Moving shipping containers is heavy work. Moving a traditional industry into the digital age is a different kind of heavy job. Software development agency GNAR took on the challenge and built an ops management platform for RMS Intermodal, one of the largest rail yard operators in the U.S. Their IoT solution gave RMS a data-driven view of their operations for the first time, resulting in a whole new definition of “efficiency” for the company.

Serendipity manifests a new idea

It all started at a wedding. GNAR Founder Brandon Stewart found himself chatting with Adam Gray, the son of RMS Intermodal’s President, and the conversation turned to RFID tracking. Brandon had done some work on an...

There are always challenges when it comes to debugging applications. Node.js' asynchronous workflows add an extra layer of complexity to this arduous process. Although there have been some updates made to the V8 engine in order to easily access asynchronous stack traces, most of the time, we just get errors on the main thread of our applications, which makes debugging a little bit difficult. As well, when our Node.js applications crash, we usually need to rely on some complicated CLI tooling to analyze the core dumps.

YAML files dominate configuration in the cloud native ecosystem. They’re used by Kuberentes, Helm, Tekton, and many other projects to define custom configuration and workflows. But YAML has its oddities, which is why the Cloud Native Buildpacks project chose TOML as its primary configuration format.

TOML is a minimal configuration file format that's easy to read because of its simple semantics. You can learn more about TOML from the official documentation, but a simple buildpack TOML file looks like this:

In today's global economy, English proficiency unlocks opportunity. People all over the world are motivated to improve their English skills in order to make a better life for themselves and their families. Cambly is a language education platform that helps millions of learners advance their careers by connecting them with English-speaking tutors from a similar professional background.

For many language learners, speaking is often the hardest skill to improve in a classroom setting. Conversation time is limited, and students tend to practice with each other rather than with a teacher. Some students may not have a fluent speaker available in their location. Cambly offers one-on-one...

I work on Heroku’s Runtime Infrastructure team, which focuses on most of the underlying compute and containerization here at Heroku. Over the years, we’ve tuned our infrastructure in a number of ways to improve performance of customer dynos and harden security.

We recently received a support ticket from a customer inquiring about poor performance in two system calls (more commonly referred to as syscalls) their application was making frequently: clock_gettime(3) and gettimeofday(2).

In this customer’s case, they were using a tool to do transaction tracing to monitor the performance of their application. This tool made many such system calls to measure how long different parts of their...