Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

A friendly introduction to PHP testing

In the last few years, there has been a lot of movement around new and exciting PHP testing tools. While this is great news, stepping back a little and understanding the underlying concepts before jumping in is vital to writing great PHP tests. When we talk about testing tools and methodologies, we're referring to automated testing tools. Writing code that tests your PHP apps is a great way to build confidence that your application will behave as you expect.

Building Livewire Components with Volt

In the past, when building Livewire components for our Laravel applications, we needed to keep our backend and frontend code split up into separate files. This can sometimes get a little confusing, especially with larger projects. But with Volt, we can now build single-file Livewire components where the backend and frontend code coexist in the same file. In this article, we'll look at what Volt is and how Volt components differ from traditional Livewire components.

The ultimate guide to Node.js testing

As a Node.js developer, you probably already know that testing code and maintaining its quality are essential aspects of software development, arguably just as important as writing code in the first place. Good tests raise confidence that changes won't cause problems, and the time invested eventually helps you ship faster.

How Solid Queue works under the hood

Whether or not you're active in the Rails ecosystem, you might already have heard some of the buzz around Solid Queue, a new database-backed backend for ActiveJob. Solid Queue is a simple and performant option for background jobs that lets you queue large amounts of data without maintaining extra dependencies like Redis. We've already talked about how to deploy, run, and monitor Solid Queue, but we haven't yet explored how Solid Queue works.

A practical guide to web scraping with Ruby

One of the benefits of Ruby's developer-friendly syntax is that it's straightforward to quickly build scripts to automate tasks. Web scraping with Ruby is fun, useful, and straightforward. In this article, we'll explore using HTTParty to pull a web page and check it for a given string. To be specific, we'll build a cron job in Ruby to check if a product is in stock on a website!

How to use the Reddit API for a JavaScript application

Reddit is a news aggregation, communication, and discussion application. If you want to get more information about a particular topic or have a question, Reddit is the place to be. The data on Reddit are provided to the public through both the website and its API. Learning how to use the Reddit API is beneficial if you want to integrate Reddit communications into your application or if you just want to use certain data on Reddit.

Building Ruby on Rails engines

Engines are one of the best ways to share functionality across Rails applications. Whether you're looking to extend your Rails application, modularize your project for better maintainability, or are just curious about the finer details, join us as we explore the intricacies of Rails engines. This article dives into everything you need to know about Rails engines, from their definition to their types, popular examples in the real world, and even building your own.

Exception Handling in JavaScript

In JavaScript, errors are only detected during runtime. Therefore, it is impossible to get compile-time errors when building JavaScript applications. There are several reasons an app might encounter a JavaScript exception: invalid input, server error, syntax errors, or errors in the application logic. In this article, we will dig into exception handling in JavaScript so that when your app encounters errors, it affects users as little as possible.

Practical strategies for Laravel performance optimization

Laravel is the most popular PHP framework for building web applications and is loved for its elegance, simplicity, and scalability. However, like any other framework for web development, Laravel can experience performance issues if it’s not optimized for high performance. Laravel performance problems aren't usually due to the framework itself, but rather some suboptimal choices in the application.

A guide to Laravel pipelines

When building web applications, it's handy to break down a feature's complex processes into smaller, more manageable pieces, whether by using separate functions or classes. Doing this helps to keep the code clean, maintainable, and testable. An approach you can take to split out these smaller steps in your Laravel application is to use Laravel pipelines. Pipelines allow you to send data through multiple layers of logic before returning a result.