Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love __typename

This articles describes the difference between how component invocation differs when using curlies {​{...}}, angle brackets <...> or an (...) s-expression in Ember templates.

The GraphQL website describes the tech as "a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data." But what does this mean in practice? When am I actually supposed to use GraphQL, and why?

A challenge often faced in multi-tenant SaaS is ensuring that each tenant gets a fair share of a platform's resources. At Salsify, we had to address this in our Delayed Job-based background task execution infrastructure. Because our customers have different use cases, they tend to run tasks of varying complexity and size. Over time we developed tenant-fairness job reservation strategies that made scaling our job system difficult if not impossible. In this post, I discuss how we managed to extend Delayed Job to solve for tenant fairness in a scalable manner.

2019 has been a great year for Ember so far, so while my peers are focused on setting direction for the framework for the rest of 2019, I wanted to take stock of the existing addons ecosystem.

I'm writing this near the end of the official #EmberJS2019 window, which means a lot of what there is to say has already been said. As I've read through this year's posts, there are a handful of themes I see coming up over and over again:

• streamlining and modularizing the framework
• broadening the Ember community
• landing our new build system, Embroider

These points are each important and valuable in their own right, and I'm hopeful that the 2019 Roadmap RFC will address all of them. Many of the posts discussing them, though, brush up against something that I think merits a more explicit discussion.

Over the past couple years I've seen an increasing number of Ember folks display a mentality that divides the world into Us and Them. It manifests in social media interactions and blog posts, day-to-day chatter in the Ember Discord server, and even the way we frame meetup and conference talks. I think it's driven by a desire to see Ember succeed and to convince other people that they should like this thing as much as we do, but it ultimately does everyone involved a disservice.

The Decision

We, like many small startups, had started our application on Heroku, and had built up considerable technical and social practice around its use. About 18 months ago, the Engineering team here at Salsify recognized that as our team, product, and user base continued to grow, we would outgrow the ideal case for Heroku.

One of the blessings and curses of Rails development is the ability to use Rails console for debugging issues and inspecting data. The console is oftentimes used in a production environment, as it is the quickest method to glean information about any problems. With great power comes great responsibility: A command that attempts to reset a local developer environment by deleting all records of a model could easily be input into a production console. In addition, with potentially unknown clipboard data (thanks "copy-on-select"), any valid Ruby code with line breaks will automatically be executed if pasted. Any user who is deleting models, queuing up events, and updating records accidentally or intentionally should be made aware of the implications. At Salsify, we've solved this problem using a combination of open-source and home-brewed improvements and rolled them into a handy gem. Read on to learn more!

Have you ever wanted to build your own calculator, query language, or even web browser? Parsers and Transformers are tremendously useful for these applications and many more, and thanks to tools like Salsify's own Botanist you don't need to be an expert in compiler design to work with them.