Ruby is an expressive language. This is no accident; Matz very consciously designed Ruby as an intuitive language to more or less read like English. It's safe to say that he succeeded. Methods are named very carefully, and do what they say they do; they also tend to have inverse methods which do the opposite. In this post, we'll look at why expressive code is important and its impact on your productivity as a developer. Then, we'll explore how to best use some of Ruby's methods. Let's get started!

In this first part of a two-part series, we'll explore how to avoid bad data and validate data at the boundary of a Phoenix application. We'll use a few techniques to ensure that bad data doesn't degrade our application. In part two, we'll specifically focus on leveraging Ecto under the hood to cast data. Let's dive in!

To keep your app secure, you need to control who and what can access it. Access control can be categorized into authentication — "who" to allow — and authorization — "what" they can access. Authentication is a subject for another day, but when it comes to user authorization, you generally have two ways to go about it: using a role-based or resource-based strategy. In this two-part series, we'll take a deep dive into using the Action Policy gem for a Ruby on Rails blog application.

Complex functionality can take a while to load. Users, in general, don't like to wait, so solutions must evolve. If you are already familiar with async/await in JavaScript, think of await as the place where blocking logically occurs. This forces the algorithm to wait, and technically, it's still synchronous code. Step functions allow long-running processes to run in the background asynchronously, so the logic does not get blocked and force people to wait.

In this article, we'll show how you can use Elixir's profile.eprof mix task to evaluate and improve code performance in your Elixir application. You'll see how we used the profiling mix task to lower reductions in our instrument/3 function and custom instrumentation functionality, both key parts of our Elixir integration.

In this series of posts, we will look at LiteStack, a one-stop-shop solution that hosts and processes all your production data on a single machine. LiteStack (as the name suggests) makes use of SQLite to provide: In this first post, we'll introduce the basics of LiteStack and set up an example Rails application. Let's begin!

Exceptions are a core aspect of programming, and a way to signal when something goes wrong with a program. An exception could result from a simple error, or your program might crash because of underlying constraints. Exceptions are not necessarily bad, though — they are fundamental to any working application. Let’s see what our options are for handling exceptions in Elixir.

Playwright and Puppeteer have emerged as two of the most powerful end-to-end testing Node.js libraries. Their robust APIs make it easier to test the UI and workflows of sites and web applications. Although they are similar tools that offer comparable features, there are circumstances in which one is better to use than the other. In this article, we'll look at scenarios where it's better to use Playwright than Puppeteer for functionality and performance reasons.

Sidekiq allows Ruby developers to maintain fast and responsive web applications by moving time-consuming tasks into the background. With multithreading at its core, Sidekiq can process many jobs at once. This makes Sidekiq an important part of Ruby or Rails applications that handle heavy loads or perform tasks like sending emails or processing files.

In part one of this series, we introduced the CoreComponents that get generated when bootstrapping a new Phoenix project. In part two, we implemented a create modal. Now, we will implement an edit modal. You can continue following along with our companion repo.