Michael Herold

In 2014, the Phoenix framework emerged onto the web development scene as a fast, productive, and concurrent solution for the modern web. Its focus was on massive concurrency, thanks to the power of the Elixir language and Erlang’s BEAM virtual machine. The original branding stressed the productive aspect, positioning the framework against the venerable king of productivity, Ruby on Rails. Those who are familiar with Rails will see a lot of inspiration from Rails. The way Phoenix auto-reloads code in development mode makes it just as easy to use as Rails. The router grammar requires a good squint to see the difference between the two. This inspiration certainly makes for a quick learning experience for Rails developers. But I wonder: at what cost? Does Phoenix make it too easy to structure your application like a Rails application? Is this convenience to the detriment of using the full power and expressivity of Elixir?

Sometimes, I find myself working across several branches helping different teammates with their stories. Often, these branches use Rails migrations to easily manage the database changes that need to be made to support the work. This means that I end up running migrations from many different branches. Because I am human, I often forget to roll those migrations back before switching branches. When a destructive migration has to happen as part of a branch, it leaves me in a situation where I have several migrations that I need to roll back at any given time. In addition, they might be interleaved with migrations that exist on the master branch if it’s a longer-running branch.

So you have something new to sell: maybe your first book or a hip new SaaS. How do you decide the price? How do you know you’re not overpricing? Or underpricing? Why, oh why, did you ever think to sell something?!

Ruby programmers rely on Redis as a high-performance key-value store for many different jobs. Redis is suitable for many different tasks, including caching, acting as the transport medium for a message bus, and service analytics. Redis is often one of the first external dependencies you reach for as a Ruby programmer because it forms the backbone of the Resque and Sidekiq asynchronous job systems.

Using custom font faces on a web page introduces several potential issues. Most commonly, these issues manifest in one of two types of problem: the dreaded “flash of unstyled text” (FOUT) or “flash of invisible text” (FOIT); or poor initial render time due to font faces specified in blocking calls to outside services. By placing only a subset font in the critical render path, you can reduce the amount of FOUT/FOIT and speed up the initial render performance.