The last 3,650 days of my professional life have been focused on making Rails apps faster. Below are five lessons I've learned the hard way.

Software companies large and small are embracing microservices as a superior approach to application development and management, compared to the earlier monolithic model. These software teams tend to reach out for containerization as their preferred way of packaging and shipping applications. Containers provide a lightweight encapsulation of any application, whether it is a traditional monolith or a modular microservice.

During the course of execution, software programs accumulate several data objects that serve no purpose in the program and need to be let go. If not dealt with, they can keep eating up memory and significantly hamper performance. Garbage collection is the process of cleaning up all these useless data objects that continue to reside in memory. It frees up the corresponding RAM to make room for new program objects.

Even the most prominent and reliable frameworks are notorious for burning out resources if not configured perfectly. In this post, we are about to take a look at how Ruby, one of the most prominent programming languages and an awesome web application alternative when combined with Rails, manages memory, and how you can make it perform even better. Ruby is a scripting language built for use in web applications and similar stuff.

The way we write, ship, and maintain software today has evolved drastically in the last few years. How we consume underlying infrastructure to run our software has matured significantly, in that we have seen a transition from bare metal to virtual machines to containers to micro-VMs.

Web development before the age of web frameworks is difficult to imagine. Setting up a robust, dependable web app from scratch is a daunting task that requires years of knowledge and experience. Nowadays, however, with the help of effective, easy to use web frameworks, it doesn’t take more than a few minutes to get going.

Both containers and virtual machines are virtual environments that comprise a number of computing components and are independent in nature, thereby allowing developers to scale applications in isolated runtimes. Both of these concepts aim at providing independent sets of resources to individual computing environments to ensure quick and reliable application performance.

Thanks to Linus Torvalds, the creator of not only Linux, but also the most popular version control system - Git, multiple developers can simultaneously work on the development of the same application, ramping up the speed of production. Git was revolutionary - it enabled developers to keep track of code changes and collaborate seamlessly across different projects.

Javascript is a funny language. It claims to be (and very much is) a single-threaded language (i.e., it executes statements in order, one at a time, one after another, in a synchronous fashion). Despite just having the one native thread to work with, it somehow allows you to write concurrent, asynchronous code that is non-blocking in nature.

In this guide, we are going to see what a Docker health check is and how to configure it for your Docker containers. A Health Check means to check the health of any resource to determine whether that resource is operating normally. Here, it is about checking the health of Docker containers. If you’ve been using docker containers in production, you might have noticed that docker checks the status of a container by using the status of the process (PID) launched from the Docker file command.