Last time in this series, we looked at improving the developer experience. As your Lambda function gains more features and dependencies, you may notice that the bundle size begins to grow exponentially. This can negatively affect deployments and cold starts. A bigger bundle means deployments take longer to upload to the AWS cloud. The JavaScript engine has more work to do before it can execute the Lambda function. In this take, we will focus on optimizing our Lambda function.

Welcome to part one of this two-part series on debugging in Elixir and Erlang. In this post, we'll use several different tools and techniques to debug Elixir code. First, we'll get to know the demo project I created to showcase certain tools: dist_messenger. It's an Elixir project of a distributed messaging system that can be used directly on IEx. It allows users in different nodes to send and receive messages to each other.

Architecting a maintainable, readable, and reliable codebase is important not only for the people who will work on the code after you, but also for your own sanity. I’ve worked on dozens of production Node.js backend services and will share my experience of architecture pitfalls to avoid when building yours.

Notifications are a typical cross-cutting concern shared by many web applications. The Noticed gem makes developing notifications fantastically easy by providing a database-backed model and pluggable delivery methods for your Ruby on Rails application. It comes with built-in support for mailers, websockets, and a couple of other delivery methods. We'll also examine the merits of using the CableReady gem for triggering system notifications in your Ruby on Rails application. Let's get into it!

As unpleasant as they are, errors are crucial to software development. When developing an application, we usually don't have full control over the parties interacting with a program and its hosts (including operating system versions, processors, and network speed). It's important you have an error reporting system to diagnose errors and make errors human-readable. In this post, we'll first look at the two common types of errors.

In our last post, we wrote a basic parser for phone numbers using Elixir. It was a bit simplistic since it didn't really respect the format phone numbers are expected to have, but it was a great start. We'll now improve the parser to ensure we only accept phone numbers that fit the spec and make our return type an instance of structured data. Let's dive straight in!

The Node.js team recently announced the release of version 19. This has the following features: In this article, we will explore the major highlights of this release. We recommend downloading the latest Node.js 19 release to follow along. To verify your version of node: Let's get started!

Today we will dive into some strategies you can use to scale Ruby on Rails applications to a huge user base. One obvious way of scaling applications is to throw more money at them. And it works amazingly well — add a few more servers, upgrade your database server, and voila, a lot of the performance issues just go poof! But it is often also possible to scale applications without adding more servers. That's what we will discuss today. Let's get going!

The easiest way to understand asynchronous code is to realize that the code does not execute sequentially. This can be difficult to comprehend in JavaScript, especially if you come from a programming language that's synchronous or sequential by default, like PHP. In this post, you will learn how to write async (also known as 'non-sequential') code in JavaScript efficiently. You'll learn the basics of using callbacks, promises, and the modern async/await style. Let's get started!

Version 13 of Next.js, a well-established React framework from the Vercel company, was released last week. The announcement was made at the Next.js Conf and took the community by storm. Developers worldwide spread the news about the features and goodies announced live on October 25th. Now, as the dust slowly settles, we can go through what's new in Next.js 13.

In this post, we'll use two of Elixir's most powerful features - pattern matching and recursion - to sanitize a string by removing invalid Unicode "Specials" characters. Let's dive straight in!