You'll probably never implement sorting from scratch. But sorting algorithms are foundational in computer science and have become a standard feature of the ritual hazing...er...interview process for developers at all levels. In this article, Julie Kent introduces us to the merge sort algorithm. She'll show us how it works, implement it in ruby, and discuss its performance characteristics.
Understanding parsers is like seeing the matrix. You start to understand the tree-like structure of your code. You begin to realize that so many language features are just syntactic sugar concealing a simple core. In this article, Alex Braha Stoll will guide us through the world of parsers. He'll explain basic concepts, then use Ruby to implement a simple parser for his toy language, Stoffle.
What do you do when you want to customize which resources are deployed via CloudFormation?
If you've ever built a UI in Rails, you've probably noticed that views tend to get slower over time. That's because adding features to a UI often means adding DB queries to the view. They add up. Fortunately, Rails provides us with an easy-to-apply band-aid in the form of view caching. In this article, Jonathan Miles introduces us to view caching, discusses when it's appropriate to use, and covers common pitfalls to watch out for.
When you inherit a legacy app with no tests, your first step should be to add them. But that can be a huge task! How do you even start? In this article, José will introduce us to a testing workflow called test-commit-revert (TCR) that is particularly useful for adding tests to legacy systems. He'll show us practical examples and help us set up our tooling for minimal friction.
You're doing some currency calculations in your app. It seems to be working well. But after a while, strange discrepancies emerge. The books stop balancing. People get mad. All because the code treated currency like any other number. In this article, Julio Sampaio shows us which of Ruby's number classes are unsuitable for currency, and walks us through better options.
When you're deciding on a technology to use for your project, it helps to have a broad understanding of your options. You may be tempted to build a web service in Go for performance reasons - but what would that code actually look like? How would it compare to languages like Ruby or JS? In this article, Ayooluwa Isaiah gives us a guided tour through the building blocks of go web services so you'll be well-informed.
Sometimes when your app is slow, it's not your fault. Your code might be optimized to the teeth, but it won't matter if it has to perform intrinsically slow tasks, like fetching data from an external API. In these situations, Rails' low-level caching can be a life-saver. But caching is infamously tricky. It's dangerous to go alone. In this article, Jonathan Miles guides us through the landscape of low-level caching. He covers the basics, but more importantly, digs into essential details of cache invalidation and points out common pitfalls.
If I asked you to sit down right now and sort a list of numbers, there's a good chance that you'd intuitively rediscover the selection sort algorithm. It's a simple approach that can have significant performance implications. That's why it shows up so frequently in technical interviews - even though most developers never implement sorting from scratch. In this article, Julie Kent walks us through the selection sort algorithm, builds a working implementation in Ruby, and discusses its performance characteristics.
Few things are scarier than a database slowly losing integrity over weeks or years. For a while, nobody notices anything. Then users start reporting bugs, yet you can't find any code that's broken. By the time you realize the problem, it may be happening for so long that your backups are unusable. We can avoid problems like these with skillful use of transactions. In this article, Kingsley Silas introduces us to transactions at the database level, discusses when they should be considered, and shows us how to use them in Rails.