We’re happy to announce that the latest npm package for error tracking of your front-end with AppSignal has just been released. For those of you who aren’t really familiar with our error tracking service, we suggest you to take a deeper look into our docs. This was one of the bigger releases, and it includes many improvements and bug fixes. Here’s what we’ve done.

With a special thanks to Aleksandar and Unai, we’re happy to announce AppSignal for Elixir 1.13.0, which includes our all-new LiveView instrumentation helpers and updated typespecs. If you’re not an AppSignal user yet, make sure to check out the product tour and see how errors, performance, host metrics and triggers all come together in one tool.

Configuration has long been a hot topic in the Elixir community, and luckily, in the recent months, there has been a great deal of thoughtful work put into making this problem an easier one to solve. Today, we’re going to show you how to migrate from an Elixir application that has been configured with the widely used config/*.exs files at compile-time, to an application that instead uses environment variables for configuration and is configured at runtime.

Starting today, you can receive notifications from AppSignal in your Discord channels. With AppSignal, you get endless insights with just a few minutes of work. We already have a whole list of out-of-the-box integrations besides Slack and Discord. AppSignal was built with developers in mind and that is why it also allows you to customize it and build upon it with your solutions. You can use webhooks as the ultimate free form to get alerted on any URL you want.

Dashboards should be easy to build and provide powerful insights. Our magic dashboards are already created automatically, so you don’t have to spend any time setting up these dashboards yourself. Many developers started tracking custom metrics that were unique to their applications. From these metrics, you can create custom dashboards and add triggers to get notified if values go outside of your desired range.

In today’s post, we’ll take a deep dive into Rails migrations. We’ll break down the migration into different pieces, and in the process, learn how to write an effective migration. We’ll learn how to write migrations for multiple databases, as well as how to handle failed migrations and techniques of performing rollbacks. To understand the whole post, you’ll need to have a basic understanding of databases and Rails.

Every JavaScript project starts ambitiously, trying not to use too many NPM packages along the way. Even with a lot of effort on our side, packages eventually start piling up. package.json gets more lines over time, and package-lock.json makes pull requests look scary with the number of additions or deletions when dependencies are added. “This is fine” — the team lead says, as other team members nod in agreement. What else are you supposed to do?

DHH just coined the term “Citadel,” which finally gives us an excellent way to reference how we approach tech at AppSignal. We said, “Hey, this is us! Our thing has a name now”. In addition to the Majestic Monolith, someone should write up the pattern of The Citadel: A single Majestic Monolith captures the majority mass of the app, with a few auxiliary outpost apps for highly specialized and divergent needs.

Many of us are impacted in one way or another by the Covid-19 virus. At AppSignal, we asked our team to prioritize their families and (mental) health first. We hope you were able to do the same. We are starting to find a new rhythm in these uncertain times, and are continuing on our mission to bring developers amazing monitoring. In that light, we are happy to ship the first version of AppSignal for Node.js.

Ruby has always been known for the productivity it brings to its developers. Alongside features such as elegant syntax, rich meta-programming support, etc. that make you productive when writing code, it also has another secret weapon called TracePoint that can help you “debug” faster. In this post, I’ll use a simple example to show you 2 interesting facts I found out about debugging.