Have you ever updated your servers? I trust most of you have. Anyway, from time to time one finds an unsupported release, running on some forgotten server. In some cases, it’s an unused service or something to be decommissioned, but sometimes, we should update it. At Devex, found this situation recently. You’ll find in this article how we upgraded some cases we couldn’t decommission.

Two weeks ago, we noticed some performance issues with Rails in our development setup, while all our other environments, some much less powerful, were working with much better performance. After confirming that no recent change caused this slow-down, and running some diagnostics and measurements to record the performance in some point, this took us on a small trip into some Ruby on Rails debugging on a VirtualBox.

Here are some accumulated links we’ve been passing around recently…

This article describes our current content management solution and gives some insight on the parts of the implementation we think are interesting.

As you might know a big part of our website is dedicated to News content covering various aspects of international development. At Devex we usually publish around 10 articles per day which are sometimes planned and worked on several days or even weeks in advance. There are different people involved in the process including both internal and external writers, editors, researchers or marketing folks. Some of them contribute to the article’s content while others just need to be aware what is going on to coordinate their own work like social media campaigns.

We hope you had nice and happy holidays! Here’s some of the things Devexers have been reading during the last weeks…

December 12th

• Replacing Throwing Exceptions with Notification in Validations
• What if journalists had story writing tools as powerful as those used by coders?
• Top 20 Navigation Features in IntelliJ IDEA (Most of it should work for RubyMine as well)
• From Open (Unlimited) to Minimum Vacation Policy
• Make Performance Part of Your Workflow
• The Pain of Duplicate Scripts
• random in the wild (via lwn) “Younger programmers prefer srand48.”

December 19th

• State of the Art in Microservices (DockerCon EU Keynote)
• PostgreSQL 9.4 released
• Three talks from the Rethink Conference
• The Big Problem is Medium Data
• Async Fragments: Rediscovering Progressive HTML Rendering with Marko

• Schneier: Corporations Misusing Our Data
• Etsy: Juggling Multiple Elasticsearch Instances on a Single Host
• Performance Calendar: HTTP 2.0 is coming, be ready
• Suprageography: All the Tweets
• Github: Introducing organization webhooks (finally)
• Google: Are you a robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA”
• Rand: The QA Mindset
• AWS: Simplifying the EC2 Reserved Instance Model

Here are last week’s Friday Links. Enjoy!

• Meetup in Barcelona: A story about tanks, the UN and Python
• coding horror: Because Reading is Fundamental
• Matt Cutts: Premortems
• Device Detection vs Responsive Web Design
• Speeding up Rails 4.2
• Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles
• A Rare Peek Into The Massive Scale of AWS
• Ko1 at RubyConf 2014: Massive Garbage Collection Speedup in Ruby 2.2

ActiveRecord models that define a has_many association often need access to a specific entry of this list. Think of an user that has many email addresses but only one that is his primary address. Or a Blog post with many comments of which one is featured.

Every friday we pass each other some links that we read during the week and deem worth sharing. Each monday we’ll publish that list here on the Blog.