The Honeybadger Developer Blog

Tutorials, product info, and good advice from the Honeybadger crew.

Refactoring Your Rails App With Service Objects

Rails apps tend to start simple, with clean models and controllers. Then you start adding features. Before you know it, your models and controllers are big, unwieldy, and hard to understand. Refactoring into service objects is a great way to split these big pieces up, so they're easier to understand, test, and maintain.

Understanding How Rbenv, RubyGems And Bundler Work Together

Rbenv, RubyGems, and Bundler work together to give us a lot of control over our code's environment. If you know how they work, you'll be better prepared to troubleshoot any problems you encounter. In this article, Olasubomi walks us through the basics of how these three tools do what they do.

Set Up A Docker Container To Test Your Rails App

Code is never self-contained. It runs in an environment. Docker lets you define that environment in a simple and portable way. That's why pretty much every automated testing and deployment service works with docker containers. You give them a container, and done! But how do you set up a container to use for testing your Rails app? In this article, we'll show you.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!
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