Using logs to power up your Rails development workflow

Mauro Otonelli

When working on Rails applications, I find tailing the development log and watching it as I navigate through pages very useful. Some of the questions that should be in the back of your mind while looking at it are:

• Am I hitting the right URL, with the proper HTTP method?
• Am I sending the right parameters? (Are they all necessary?)
• Are there any warnings/exceptions that I should handle?
• Does the ORM generate the right SQL statements?
• Is my request taking a longer time than expected?
• Am I making unnecessary 3rd party API requests?

Reporting from ephemeral containers in production

Sebastian Armano

Reporting is not a particular task of business analysts anymore. Anyone at any department, at any point in time, needs a quick report based on the latest data to validate their decisions. Having the ability to create small custom reports in a couple of minutes, and in a format that can be consumed by any analysis software is a powerful resource to have in our belt.

strong_password v0.0.7 rubygem hijacked

Tute Costa

I recently updated minor and patch versions of the gems our Rails app uses. We want to keep dependencies fresh, bugs fixed, security vulnerabilities addressed while maintaining a high chance of backward compatibility with our codebase. In all, it was 25 gems we’d upgrade.

I went line by line linking to each library’s changeset. This due diligence never reported significant surprises to me, until this time.