Ruby on Rails makes writing web applications a pleasure. It’s a powerful and intuitive platform, built on an equally powerful and intuitive language. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking the time to check your code for bottlenecks and performance problems before you ship. In this post, I’ll cover how to use Rack Mini Profiler to profile your Rails application.
Have you ever been confused about the different ways to handle missing data in the Ruby language? I know I have, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that. The options Ruby offers come in the form of several methods: “present?”, “blank?”, “nil?”, and “empty?”. There are all somewhat related since all of them check for the absence of data in some way.
Authentication for web apps is a difficult problem. Anyone who’s ever tried to create their own authentication system will tell you that there are a lot of unexpected edge cases. What’s more, your authentication system is an externally-facing part of your application. This means if someone is trying to hack into your application, your login system’s security will be one of the first places they check.
AKS is the managed service from Azure for Kubernetes. When you create an AKS cluster, Azure creates and operates the Kubernetes control plane for you at no cost. The only thing you do as a user is to say how many worker nodes you’d like, plus other configurations we’ll see in this post. So, with that in mind, how can you improve the AKS cluster performance of a service in which Azure pretty much manages almost everything?
A Rails migration is a tool for changing an application’s database schema. Instead of managing SQL scripts, you define database changes in a domain-specific language (DSL). The code is database-independent, so you can easily move your app to a new platform. You can roll migrations back, and manage them alongside your application source code.
If you’re thinking about using containers to manage an application, there are a lot of options for technologies to use. It can be difficult to even know where to begin to make a decision. One common question is whether someone should use Docker vs Kubernetes for managing their application containers. This is a misleading question. In truth, Docker and Kubernetes aren’t competing technologies. There’s no need for them to face off.
Everybody climb aboard the hype train with me. Today, we’re going to study a new job title: the DevOps engineer. This role is getting popular in the same way that the full-stack developer role became popular before it. In fact, one could argue that the DevOps engineer is an extension of the full-stack developer in that both seek to extend our ownership of our software.
Docker is a powerful tool for creating and deploying applications. It simplifies rolling out applications across multiple systems and is a useful tool for integrating new technologies. An application that runs using Docker will start up the same every time on every system. This means that if the application works on your local computer, it’ll work anywhere that supports Docker. That’s great news! It simplifies your development process and can be a powerful tool for continuous delivery.
No matter how carefully coded, reviewed, and tested your Ruby code is, odds are good that at some point you’ll cause a catastrophic failure to at least one system you’re responsible for. How do you prepare yourself? You need a Ruby debugger. In this post, I’ll cover the whole Ruby debugger process—from finding the issue to determining the root cause. Use these instructions for debugging a single Ruby file, a Rails app, or a gem.
New Relic is one of the industry leaders for SaaS-based application performance management. However, many are starting to look for new relic alternatives. Probably about half of those alternatives are available as SaaS APM.
