A great thing about building applications for the internet is that people from all around the world can benefit from your effort. You can gather new users from Taiwan to Colorado and meet their needs just as effectively. In this global context, it can be good to provide your users with local flavor to help them feel connected to you and your applications. It can also be useful for you to know where your users are coming from to make sure that your infrastructure is configured in the best way.

The introduction of Google Maps in 2005 changed the way we think about the internet. It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time where the internet was disconnected from the physical world. You might find a business’s website, and if you were lucky, they’d have an address included. A national chain of restaurants or grocery stores probably wouldn’t be able to tell you their nearest location to your home. All of that has changed, today.

In this post, we’ll learn what Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda is, and why it might be a good idea to use for your next project. For a more in-depth introduction to serverless and Lambda, read AWS Lambda: Your Quick Start Guide to Going Serverless. In order to show how useful Lambda can be, we’ll walk through creating a simple Lambda function using the Python programming language. We’ll test it out, as well as take a look at what Lambda provides for metrics and logging.

Ruby, like most other modern, high-level programming languages, doesn’t force you to manage memory. This feature is called garbage collection, or GC, and you get it for free in Ruby. You can write tons of Ruby code and never give a second thought to the fact that under the covers, Ruby is doing a bang-up job of allocating and freeing memory for your code to use. But it certainly couldn’t hurt to learn something about how Ruby garbage collection works.

It’s five o’clock on a Friday afternoon. There are no new bug reports and everything is looking smooth. Your plan of a relaxing weekend is in sight when you get a call—the website you look after isn’t responding. Yikes. AWS Lambda minimizes the chance of this truly terrifying event from happening by taking care of server maintenance while you focus on coding robust applications.

About a decade ago, the Ruby programming language made a big splash in the software engineering industry thanks to the Ruby on Rails web framework. The terse and friendly syntax of Ruby and the “they thought of everything” feeling of Rails offered web startups the ability to move quickly and nimbly.

It’s the night before a big deadline, and just before you press the button to deploy, you notice a small but important bug! You open a terminal, type in the command to run the code—and all you see is a page of errors. It’s these palm-sweating moments that make us wonder whether we made the correct career decision. Configuring our systems and keeping them working is a struggle most of us deal with regularly. Ruby Version Manager (RVM) attempts to solve this problem.

Ruby on Rails makes writing web applications a pleasure. It’s a powerful and intuitive platform, built on an equally powerful and intuitive language. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking the time to check your code for bottlenecks and performance problems before you ship. In this post, I’ll cover how to use Rack Mini Profiler to profile your Rails application.

Have you ever been confused about the different ways to handle missing data in the Ruby language? I know I have, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that. The options Ruby offers come in the form of several methods: “present?”, “blank?”, “nil?”, and “empty?”. There are all somewhat related since all of them check for the absence of data in some way.

Authentication for web apps is a difficult problem. Anyone who’s ever tried to create their own authentication system will tell you that there are a lot of unexpected edge cases. What’s more, your authentication system is an externally-facing part of your application. This means if someone is trying to hack into your application, your login system’s security will be one of the first places they check.