The Odin Project is an open source community and curriculum for learning web development. Students build portfolio projects and complete lessons that are constantly curated and updated with the latest resources. They offer completely free courses like Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Once a student climbs the technical ladder, there's even a course on how to go about getting a job in the industry, walking you through things like job searching, interviews, and much more.

Every single app — large or small, open source or not — has room for improvement when it comes to performance. This is why we created Skylight for Open Source to give open source contributors the tools they need to find these issues. Over the next week, we'll show you three different open source apps running on Skylight, each with their own unique performance challenges, varying in complexity.

Today, we released version 2.0 of the Skylight Agent. 2.0 doesn't introduce any new APIs, but we did rewrite the SQL Lexer to support more varieties of queries. We also spent a lot of time on internal refactoring and improved our error logging. Since we follow semantic versioning, we also took the opportunity to drop support for some older dependencies and environments. Read on for more information about upgrading as well as some technical details on our internal changes.

Here at Skylight, we love all things open source. Many of us on the Skylight team are open source contributors ourselves. From our own experiences, we know that many people are excited about the idea of contributing to their favorite open source apps, but they don’t always necessarily know where to start.

This week at Skylight HQ (technically it’s in the Cloud somewhere), we were hit with a pretty big surge of requests on our collector (Cyber Monday perhaps?). Fortunately our backend is architected to handle a very large volume of data from the agents with minimal latency, so this kind of surge on our backend would not affect the performance of your apps in any way (in addition, the agent is sending data in the background from a different process separate from your app/server).

Skylight’s new deploy tracking feature allows you to zero in on performance improvements or regressions caused by a deployment. Now, each of your deployments will be marked on the Response Timeline, allowing you to answer the following questions: Did this deployment make my app any faster?

We're pleased to announce the release of version 1.4 of the Skylight agent today. This release has a number of improvements and some exciting new features! Read on to learn more, or skip to the good stuff and update your Gemfile.