Honeybadger Developer Blog

Rails Security Threats: Authentication

Authentication is at the heart of most web development, yet it is difficult to get right. In this article, Diogo Souza discusses common security problems with authentication systems and how you can resolve them. Even if you never build an authentication system from scratch (you shouldn't), understanding these security concerns will help you make sure whatever authentication system you use is doing its job.

By Diogo Souza
#ruby
Jun 21, 2021

Adding Typescript to your Existing Rails App

Have you ever thought about trying typescript for your app's front end? It's enticing, but the thought of porting all that existing JS is just too much. But what if you could gradually introduce typescript into your existing app, only using it where it made sense? In this article, Ayo Isaiah shows us how to do just that.

By Ayooluwa Isaiah
#js
Jun 14, 2021

Building A New Programming Language In Ruby: The Interpreter

In earlier installments of this series, Alex Stoll guided us through creating a lexer and a parser. These translated the human-readable source code into data structures. In this article, he begins work on the interpreter - the bit that actually runs our code!

By Alex Braha Stoll
#ruby
Jun 7, 2021

Understanding RBS, Ruby's new Type Annotation System

Ruby's flexibility has always been both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. You can write amazingly expressive programs. You can also slip and break them in amazingly expressive ways. RBS is a new type annotation system in Ruby 3 that seeks to keep ruby's flexibility while protecting us from some of its dangers. In this article, Julio Sampaio walks us through RBS. He explains the impact it has on metaprogramming, and he shows us how we can use it to make our own apps more robust.

By Julio Sampaio
#ruby
May 31, 2021

Using Redis as a Cache in Laravel

One of the easiest ways to speed up your web app is to cache slow-to-compute data, so it doesn't have to be recomputed the next time the page loads. In this article, Keneth Ekandem shows us how to use Redis to cache DB results in a Laravel App.

By Kenneth Ekandem
#php
May 31, 2021

Understanding Ruby Method Lookup

Ruby lets you express yourself like few other languages, with a minimum of boilerplate. It's fantastic until it isn't. Until one day when you think you're calling the `foo` method you wrote last week, but instead, you end up calling a `foo` method that came with some gem from 2008. In these situations, knowing about Ruby's method lookup rules will save your bacon.

By Kingsley Silas
#ruby
May 24, 2021

Rails Security Threats: Injections

One of the best things about Rails is that it protects your app from a wide variety of injection attacks with minimal development effort. But we're never 100% safe. After all, Rails can't protect us from our own bad decisions. We need to understand the threats so we know when we can lean on Rails and when we can't. In this article, Diogo Souza introduces us to the OWASP Top 10 list of vulnerabilities and dives into injection vulnerabilities to show us how rails protects us against them and how we can protect ourselves.

By Diogo Souza
#ruby
May 17, 2021

Character Encoding for PHP Developers: Unicode, UTF-8 and ASCII

As developers, our world is made of text, but computers only understand numbers. What gives? A process called character encoding maps numbers to letters. Easy enough, until you realize that we need to encode every character from every language while keeping file sizes small and staying compatible with legacy systems. In this article, José shows us everything we need to know about character encoding for PHP developers - including what to do when it breaks!

By José M. Gilgado
#php
May 17, 2021

React on Rails: Building a Simple App

To decide on a front-end for your Rails app, you need a feel for the options. Does a certain JS framework speak to you or does it make you feel dirty inside? There's only one way to find out! In this article, Julio Sampaio walks us through creating an React app from scratch and integrating it with a Rails back-end via webpacker.

By Julio Sampaio
#ruby #rails #js
May 10, 2021

Top Ten Git Tips & Tricks

Let's face facts. Git is not fun. Git is not friendly. No. It's just infuriatingly useful, so we're stuck with it. But what if you could make git more friendly? More convenient? Would that make your day a little less stressful? In this article, Julie Kent shows us how we can do this with just a few simple tweaks.

By Julie Kent
#git
May 3, 2021

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