Background job processing is integral to modern software architecture. Background jobs allow resource-intensive tasks to be handled asynchronously, improving your application’s responsiveness and efficiency. You can use background processing for tasks such as sending emails, data processing, and batch jobs. If you were to run these synchronously, they could significantly degrade the user experience and system performance. Thus, most frameworks have libraries for running background jobs.

After Twitter moved from Ruby to Scala in 2009, the story was born that Ruby on Rails can’t scale. The story goes that it lacks robustness, is a memory hog, and lacks the concurrency features you need to grow an application. This has been the prevailing wisdom for over a decade. And then along came Shopify, showing that, as Lutke says, Ruby on Rails is a framework that can process billions of events per day and evidently does scale. Ruby on Rails is an excellent candidate for scaling.

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.

For a software engineer, even the basic use of a debugger can save a lot of pain: adding breakpoints (places in the code the program will stop at and expose the current context) is very easy, and navigating from one breakpoint to another isn't difficult either. And with just that, you can say goodbye to a program's many puts and runs. Just add one or more breakpoints and run your program.

Grape is a popular Ruby framework for building RESTful APIs. Exception handling plays a crucial role in ensuring the stability and reliability of any application, including those made with Grape. This article will explore the basics of Grape exception handling, including customizing exceptions. We'll also touch on some best practices, and how to integrate your app with AppSignal for enhanced error monitoring and management. Let's get started!

RSpec is a library for writing and running tests in Ruby applications. As its landing page states, RSpec is: "Behaviour Driven Development for Ruby. Making TDD productive and fun". We will return to that last part later. This post, the first of a two-part series, will focus on introducing RSpec and exploring how RSpec especially helps with Behaviour Driven Development in Ruby. Let's dive in!

Design patterns can help to simplify your codebase so you don't need to reinvent the wheel. In this post, we'll go into how to use Draper. But first, we will start with an overview of the decorator pattern and how to use it with Ruby's standard library. Let's get started!

So far in this series, we have been exploring the capabilities of SQLite for classic HTTP request/response type usage. In this post, we will push the boundary further by also using SQLite as a Pub/Sub adapter for ActionCable, i.e., WebSockets. This is no small feat: WebSocket adapters need to handle thousands of concurrent connections performantly.

When working with money in an application, ensuring everything is accounted for is important. In this post, we will explore some common methods and best practices of handling money in your Ruby app, and see how you can use money-rails to write maintainable money-handling code. Let's get started!

Hello there! My name is Maciej Mensfeld, and some of you might recognize me from my involvement in RubyGems Security, OSS commitments, or perhaps from Karafka: a multi-threaded, efficient Kafka processing framework tailored for Ruby and Rails. While I generally pen my thoughts on my personal blog, today's post is unique. This article results from a collaborative effort with the brilliant people over at AppSignal. To set the record straight, I don't work for AppSignal.