How to use Mint, an awesome HTTP library for Elixir - Part 02

In our previous post we looked at how to set up and use Mint to make a simple GET request to fetch the contents of a README file from a Github repository. In this post let us continue building our Awesome Toolbox and add some more functionality. Read more

Prometheus and Docker: Monitoring Your Environment

What Are We Doing Here? Coming back from Monitorama last week, I had a chance to sit back and start playing with some tools to see how they worked. Prometheus is a pretty ubiquitous tool in the monitoring space, is pretty easy to spin up, and most importantly (for this ... Read more

Debugging with Rails Logger

If you’re a Rails developer, then you’ve probably used Rails Logger on at least one occasion or another. Or maybe you have used it without even realizing, like when you run ‘rails server’ and it prints information to the terminal window, for example. Rails Logger provides us with a powerful way of debugging our applications and gives us an insight into understanding errors when they occur. But are you using all of the Rails Logger features? There’s a good chance you are not! So let’s take a more in-depth look at the logging system in Rails, look at some of its more unknown features, and establish some best practices for our log creation in the future. Read more

Which Ruby Background Job Framework is Right for You

If you've been around the Ruby/Rails ecosystem for a bit you've likely heard the term 'background job' or 'offline processing'. But what does that actually mean? How do you know which tasks are suitable to be processed 'in the background'? Once you define those tasks, how do pick the right ... Read more

Understanding Linux CPU stats

Your Linux server is running slow, so you follow standard procedure and run top . You see the CPU metrics: But what do all of those 2-letter abbreviations mean? The 3 CPU states Let's take a step back. There are 3 general states your CPU can be in: Idle , ... Read more

Container Orchestration in 2019

How are you deploying your applications in 2019? Are you using containers yet? According to recent research over 80% of you are . If you are within this group, were you initially sold on the idea of containers but found that in reality, the complexity involved with this approach makes it a difficult trade-off to justify? The community is aware of this and has come up with a remedy to ease the pain, and it’s called container orchestration. So whether you are using containers or not, let’s take a closer look at container orchestration and find out what you need, what its used for and who should be using it. Read more

Building Docker Containers for our Rails Apps

How can we take our existing Ruby on Rails applications and run them inside a Docker Container? In a recent post, we talked about Docker containers, and what you should know about them. Hopefully we cleared up any confusion you might have had about the Docker ecosystem. Perhaps with all that talk, it got you thinking about trying it out on one of your own applications? Well in this post we’d like to show you how easy it is to take your existing Ruby on Rails applications and run them inside a container. So, let’s assume you have an existing Rails project with a PostgreSQL database, and let’s walk you through the steps it would take to run this in a container instead. It’s a lot easier than you probably think! Read more

8 Things You Should Know About Docker Containers

These days Docker is everywhere! Since this popular, open-source container tool first launched in 2013 it has gone on to revolutionize how we think about deploying our applications. But if you missed the boat with containerization and are left feeling confused about what exactly Docker is and how it can benefit you, then we’ve put together this post to help clear up any confusion you might have. What are Docker Containers? We take a look at the 8 things that you should know about Docker containers. We'll cover everything from Dockerfiles to Docker Compose to Docker Hub. Read more

Free memory on Linux: free -m vs /proc/meminfo

How much memory is really available on your Linux box? Don't use /proc/meminfo to find out, use free -m instead. You may have more memory available than you thought. Here's an example. /proc/meminfo says about 330MB is free: ~ $cat /proc/meminfo MemFree: 340996 kB .. free -m gives the following: ... Read more

How to use Mint, an awesome HTTP library for Elixir - Part 01

Mint is a shiny new elixir package which allows you to make HTTP requests using the HTTP 1, and HTTP 2 protocols. Let us see how we can start using it to improve our web apps performance. Read more

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