A bug in software can be disruptive, elusive, maddening, and invasive. Indeed, a developer often needs the tenacity of Edison to find and fix an issue. But grit isn't the only asset a developer requires. One also needs information to debug code: What are the symptoms and effects of the issue? What is its frequency? Pervasiveness? Provenance? The evidence and artifacts of a bug — a core dump, stack trace, log, or test case — are invaluable.

It's 2024, and the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is 35 years old. The fact that the vast majority of web traffic still relies on this simple, stateless form of communication is a marvel in itself. A first set of content retrieval optimizations were added to the protocol when v1.0 was published in 1996. These include the infamous caching instructions (aka headers) that the client and server use to negotiate whether content needs refreshing.

Ruby on Rails is an excellent choice for building a REST API, stemming from its design principles and robust feature set. It encourages a resource-oriented architecture, including built-in routing, migrations, and task tools. Rails also includes Active Record, an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) layer, which simplifies database interactions.

Ruby on Rails is currently in major version 7.1 and rolling towards Rails 8, the next comprehensive new release. Before Rails 8, though, there’s a significant version that will help bridge the gap: Ruby on Rails 7.2. In this post, we’ll dive into several noteworthy changes in Ruby on Rails 7.2, focusing on the support for database changes in Active Record. You'll come away with hands-on opportunities to work with these features. Let's get started!

From custom-made to plug-and-play forms of authentication, Ruby developers have plenty to choose from these days. Yet, as you may know, building your own solution can be costly and dangerous. If Devise is the de facto standard for most teams, an alternative might simplify the lives of most. This article will cover the setup and use of Auth0 in a Ruby on Rails application, including everything you need to get going properly, from handling roles to relying on multiple providers to authenticate users.

Check out Scout Monitoring's ollama-rails GitHub repo for samples on how to use ollama-ai to communicate with Ollama. Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a game-changer, enabling machines to understand, generate, and process human language with unprecedented accuracy and fluency. One such tool that has gained significant attention is Ollama, a cutting-edge platform that allows developers to run LLMs locally without relying on cloud services.

Versioning APIs is a critical part of building web applications, as it allows you to make changes that may otherwise break existing API users. Changing the contract between the API and the clients that depend on it is dangerous, and versioning endpoints adds flexibility and safety. Versioning is implemented in many ways - You can version with subdomains, query parameters, URL schemas, headers, and more!

It's hard to overstate the importance of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for all websites. Since the first CSS standards were published in late 1996, we have come quite far regarding features and ecosystems. Several frameworks have appeared and proved popular, one of the most recent being Tailwind CSS. In this post, we'll first examine Tailwind's utility-first approach before diving into how to use it in a Ruby on Rails application.

APIs are the bread and butter of the internet. The ability to interact with our applications programmatically enables interoperability and makes our lives as developers easier. Unfortunately, web applications are vulnerable to malicious actors that seek to misuse them or degrade their performance, which is why rate limiting is an important part of any API.