When visiting a new website, it is quite normal to get carried away by the bells and whistles of the fancy UI and UX and not be able to appreciate all the lower level, back-end code that runs tirelessly to ensure a smooth and fast website experience. This ... Read more

We’re excited to announce that Ashton Howe has joined Scout APM as our new Director of Marketing! Ashton brings to the team a unique expertise at the intersection of marketing, attribution, data science and strategy, and will lead the development of an industry-leading marketing program to engage, inform, and support ... Read more

In Python, Lambda functions are rare compared to “normal” functions, and occasionally misunderstood or overused. In this article we’ll cover what Lambda functions are, how to use them, and how they compare with normal functions and other alternatives. We’ll also touch on the history of lambda functions, such as where ... Read more

In the realms of computer science and software engineering, reusability and modularity are considered to be important design principles to keep in mind when building software programs. The key idea behind these principles is to write code in a way that does not concentrate all it’s operations in one place. ... Read more

All programming languages provide efficient data structures that allow you to logically or mathematically organise and model your data. Most of us are familiar with simpler data structures like lists (or arrays) and dictionaries (or associative arrays), but these basic array-based data structures act more as generic solutions ... Read more

Web frameworks are powerful tools. They abstract the common aspects of building web sites and APIs and allow us to build richer, more stable applications with less effort. A broad range of web frameworks is available to us in Python. Some are proven favorites with large ecosystems and communities. Others ... Read more

Errors are undesirable for users and you should do everything in your control to keep users away from them. However, they are of utmost importance for developers. They allow developers to understand the inaccuracies and vulnerabilities in their code by alerting them when their code breaks. They also provide relevant ... Read more

A Python decorator wraps a target function with another wrapper function. This wrapper function can add any behavior you might want. For example, it can track execution times, redefine how the wrapped function runs, or modify return values. As a concrete example, the standard library’s functools.lru_cache() decorator wraps a target ... Read more

PHP is a weakly typed language. This means that when initializing a variable in PHP, one doesn’t need to declare the variable type. PHP implicitly declares a data type for your variable. This can save you from prospective type errors in your code. When working with programming languages, it is ... Read more

Ten years ago NewRelic , DataDog , Splunk , Dynatrace and SolarWinds built tools we loved to use. They were easy to implement and solved problems quickly and efficiently. Each company was known primarily for a single, well-conceived product. NewRelic’s APM. Splunk’s log file analyzer. DataDog’s server monitor. SolarWinds’ network ... Read more