Or your logs fail to give clear information on what went wrong, or they reveal sensitive information that hackers may harvest. Fixing these problems is possible! Let’s explore how you can write meaningful log messages and use log levels correctly.

Welcome to Stackify’s guide to C# exception handling. Why is this topic so important? In modern languages like C#, “problems” are typically modeled using exceptions. Jeff Atwood (of StackOverflow fame) once called exceptions “the bread and butter of modern programming languages.” That should give you an idea of how important this construct is.

Microservices are small, independently-running applications that perform a single function for a larger application or IT infrastructure. By loosely connecting a number of them together, developers create a pluggable architecture that facilitates the process of updating, upgrading, and scaling the application in response to changing requirements.

One of my favorite Talend customer success stories is the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). I love this story not only because they transformed investigation journalism with data, won the Pulitzer prize for the Panama papers, and helped the public to recover billions of dollars lost to illegal tax evasion.

The retail landscape is in the midst of a dramatic, data-driven renaissance. New tools help to build new connections — between consumers and retailers, and across supply chains. Data analytics and machine learning further these connections to better understand and predict customer behavior and improve demand forecasting. In this emerging era of smart retail, organizations have access to a range of powerful new capabilities and tools.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard that “data-driven companies make more money”. McKinsey started beating that drum half a decade ago. Financial Times wrote extensively about the topic. Google even commissioned a multi-year study from Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which showed that “best-in-class digital marketers benefit from 1.4 times greater cost benefits and up to 2.5 times revenue impact” after implementing analytics to drive their business growth.

Great news for all the Elixir alchemists, we’ve just released AppSignal for Elixir package version 1.12.0 which adds support for the upcoming 1.5 version of the Phoenix framework, and improves in-channel error handling. If you’re not an AppSignal user yet, make sure to check out the product tour and see how errors, performance, host metrics and triggers all come together in one tool. Phoenix 1.5 isn’t here yet, but AppSignal 1.12 is ready for it.

As programmers we often have to mentally run code. To imagine how a program will behave given certain inputs. This is hard enough for experienced developers. But for juniors? It can seem impossible. In this article, Melissa Williams argues that pry is an invaluable tool for junior rubyists because it allows them to see exactly what is going on as their code is run.

Application performance is always a concern when building in the modern, competitive web and mobile space. At Scout, it’s why we created application performance monitoring tools in the first place. That said, there are steps you can take to build a more performant application. If you are using Ruby on Rails, caching might be one of the best tools on your belt to build a better application.