Ruby articles

Understanding the Ruby exception hierarchy

In this post we look at Ruby's exception class heirarchy, and how you can use it to be as broad or as narrow as you like when rescuing exceptions.

Custom exceptions in Ruby

Exceptions are classes, just like everything else in Ruby. This post will show you how to create your own custom exceptions without falling into some common traps that snare beginners.

Capturing stdout & stderr from shell commands via Ruby

tl;dr If you want to run a shell command from Ruby and capture its stdout, stderr and return status, check out the Open3.capture3 method. If you'd like to process stdout and stderr data in a streaming fashion, check out Open3.popen3.

So many bad choices

Ruby's Exception vs StandardError: What's the difference?

Never rescue Exception in Ruby! - Maybe you've heard this before. It's good advice, but it's pretty confusing unless you're already in the know. Let's break this statement down and see what it means.

How to globally disable rdoc and ri during gem installs

Gem installs can be slooow. One of the biggest culprits is documentation. Every time you install a gem, your computer has to scan the source of that gem and generate documentation.

This can be useful if you often need to check gem documentation when...

Testing object allocations with RSpec

Everyone is talking about Ruby performance lately, and with good reason. It turns out that with some smallish tweaks to your code it's possible to increase performance by up to 99.9%.

There are plenty of articles out there on how to optimize your...

Using temporary tables in PostgreSQL with Rails

Here at Honeybadger, we have a lot of data, which presents us with a few problems. One of the biggest challenges is data culling. Removing old data that nobody uses any more, while keeping the good stuff.

Complicating matters is the fact that our...

How SVG helped me level up as a front-end developer

SVG has been around since 1999. Those were heady days. People had invented and were in love with XML - if you can believe that. If you picked up a trade magazine like Dr. Dobb's Journal - which in those days both existed and was printed on real paper...

Tag exceptions automatically to unlock great power

If you use Honeybadger, you may have come across "tags" in the UI. Tags are the key that unlocks a lot of advanced functionality in Honeybadger.

For example, imagine that there are a couple of errors that you want to procrastinate on. You can tag...

How we implemented in-browser alerts with Pusher, Rails and Pnotify

Today we're announcing the launch of a fun feature: In-browser notifications. Once enabled on the Notifications tab of the Project Settings page, you'll get a popup notification in the corner of the browser window when one of the events occurs that...

A better method of handling multistep forms in rails

If there ever was a task that seemed straightforward from the outside, but then turned out to be really complicated when you got into it, a multi-step form is it.

Why are multi-step forms so hard? The main challenge seems to be validating partial...

How do Ruby Gems work?

One of the things that makes working with Rails so nice is that for any common programming need---authorization, site administration, ecommerce, you name it---someone smarter than you has likely coded up the solution for your problem and packaged it...

The data mapper pattern in Rails 4 using the perpetuity gem

In this post I'll describe how to get started using the Data Mapper pattern in Rails 4. But first, I'd like to explain what the Data Mapper pattern is, why you might want to use it, and the history of the Data Mapper + Rails combo.

What Data Mapper...

What everybody ought to know about Ruby on Rails 4.1

One of the most important things to know about Rails 4.1 is that even the beta version is stable enough for some companies to use it in production. For example,Basecamp began Rails 4.1 beta1. Other important features from the release notes include...

Speed up Rails tests 10x by using PORO domain models

If you're like most Rails developers I know (including myself), you're probably used to writing "unit" tests in RSpec that load up the whole Rails framework before each test, which takes a few seconds to do, even if you're only testing one tiny thing...

Getting Started with AngularJS and Rails 4

Getting started with AngularJS isn't hard. The documentation is some of the best out there and it's tutorials are simple enough.

But things get tricky when you start combining technologies.

If you're using CoffeeScript instead of straight JavaScript...

Refactoring Ruby using Sprout Classes

One of the hairiest challenges of working with some legacy applications is that the code wasn't written to be testable. So writing meaningful tests is difficult or impossible.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem: in order to write tests for the legacy...

Zero downtime migrations: 500 million rows

Data makes things hard

In this article I'm going to go over some of the tricks we use to handle large data migrations at Honeybadger. Check out the video for a quick overview.

When you have a lot of data, your life gets harder. When you only have...

Is _why coming out of exile?

Mysterious PCL files, A Fake Printer Spool. Chunky Bacon.

The inadequate guide to Rails security

If you're like me, you got into this business because you love building awesome apps.

Let's take a second to reflect on the good times.

...back to the real world.

It sucks that you even have to worry about security. It's just sick that there are...