Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Today, many web applications will feature pages that are publicly available — like a homepage — and more secure ones where a user has to log in to get access. The process of user registration, logging in, and tracking user session state is called "authentication". At the same time, when dealing with logged-in users, it's necessary to separate actions and resources that are available to them depending on their user roles. For example, "admins" generally have more access than normal users.

In the first part of this series, we explored the ins and outs of Elixir test factories and fixtures. However, test factories bypass the rules of your Elixir application. Let's turn our attention to how we can avoid this by using data generation functions. Let's dive straight in!

In an API-driven world, error handling is integral to every application. You should have an error handling layer in your Node.js app to deal with errors securely and effectively. In this article, we'll explore: Let’s jump right in!

In our last post, we persisted and restored a collapsed/expanded UI state with Kredis. However, the great pain point with this is that we have to invent a lot of Kredis keys. This time, we'll see how we can avoid this by developing a generalized solution for any DOM node whose attribute states we want to track on the server side. Let's dive straight in!

Writing tests is an essential part of any Elixir developer's routine. We're constantly chasing knowledge on how to write better tests, improving their speed and readability. In this three-part series, we'll explore test data generation in Elixir. Whether you are a mid-level or senior-level Elixir developer, this series will provide valuable insights to help improve the testing process for your projects.

Kredis (Keyed Redis) is a recent addition to the Rails developer's toolkit. It strives to simplify storing and accessing structured data on Redis. In this first part of a two-part series, we'll start by going into how Kredis works. We'll then run through an example use case for storing ephemeral UI state using a bespoke Redis key. Let's get started!

Rails 7 was a welcome release that brought a lot of significant features and changes. On the backend, Rails 7 introduced asynchronous query loading and Zeitwerk for autoloading. The frontend saw Hotwire becoming the default solution for new Rails apps. Rails 7.1 will add to these notable features. In this post, we'll discuss some noteworthy additions that are likely to be shipped.

Ecto is a toolkit for mapping database objects to Elixir structs and provides a unified interface to manipulate that data. In this post, we will dive into the internals of Ecto — its major components, their functions, and how they work. In doing so, we'll demystify some of the apparent magic behind Ecto. Let's get going!

Puppeteer is a powerful Node.js browser automation library for integration testing and web scraping. However, like any complex software, it comes with plenty of potential pitfalls. In this article, I'll discuss a variety of common Puppeteer mistakes I've encountered in personal and consulting projects, as well as when monitoring the Puppeteer tag on Stack Overflow.

Views in Rails don't do much besides showcasing what we want. Sure, they might render slightly different results depending on who's watching (an admin or a logged-in user has a different experience than a guest user, for example), but they don't do much processing on what they're given. Or at least they shouldn't. Often though, Rails projects wind up with a lot of logic in their views. In this post, we'll explore how to use Rails helpers to keep our views clean and readable.