Honeybadger Developer Blog

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

Ruby's Bitwise Toolbox: Operators, Applications and Magic Tricks

How often do you think about the bits -- the ones and zeroes -- that make up your app's data? If you're doing web development in Ruby there's rarely any need to. But what if you want to interact with the operating system or a piece of hardware? What if you'd like to understand network protocols or databases? In that case, a solid understanding of bitwise operators is foundational. In this article José M. Gilgado will introduce you to bitwise operations in Ruby, give practical examples of how they can be useful, and finish big with with some fun math tricks.

Plugging Git Leaks: Preventing and Fixing Information Exposure in Repositories

Have you ever been neck-deep building a new feature? You're working at capacity. You need to test something out so you paste an API key into your source file with every intention of removing it later. But you forget. You push to GitHub. It's an easy mistake, and potentially a very expensive one. In this article, Julien Cretel explores the nuances of this kind of data leak, offers suggestions for recovery when leaks happen and gives us options for preventing them in the first place.

Decoupling Ruby: Delegation vs Dependency Injection

We've all worked with tightly-coupled code. If a butterfly flaps its wings in China, the unit tests break. Maintaining a system like this is...unpleasant. In this article, Jonathan Miles dives into the origins of tight-coupling. He demonstrates how you can use dependency injection (DI) to decouple code. Then he introduces a novel decoupling technique based on delegation that can be useful when DI is not an option.

Exploring Big-O Notation With Ruby

You know Big-O is important - not only for acing your next job interview but for knowing how code works at scale. But have you ever taken the time to go beyond a superficial understanding of the subject? In this article, Julie Kent uses equal parts math and Ruby to reveal the beating heart of Big-O and show us how it ticks.