How We Ended Up With Microservices

Phil Calçado writes a detailed post on the non-technical side of why Soundcloud moved away from a monolithic Rails app, in favor of a microservices architecture. Main reason: productivity. They were able to reduce their time-to-launch of new features from 66 days to 16 days.

A Gentle Introduction To Actor-based Concurrency

Originally published 2 years ago, Practicing Ruby provides a great explanation of what the Actor model looks like in Ruby. He solves the Dinning Philosophers Problem with bare ruby, the with Celluloid and then shows a simple implementation of actors in ruby would look like. Great read.

Implementing Worker Threads in Rails

Did you know that when a process is forked in ruby, only the main thread is copied and all other threads are dead? Neither did I, until I ran into it recently. Solving threading issues is very hard. This post has great techniques on how to use threads in Rails, even if using forking servers.

Making Architecture Matter

In this keynote at OSCON 2015, Martin Fowler gives a great overview about how to think about software architecture to get the most benefit. As quoted in the comments:

It’s particularly relevant now as we push more and more toward continuous delivery, continuous deployment, features updated over the Internet all the time. That degree of being able to respond to change becomes important. That’s the economic reason why software architecture is important, because if we don’t keep good architecture, we are, in the end, deceiving our customers — in fact, stealing from our customers — because we’re slowing down their ability to compete.

Binary pattern matching in Elixir

Zohaib Rauf writes a great post that shows the great power of pattern matching in Elixir. Step by step, he builds a small module that parses PNG binaries. The explanations are clear and the resulting code is really elegant: One main function that parses the header and calls a private recursive function that parses each of the chunks. Worth a read, even if you are not into Elixir (yet!).

Work Hard, Live Well

Dustin Moskovitz writes about work life balance in the software industry and his personal experience at Facebook. The article resonates with me: I often say that in the modern world, sleep is a competitive advantage: Being tired decreases cognitive ability. When I was a freshman in college, I stayed up late to study for a physics exam, which I presented after only 4 hours of sleep. I had flunked because of basic algebraic mistakes applying the correct physical formulae. I took the lesson to heart. After that, for me exam preparation always included adequate rest.

The API for ActiveRecord::Base is very large, which makes it easy to miss some of the great convinences it affords.

I have two University degrees in different engineering disciplines, but came to Software Engineering without any formal training in Computer Science. I learned how to use databases and shortly later how to write programs. I mostly learned from practical books and online resources. All my deeper knowledge of computer theory came years later. Understanding Computation: From Simple Machines to Impossible Programs by Tom Stuart seems to have been written for people like me: Thirsty for knowledge about computer theory, with explanations written in the language we use every day and without the mathematical notation¹.

In my projects, I regularly encounter the need for a long-running process that runs in the background. In ruby, it’s easy to reach for Thread: