Memory leaks are something every developer has to eventually face. They are common in most languages, even if the language automatically manages memory for you. Memory leaks can result in problems such as application slowdowns, crashes, high latency, and so on. In this blog post, we will look at what memory leaks are and how you can avoid them in your NodeJS application. Though this is more focused on NodeJS, it should generally apply to JavaScript and TypeScript as well.

We’re happy to announce that the latest npm package for error tracking of your front-end with AppSignal has just been released. For those of you who aren’t really familiar with our error tracking service, we suggest you to take a deeper look into our docs. This was one of the bigger releases, and it includes many improvements and bug fixes. Here’s what we’ve done.

With a special thanks to Aleksandar and Unai, we’re happy to announce AppSignal for Elixir 1.13.0, which includes our all-new LiveView instrumentation helpers and updated typespecs. 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.

Configuration has long been a hot topic in the Elixir community, and luckily, in the recent months, there has been a great deal of thoughtful work put into making this problem an easier one to solve. Today, we’re going to show you how to migrate from an Elixir application that has been configured with the widely used config/*.exs files at compile-time, to an application that instead uses environment variables for configuration and is configured at runtime.

In today’s post, we’ll take a deep dive into Rails migrations. We’ll break down the migration into different pieces, and in the process, learn how to write an effective migration. We’ll learn how to write migrations for multiple databases, as well as how to handle failed migrations and techniques of performing rollbacks. To understand the whole post, you’ll need to have a basic understanding of databases and Rails.

Every JavaScript project starts ambitiously, trying not to use too many NPM packages along the way. Even with a lot of effort on our side, packages eventually start piling up. package.json gets more lines over time, and package-lock.json makes pull requests look scary with the number of additions or deletions when dependencies are added. “This is fine” — the team lead says, as other team members nod in agreement. What else are you supposed to do?

DHH just coined the term “Citadel,” which finally gives us an excellent way to reference how we approach tech at AppSignal. We said, “Hey, this is us! Our thing has a name now”. In addition to the Majestic Monolith, someone should write up the pattern of The Citadel: A single Majestic Monolith captures the majority mass of the app, with a few auxiliary outpost apps for highly specialized and divergent needs.

Ruby has always been known for the productivity it brings to its developers. Alongside features such as elegant syntax, rich meta-programming support, etc. that make you productive when writing code, it also has another secret weapon called TracePoint that can help you “debug” faster. In this post, I’ll use a simple example to show you 2 interesting facts I found out about debugging.

In today’s post, we’ll learn what gRPC is, when you should reach for such a tool, and some of the pros and cons of using it. After going over an introduction of gRPC, we’ll dive right into a sample application where we’ll build an Elixir backend API powered by gRPC. Let’s jump right in!

In today’s post, we will be looking into a software design pattern called Facade. When I first adopted it, it felt a little bit awkward, but the more I used it in my Rails apps, the more I started to appreciate its usefulness. More importantly, it allowed me to test my code more thoroughly, to clean out my controllers, to reduce the logic within my views and to make me think more clearly about an application’s code’s overall structure.