Back-end

In today’s world where there are a lot of choices for writing quality software, it’s easy to overlook some tools that are viable options in developing modern software. These software development tools, in competition with each other, often fluctuate in popularity and developer preferences. Many excellent tools are viable options for any given project. This article provides eight reason in favor of the Microsoft stack and why it is still a reasonable choice for software development today.

In this article, I will show that unit testing itself is quite easy; the real problems that complicate unit testing, and introduce expensive complexity, are a result of poorly-designed, untestable code. We will discuss what makes code hard to test, which anti-patterns and bad practices we should avoid to improve testability, and what other benefits we can achieve by writing testable code. We will see that writing testable code is not just about making testing less troublesome, but about making the code itself more robust, and easier to maintain.

While Ruby has Rails and Python has Django, the dominant application development framework for Node has yet to be established. But, there is a powerful contender gaining steam: LoopBack, an open source API framework built by StrongLoop, the creators of Express.

Let’s take a closer look at LoopBack and it’s capabilities by turning everything into practice and building an example application.

C++ is a general purpose programming language that offers great flexibility when it comes to system programming and application development. The language, however, comes with some pitfalls requiring attention from developers to ensure quality programming. This article explains how ten of the most common C++ developer mistakes can be avoided.

Apache Lucene is a powerful Java library used for implementing full-text search on a corpus of text. With its wide array of configuration options and customizability, it is possible to tune Apache Lucene specifically to the corpus at hand - improving both search quality and query capability.

This article gives us a glimpse of the simplicity and ease of customization of the Apache Lucene analysis pipeline.

Toptal engineer Jurgens du Toit looks at the possibility of using Logstash to regain control of your inbox and make your error emails manageable again, all without changing a single thing in your app.

Logstash can effectively leverage the power of Elasticsearch and Amazon SNS to streamline email notifications and save time.

A business rules engine is a tool for executing business rules. Business rules are composed of facts and conditional statements. Any “if-then” statement that appears in traditional business logic qualifies as a business rule.

The Internet is becoming “smarter” every day. The video-sharing website that you frequently visit seems to know exactly what you will like, even before you have seen it. The online shopping cart holding your items almost magically figures out the one thing that you may have missed or intended to add before checking out. It’s as if these web services are reading your mind—or are they?

Turns out, predicting a user’s likes involves more math than magic. In this article we explore one of the many ways of building a recommendation engine that is both simple to implement and understand.

A thorough and practical introduction to concurrent and parallel programming in Ruby, presenting and contrasting a number of techniques and options available, from the standpoints of both performance and complexity. Discusses forking, multithreading, the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL), and more.

You hear a familiar song in the club or the restaurant. You listened to this song a thousand times long ago, and the sentimentality of the song really touches your heart. You desperately want to heart it tomorrow, but you can’t remember its name! Fortunately, in our amazing futuristic world, you have a phone with music recognition software installed, and you are saved.

But how does this really work? Shazam’s algorithm was revealed to world in 2003. In this article we’ll go over the fundamentals of that algorithm.

Git can support your project not just with version control, but also with collaboration and release management. Understanding how workflow patterns can help or hinder a project will give you the knowledge to evaluate and adapt your project’s Git processes effectively.

Why are Rails Engines not used more often? I don’t know the answer, but I do think that the generalization of “Everything is an Engine” has hidden the problem domains that they can help to solve.

Don’t wait for a data breach to happen before making security a priority. This article explains how to set up a proactive web app defense and avoid the top 10 most common security pitfalls.