July 2019 Summaries

In this story, a misbehaving Elixir application was causing an internal server error instead of a 404 not found error in production. The issue was traced back to the logger crashing due to an undefined inspect function when called with an empty list. After further investigation and help from the Elixir community, it was discovered that the problem stemmed from a maintenance script cleaning up files in /tmp, which marked certain BEAM files as deleted if they had not yet been loaded by the Erlang VM at the time of cleanup. The fix involved moving the OverlayFS upper directories out of /tmp to prevent this issue.

This article discusses the challenges faced by developers in accessing and using realtime public transport data feeds. The four major technical barriers identified are a lack of real-time updates, fragmentation in real-time protocols, problematic data structures, and rate limits. To maximize innovative use of transport data, the author recommends that providers should offer push-based systems for instantaneous updates, support multiple common protocols to increase accessibility, provide varied levels of detail based on user requests, and invest in increasing rate limits to make data more accessible.