If you care about your application performance you have to schedule extra tasks into background when handling requests. One of such tasks may be collecting performance or business metrics. In this post I'll show you how to avoid potential problems with threaded background workers.
continue reading →If you're really serious about your application you have to collect and analyze its statistics. You can use Google Analytics or any other tool to track visits and basic events, or you can send specific events on demand. There's also a way to automatically track ActiveRecord model creations and in this post I'll show you how easy it is.
continue reading →I work in Arkency for almost 4 years and lately I've started to think how it influences me. Working together is not only about delivering some good as a bunch of people - team has own identity, own culture. These days I decided to write down what I found out about my team for two reasons. First is just to see some day how it evolved over years - but that's a good reason to write it in “My sweet diary”, holden under a pillow. I'm also inspired by great blog series “We are principled” by 8th Light.
continue reading →Yesterday day I presented a small code snippet to my dear coworkers (who I of course always respect) and (as usually) they were not impressed, even though I liked my solution. So I wanted to know your opinion about this little piece of code. Let's start with the beginning.
continue reading →There is a well known cite on naming in our industry:
“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” Phil Karlton
To be honest it's not Computer Science specific issue, but common problem for whole science. History of science is composed of discoveries and evolution of definitions. Every math theorem is based on some definitions - I would call it “theorem dictionary”. There is also huge branch of philosophy aiming to figure out how our language infleunce on our thoughts. So I asked myself - how naming can influence my design. What can I learn from bad names?
continue reading →There's an idea we were working on for more than one year till now. As backend developers we were thrown into mysterious world of frontend (client-side) apps without any good pattern how to create Single Page App. So we (GameBoxed + Arkency) invented one - hexagonal.js.
continue reading →In the old times everything was simple. You received a request, did some computation (or not in case of static page) and sent a reply. However what we do now is no longer that easy.
continue reading →Chillout.io architecture is distributed - currently just as few processes on same production server. As professionals we decided to prepare integration tests for each of application (maybe in terms of their business we could call them acceptance tests), but that wasn't enough - we wanted to expose business scenarios that we're actually aiming in. We achieved that with fully black-box tests. Curious how we did that? Read on.
continue reading →I have seen people using very different techniques to build API around Rails applications. I wanted to show what I like to do in my projects. Mostly because it is a very simple solution and it does not make your models concerned with another responsibility.
continue reading →What is unit testing for? Is it a way to make sure that your code is correct and bugless? Or rather OOD tool, that expose most of places where you break object orientation principles? You may have your own answer (please comment though) but I would vote for the second one - of course it may assure me that I haven't introduced some totally stupid bug, but that's less interesting part.
continue reading →There are many possible blogging platforms out there to be used, yet we decided not to use any of them. It was a controversial decision even inside our own, small team. Before we started blogging there was a heated discussion whether we should use something that can quickly get you running so that when you feel in a mood for a blog post, there are no obstacles preventing you from writing. Or the alternative was to build something custom and have more control. We ended up using existing tools but put a little effort to combine them together into something that we like.
continue reading →Yes, we have to be honest - we're doing content marketing for our product for Rails developers, but we want that content to be meaty and very useful. So today I'm gonna focus on basic functions of Google Analytics you could not know and how we use them on our blog and landing page.
continue reading →You've probably already read that we don't use Rails or any other framework to build chillout.io. Having that said I must add we neither use ORM.
continue reading →So today I started my day with reading recent posts on rails-core group and one post looked interesting to me: Add support for multiple, concurrent, connection pools. ActiveRecord and threads and multiple databases. What could possibly go wrong?
continue reading →There are many ways to install and manage ruby installation in your
infrastructure. Some people like rvm, others prefer rbenv, some pack
their ruby installation into deb packages. We like nothing.
In this series of blog posts we discuss possible implementation options for sending data asynchronously from Rails applications. The two common use cases involve delivering exceptions and business metrics to external services.
The second part describes another two solutions: using Thin and classic threads. Read the first part if you have not done it yet.
continue reading →Exceptions and business metrics. These are two common use cases involving delivery of data from our Rails application (or any other web application) to external services that are not so crucial and probably we would like to send them asynchronously instead of waiting for the response, blocking the thread. We will try to balance speed and certainty here, which is always a hard thing to achieve.
This is a series of posts which describe what techniques can be used in such situation. The first solution that I would like to describe (or discredit) is ZMQ.
continue reading →As a web programmer you use JS from time to time or on daily basis. You probably know how to create and use objects, but don't feel that approach is natural. It's awful JS, right? No, it's you and your lack of knowledge. Let's see what object orientation in JavaScript mean.
continue reading →We all have been using the same code for uploading images for years, but didn't you always feel that there is something wrong with it? For every other task like writing texts, picking a date, selecting from lot of choices we have a good tool that can help in implementing such feature and improve the user experience, but file uploads almost always feel a little broken. There are some Flash tools that might help, but they are still not good enough.
continue reading →