Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

June 2023

Migrate Your Express Application to Fastify

Welcome to the final part of our Express to Fastify series. In the previous installments, we explored the unique features and advantages of Fastify over Express. Now, you'll put what you've learned so far into practice by migrating an existing Express application to Fastify. You'll avoid rewriting an entire application from scratch by gradually transitioning to Fastify.

Keep Your Ruby App Secure with Bundler

This article covers the use of bundler features to secure Ruby applications. In this day and age, we have to be more and more careful about software supply chain security. We'll show you how to start this journey by relying on a Gemfile and bundler to manage your project's dependencies. By the end of the post, you will better understand how bundler audit and bundler outdated work. Both can help you monitor the security state of your project's dependency tree. Let's dive in!

An Introduction to Lambdas in Ruby

Lambdas are a powerful programming construct used in many languages. These functions allow developers to write code that is more concise, efficient, and easier to maintain, making Lambdas an essential part of any developer's toolkit. In this article, we'll explore how you can use Lambda functions in Ruby to simplify your code and make it more powerful.

Exceptional Error Reporting for Rails Exceptions

If you want insights into your application's exceptions but don't have time to invest in adding verbose logic to your code, we've got some exceptional news: The AppSignal for Ruby gem 3.4.1 now supports the Rails error reporter! With this change, you can simplify your AppSignal integration, streamline your code and begin reporting errors on the fly without raising an error page and interrupting your user's flow.

Create and Open A Modal in Phoenix 1.7

Phoenix 1.7 came out this year with a whole host of exciting features, including verified routes and some great built-in Tailwind components. These components are a fantastic start, but they are not made to be a fully general design system. We should expect to modify components to fit our specific needs. However, knowing where to start can be difficult. In this three-part series, we'll take a fresh Phoenix app and create a working UI using generated components.

Puppeteer in Node.js: More Antipatterns to Avoid

Puppeteer is a powerful browser automation library for web scraping and integration testing. However, the asynchronous, real-time API leaves plenty of room for gotchas and antipatterns to arise. This article is part of a series, starting with Avoiding Puppeteer Antipatterns and Puppeteer in Node.js: Common Mistakes to Avoid. In this post, we'll add another dozen antipatterns to the list. There will be no overlap with previous installments, so you may wish to start with those.

Setting Up Business Logic with DCI in Rails

In our last post, we examined the most common ways to organize business logic in Ruby on Rails. They all have advantages and drawbacks, and essentially, most do not leverage the full power of Object Oriented Programming in Ruby. This time, we will introduce another alternative that more naturally fits the mental models we apply when reasoning about the behavior of our applications: DCI.

Designing a Scalable Backend in Node.js

As a developer supporting a growing business, you’ll likely spend a lot of time thinking about scaling. We live in a wonderful time to be solving scale problems. Computers are so fast and capable that many of the development decisions you make when writing backend systems won’t noticeably impact performance(until your app reaches an absolutely massive scale). If this weren’t the case, we’d all be writing web servers in C.