Elixir makes it easy to work with sophisticated data structures. We've come a long way C, where you had to manage every detail of your data's representation in memory. Even so, the way Elixir lays out your data in memory can have real implications on your app's performance. In this article, Sasha Fonseca gives us a tour through Elixir's internal data structures and shows us how they can affect application performance.
What makes Rails magical? It just might be its code loader. Put a few files in the right places, and - presto! - you have a web app. When you use a class, Rails handles the include so you can stay focused on your code. But this magic isn't just for Rails! You can add thread-safe code loading to your own apps via the Zeitwerk gem. In this article, Olasubomi introduces us to Zeitwerk and shows us how to integrate it with our own projects.
We don't get to choose our families. Some of us don't even get to choose our databases. What do you do if you have the bad luck to inherit a database with non-unique ids? In this case study, Regan Ryan shows us how his team faced the challenge.
Some devs use JavaScript in the browser; some use JavaScript on the server. What if you do both?
ActiveRecord makes accessing your database easy, but it can also help make it faster by its intelligent use of caching. In this article, Jonathan Miles shows us the tricks that Rails uses to ensure that your database isn't doing more work than it needs to.
For quick, scalable, highly-available web services, few options compare to AWS Lambda. Just provide your code, add a little configuration, and you're done! In this article, Milap Neupane will introduce us to Lambda, show us how to get it working with Ruby and the Serverless Framework, and discuss reasons to use — or to not use! — Lambda in production.
When picking a language for your next project, few things are more critical than the tooling it provides. In this article, Ayooluwa Isaiah wraps up our Go for Rubyists series with an introduction to go tooling.
Many of the concepts you're already familiar with as a web developer are applicable in Go. In this article, Ayooluwa Isaiah shows us how middleware, templating, and other aspects of the go language work together to create a coherent web-development experience.
If you're coming to Python from another language, it's normal to feel a little confused about object instantiation and inheritance - especially when people start talking about "metaclasses." In this article, Rupesh Mishra explains how instantiation, inheritance, and - yes - even metaclasses work in Python.
You'll probably never implement sorting from scratch. But sorting algorithms are foundational in computer science and have become a standard feature of the ritual hazing...er...interview process for developers at all levels. In this article, Julie Kent introduces us to the merge sort algorithm. She'll show us how it works, implement it in ruby, and discuss its performance characteristics.