In today’s post, we’ll look at system tests in Rails 6. System tests are meant to auto-test the way users interact with your application, including the Javascript in your user interface. Minitest, being the default testing framework in Rails, is a great match for system testing. With all the configuration that Rails handles for us, there are just a few steps needed before we have our first tests up and running.

In today’s post, we’ll go over what continuous integration and continuous delivery are, the benefits that come along with employing CI/CD, and some best practices that you should follow. We’ll also explore a wide array of Elixir ecosystem tools that can help you create top-notch CI pipelines. In order to experiment with a handful of the tools that we will be discussing, we’ll use a Git hooks Elixir library to execute our CI/CD validation steps, but on our local machine.

In this post, we’ll look into tried and true methods of improving Rails view performance. Specifically, I will focus on database efficiency, view manipulation, and caching. I think the phrase “premature optimization is the root of all evil” has been taken a little out of context. I’ve often heard developers use this during code reviews when simple optimization techniques are pointed out.

In today’s post, we’ll cover the significant differences and benefits of using structure.sql versus the default schema.rb schema formats in your Ruby on Rails application. In a data-driven world, knowing how to exploit all of your database’s rich features can make the difference between a successful and unsuccessful enterprise.

In today’s post, we will be covering the Elixir library named Broadway. This library is maintained by the kind folks at Plataformatec and allows us to create highly concurrent data processing pipelines with relative ease. After an overview of how Broadway works and when to use it, we’ll dive into a sample project where we’ll leverage Broadway to fetch temperature data from https://openweathermap.org/ in order to find the coldest city on earth.

In this post, we’ll explore how to create Ruby modules that are configurable by users of our code — a pattern that allows gem authors to add more flexibility to their libraries. Most Ruby developers are familiar with using modules to share behavior. After all, this is one of their main use cases, according to the documentation.

Hello again! Welcome to the finalé of a two-part series of posts on errors in JavaScript. Last time, we took a look into the history of errors in JavaScript — how JavaScript shipped without runtime exceptions, how error handling mechanisms were later added both to the fledgeling web browsers of the day and to the ECMAScript spec, and how they future efforts to standardise these features would be connected to the politics of the browser wars of the late 90’s and 2000’s.

In this post, you’ll learn how to use ETS as a caching mechanism in your Elixir applications, get familiar with different available options, and be made aware of some things to keep in mind.

We often get questions about optimizing or monitoring Sidekiq. Monitoring is kind of our game, but optimizing Sidekiq’s performance is a different ball game altogether. In reality, optimizing is complex, but let’s start by looking at the seemingly simple answers…

Hello again! It’s a historic week here at AppSignal! This week we released the first version of our new and improved JavaScript error monitoring. Now you can have your front end code, Ruby or Elixir back end code, your hosts, performance, everything monitored in one interface. To celebrate the launch, in a two-part series of posts, we’ll be taking a look at the history of Errors in JavaScript, including how to handle them in your code today.