By Chris Nicoll & Shaun Davis

How We Built Fly Postgres

Fly.io is an ambivalent database provider—one might even use the word "reluctant". The reasons for that are interesting, as is the way Fly Postgres works. When we relate this in conversations online, people are often surprised. So we thought we'd ...

By Dov Alperin

Real-Time Collaboration With Replicache and Fly-Replay

Imagine this: you have invented the best design tool since Figma. But before you can compete with the design-industry heavyweight, you need to be able to compete on one of Figma's main propositions: real-time collaboration. You do some research an...

By Brad Gessler

Logbook: November 7 to November 14, 2022

Automatically deploy Elixir apps to production with Github Actions CI and troubleshoot performance issues with OpenTelemetry. Help the Python community draft Django docs. Deploy S3-compatible object storage close to your Fly apps. Last week we got...

By Brad Gessler

Logbook: October 29 to November 6, 2022

This week Redis gets some power-ups, Elixir confesses its love for React, Fly gets real about Postgres, Livewire gifts us with a few tutorials, and a many of us in North America didn't have to change the clocks around our house because we convince...

By Chris McCord

A Love Letter to React

It's hard to overstate the impact React has had since its release in 2013. For me, React came with a few revelations. First was a reactive HTML-aware component model for building UIs. Second was colocated markup directly in the app code. Third, it...

By Brad Gessler

Logbook: October 21 to 28, 2022

Postgres Docs ImprovementsFirst up, some new documentation was created to run people through how to fail over a Postgres database. Performing a Failover Performing a Regional Failover "Getting Started" was updated to show how to setup a Po...

By Ben Johnson

Introducing LiteFS

Full-stack developers are sleeping on SQLite, a database most devs think more suited to unit tests than production loads. That's true enough for some apps. Most web apps are read-heavy, though, and we can use that to our advantage. With the right ...

By Dov Alperin

Scale-to-Zero Minecraft Server With Terraform and Fly Machines

Running a Minecraft server for friends has become an archetypal first foray into the workings of the Internet. For some it's learning to expose the tender underbelly of a home network to outside connections. For others it's exploring the world of ...

By Ben Johnson

How the SQLite Virtual Machine Works

SQL is a weird concept. You write your application in one language, say JavaScript, and then send commands in a completely different language, called SQL, to the database. The database then compiles and optimizes that SQL command, runs it, and ret...

By Ben Johnson

How SQLite Scales Read Concurrency

If you scour Hacker News & Reddit for advice about databases, some common words of caution are that SQLite doesn't scale or that it is a single-user database and it's not appropriate for your web-scale application. Like any folklore, it has some h...

By Lubien & Chris Nicoll

Building an In-Browser IDE the Hard Way

"Remote development environment!" Whether you reacted with a thrill of enthusiasm, a surge of derision or a waft of indifference, we're not really here to change your mind. That phrase means a lot of different things at this point in history. The ...

By Ben Johnson

How SQLite Helps You Do ACID

When database vendors recite their long list of features, they never enumerate "doesn't lose your data" as one of those features. It's just assumed. That's what a database is supposed to do. However, in reality, the best database vendors tell you ...

By Chris Nicoll

Volume Expansion and Snapshot Restores

Fly Volumes are the persistent storage that makes it possible to run full stack apps entirely on the Fly.io platform, keeping your configuration, session or user data in place across deployments. Looking at them from another angle, volumes are spa...