Setting up a proper monitoring overview over your application’s performance is a complex task. Normally, you’d first need to figure out what you need to monitor, then instrument your code, and finally make sense of all the data that has been emitted. However, with a few things set in place…

This article has been modified from its original appearance in Playbook Thirty-nine — A Guide to Shipping Interactive Web Apps with Minimal Tooling, and tailored to fit this guest post for AppSignal. There’s a lot of functionality that your app needs to handle, but that logic doesn’t necessarily belong in…

In today’s post, we will look into Ruby’s #dup and #clone. We'll start with a real-life example that triggered this interest. After that, we'll dive deeper with the goal of learning how #dup is implemented in Ruby and how it compares to #clone. We'll then close of by implementing our…

Happy new year, and welcome back to Ruby Magic! In this winter episode, we’ll dive into bindings and scopes. So put on your skis and follow us deep into the woods. Last time, we looked at closures in Ruby by comparing blocks, procs and lambdas. …

Performance monitoring is an important part of running a successful application. One of the most basic ways to tell the performance of something is to measure the duration each time it happens and distill statistics from it. Mean The mean or average of a collection of values is a good start…

Ruby has various ways of performing iteration — loops, blocks and enumerators. Most Ruby programmers are at least familiar with loops and blocks but Enumerator and Fiber often stay in the dark. …

In this edition of Elixir Alchemy, we’ll dive into Elixir’s GenStage module. Along the way, we’ll explain backpressure and we’ll write a Genstage to query the blockchain. Let’s start by discussing how using a GenStage can solve buffering problems. What Is a GenStage? Imagine you’re consuming data from an external source. That source could…

Threads and asynchronous environments are initially a bit tricky. Without a good mental model to organize interaction, it is easy to get into trouble and end up with unexpected results. On top of that, testing asynchronous code can be difficult without the right tools or test patterns. Thinking about threads…

In this edition of Ruby Magic, we’ll show you how to use code written in C from Ruby. This can be used to optimize performance sensitive parts of your code or to create an interface between a C library and Ruby. This is done by creating extensions that wrap libraries…