Race conditions are arguably the most insidious kind of bug; they're intermittent, subtle, and most likely to occur in production. ActiveRecord's update_counter provides us with a convenient way to avoid race conditions when incrementing or decrementing values in the database. In this article, Jonathan Miles shows us how to use it, how it's implemented, and other approaches to avoiding race conditions.
Lambda is an excellent option for deploying lower-traffic web services when you don't want to maintain another server and you want easy access to all of AWS's other services. In this article, Godwin Ekuma shows us step-by-step how to deploy our Rails apps to AWS Lambda.
EuroPython, PyCon, DjangoCon, and SciPy rev up. A PyDoc CVE. Flask has a major new release. FastAPI and Django have minor releases. Discussions on a faster python
Good docs make happy customers. But documentation is HARD. You have to figure out what's important and write it up in a way that's tailored to your audiences and consistent across the site. Now you need to set up a website, publish the docs and maintain them as your product changes. Fortunately, we have seasoned technical writer Kate Bartolo here to walk us through the whole process.
Rails apps tend to start simple, with clean models and controllers. Then you start adding features. Before you know it, your models and controllers are big, unwieldy, and hard to understand. Refactoring into service objects is a great way to split these big pieces up, so they're easier to understand, test, and maintain.
Rbenv, RubyGems, and Bundler work together to give us a lot of control over our code's environment. If you know how they work, you'll be better prepared to troubleshoot any problems you encounter. In this article, Olasubomi walks us through the basics of how these three tools do what they do.
Code is never self-contained. It runs in an environment. Docker lets you define that environment in a simple and portable way. That's why pretty much every automated testing and deployment service works with docker containers. You give them a container, and done! But how do you set up a container to use for testing your Rails app? In this article, we'll show you.
Authentication is at the heart of most web development, yet it is difficult to get right. In this article, Diogo Souza discusses common security problems with authentication systems and how you can resolve them. Even if you never build an authentication system from scratch (you shouldn't), understanding these security concerns will help you make sure whatever authentication system you use is doing its job.
Have you ever thought about trying typescript for your app's front end? It's enticing, but the thought of porting all that existing JS is just too much. But what if you could gradually introduce typescript into your existing app, only using it where it made sense? In this article, Ayo Isaiah shows us how to do just that.
In earlier installments of this series, Alex Stoll guided us through creating a lexer and a parser. These translated the human-readable source code into data structures. In this article, he begins work on the interpreter - the bit that actually runs our code!