Welcome to the new year! We have high hopes for 2017, expecting many things to change. But one thing should remain the same: constant improvement as developers, and this means learning, trying and hacking new things every day. So there it is, a new set of articles we found readworthy and worth sharing to start off well.

If you follow Rebased on Twitter, you might remember these links from being posted on our Twitter account, but sometimes you may miss a thing or two while going through your feed. This digest gives a brief summary of every linked article, so you get a nice bundle of Rebased-approved content, no FOMO involved.

How removing caching improved mobile performance by 25%

The title might seem a bit misleading, since it’s about a very specific element that shouldn’t be called cache, but it’s still a very informative and educational read. The part about internal Chrome network debugging tools will be a great piece of new knowledge to many web developers.

Fast Topic Matching

The author describes the topic of the article perfectly, so let me just quote: “A common problem in messaging middleware is that of efficiently matching message topics with interested subscribers”. This is exactly what this post is about. Extensive and full of firsthand insights, including performance numbers for all the described techniques.

The case of the 500-mile email

A part of Software Folklore collection, this oldie (but goodie!) is both funny and eye-opening, showing that no bug report is too crazy for investigation, and sometimes they can unearth deep problems within the technical stack. Check out the whole collection, they’re all great campfire stories for your fellow techies!

Scale Out Multi-Tenant Apps based on Ruby on Rails

Yet another approach to multitenancy in Rails, this time combined with the announcement of new activerecord-multi-tenant gem. Here at Rebased we’d rather go along the schema-level separation of Tenants’ data, but for some scenarios a tenant_id foreign key approach might be a more pragmatic one, and this gem makes it easier to work with.

How To Spy on Your Ruby Methods

A short and straight-to-the-point article showing how to use Ruby’s built-in TracePoint class for tracing method calls, return values and exceptions. It’s one of those skills that - once learned - make you wonder how you had lived without them before!

Design Patterns in Ruby

This one is a summary of design patterns described in Russ Olsen’s excellent book “Design Patterns in Ruby”, featuring diagrams and code examples. If you read the book - check this out for a quick revision. If you didn’t read the book - check this out, too, you’ll see if it’s worth it (and it is).

Real-Time Audio Processing with Ruby

The code here might not be very idiomatic and Ruby-like, but it’s still an interesting read about writing a VST plugin in our favourite language. Well worth your time if you’re into sound recording and audio processing.

We hope you’ll find these articles as useful as we did. Also, we’re on our way to release a few new pieces on the blog, so stay tuned for updates. May your code be balanced and clean for the whole 2017!