From custom-made to plug-and-play forms of authentication, Ruby developers have plenty to choose from these days. Yet, as you may know, building your own solution can be costly and dangerous. If Devise is the de facto standard for most teams, an alternative might simplify the lives of most. This article will cover the setup and use of Auth0 in a Ruby on Rails application, including everything you need to get going properly, from handling roles to relying on multiple providers to authenticate users.

Debugging is a valuable skill for any software engineer to have. Unfortunately, most software engineers are not trained in it. And that's not just specific to developers going through boot camps; even in universities, we are not often taught and trained to use a debugger. My teachers and mentors were more interested in getting me to write programs rather than debugging them. If we are fortunate, debugging comes at the end of the semester, in a short, last session.

In the world of Python frameworks, FastAPI is the new kid on the block and a great choice for building APIs. Equally, Render is a good option for developers who want to quickly test their applications in a production environment for free. In this post, we'll run through how to deploy a FastAPI app to Render. First, though, let's explore why FastAPI and Render are often chosen by developers.

When working on multiple tasks, it's important to consider performing them concurrently. However, when using concurrency, we need to be careful not to overload our system resources. In this article, we will cover the following: Let's get going!

Data validation is essential to avoid unexpected behavior, prevent errors, and improve security. It can be performed both on a web page — where data is entered — and on the server, where the data is processed. In this tutorial, we'll explore data validation in the Node.js backend. Then, you'll learn how to implement it in Express using the express-validator library. Get ready to become a Node.js data validation expert!

In our last post, we explored how Dependency Injection (DI) is a powerful design pattern that can improve our ExUnit tests. In this article, we will dive deeper into the topic of DI in Elixir, focusing on the Rewire library for Elixir projects. We will cover Rewire's core concepts, how to get started with it, and practical examples. We will also see how to use Rewire alongside Mox. Let's get started!

It's hard to overstate the importance of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for all websites. Since the first CSS standards were published in late 1996, we have come quite far regarding features and ecosystems. Several frameworks have appeared and proved popular, one of the most recent being Tailwind CSS. In this post, we'll first examine Tailwind's utility-first approach before diving into how to use it in a Ruby on Rails application.

AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine that allows you to run containers without managing servers. With Fargate, you no longer have to provision clusters of virtual machines to run ECS containers: this is all done for you. Fargate has an Amazon ECS construct that can host an API. In this take, we will build a Fargate service using the AWS CDK, put the API in a docker image, and then host it inside Amazon ECS. The API will be a pizza API and we'll store the data in a DynamoDB table.

It's essential to test web applications to ensure reliability, functionality, and a good user experience. That's why robust testing frameworks have become so important for web developers. Among the plethora of available tools, Cypress and Playwright have emerged as two of the most popular choices for automating end-to-end testing. In this Cypress versus Playwright comparison guide, we'll explore the strengths and weaknesses of the two tools, their features, and their differences. Cypress or Playwright?

As a contract software developer, I am exposed to oodles of Ruby code. Some code is readable, some obfuscated. Some code eschews whitespace, as if carriage returns were a scarce natural resource, while other code resembles a living room fashioned by Vincent Van Duysen. Code, like the people who author it, varies. Yet, it's ideal to minimize variation. Time and effort are best spent on novel problems.