“All code and no logging makes John a black box error-prone system.” Logging is a key aspect of monitoring, troubleshooting and debugging your code. Not only does it make your project’s underlying execution more transparent and intelligible, but also more accessible in its approach. In a company or a community setting, intelligent logging practices can help everyone to be on the same page about the status and the progress of the project.

When it comes to web development, middleware is often the key to ensuring everything connects up - even if some of the pieces don’t always match up. HTTP Middleware is a mechanism used to conveniently filter HTTP requests coming into your web application. When it comes to PHP, frameworks often help us get our applications to handle workloads vanilla PHP might have a harder time managing. Frameworks help to manage the underlying structure of an application while supporting existing PHP standards.

If you've been on the hunt for a new developer podcast, then you understand just how difficult and fruitless that pursuit can be. You can spend hours online sifting through coding podcasts, programming podcasts, and DevOps podcasts only to realize one simple thing: none of them focus on your preferred programming language! With thousands of different developer podcasts out there, the problem is magnified exponentially. Fortunately, we at Scout APM have nothing but expertise and time on our hands.

There's no type of monitoring tool that can get to the heart of a performance problem faster than Application Performance Management (APM). If you're making this decision, you may be choosing between New Relic and Scout. There are cases where New Relic is a better fit, clear cases where Scout fits like a glove, and some murky situations as well. Where do you fall? Below, I'll summarize the factors to consider when choosing your best APM product.

Application performance is always a concern when building in the modern, competitive web and mobile space. At Scout, it’s why we created application performance monitoring tools in the first place. That said, there are steps you can take to build a more performant application. If you are using Ruby on Rails, caching might be one of the best tools on your belt to build a better application.