In a world full of microservices and distributed systems, building robust and reliable APIs is of paramount concern. One key concept that plays a vital role in achieving reliability is idempotency. In this article, we'll delve into the world of idempotency, exploring what it is, why it's important, and how it can be implemented to solve the persistent problem of duplicate processing in APIs. Along the way, we'll see how to build an idempotent API in Node.js with Redis.

In our last post, we looked at the basics of RSpec and explored how well it works with Behavior Driven Development in Ruby. Now, we will look at specific types of RSpec tests for different parts of a Ruby on Rails application. Let's dive straight in!

We have all encountered collections of data at some point when working on Elixir applications. These collections are very handy for storing, retrieving, and manipulating data using different data structures, making them very efficient in managing clean code. In this article, we'll go through the following: Finally, we'll explore how to build a memory-efficient Elixir application using the lazy processing approach with streams.

Coming from an HTTP-only background, message queues look very fascinating. Unlike HTTP, you can just push events to the queue and move on. After all, they're a big part of what makes async communication possible between microservices. In this article, we'll take a look at Apache Kafka and how you can build a durable throttling layer with it. Let's get started!

In a world of ever-changing technology, testing is an integral part of writing robust and reliable software. Tests verify that your code behaves as expected, make it easier to maintain and refactor code, and serve as documentation for your code. There are two widely used testing frameworks for testing Django applications: In this article, we will see how both work. Let's get started!

RSpec is a library for writing and running tests in Ruby applications. As its landing page states, RSpec is: "Behaviour Driven Development for Ruby. Making TDD productive and fun". We will return to that last part later. This post, the first of a two-part series, will focus on introducing RSpec and exploring how RSpec especially helps with Behaviour Driven Development in Ruby. Let's dive in!

In this post, the first of a two-part series, we'll cover how Elixir applications can be traced using OpenTelemetry and how macros can make this process super easy and streamlined. First, we'll talk about tracing and OpenTelemetry in Elixir. Then we'll improve our custom tracing layer step-by-step until we get an easy and seamless tool to trace our application. Let's get started!

In this series, we have looked at the "musts" (databases) and "shoulds" (asynchronous jobs, websockets) of a web application. Now we turn to one of the "coulds" (that is nonetheless recommended for scaling businesses): caching. In particular, we mean caching HTML fragments and other snippets of data, as referred to in Rails Guides. We are not concerned with HTTP or SQL query caching. In this part, we'll see how to speed up our Rails app using LiteCache.

Welcome to part two of our series on profiling and optimizing CPU-bound tasks in Node.js! In the first installment, we discussed the complexities of handling CPU-bound tasks in Node.js, shedding light on their impact on runtime performance and exploring various profiling techniques. Once you've used profiling to figure out where the bottleneck in your application is, the next step is to choose the right optimization strategy to obtain an acceptable level of performance for your use case.

Design patterns can help to simplify your codebase so you don't need to reinvent the wheel. In this post, we'll go into how to use Draper. But first, we will start with an overview of the decorator pattern and how to use it with Ruby's standard library. Let's get started!