Ruby articles

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.

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.

Do you know how to add concurrency to a Ruby app? Let's open the Ruby concurrency toolbox and learn how each tool works.

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.

Have you ever dealt with a unicode bug? Where plain text — the substance you work with all day — can no longer be trusted? It can be disorienting to say the least! This article will help prepare you so that the next time that happens you’ll be able to spend less time hyperventilating and more time troubleshooting.

Most people consider timeouts to be a kind of error, so it'd be nice to have them reported by Honeybadger like any other errors. This article will show you how to set that up.

Alongside introducing new security features like Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) and integration with haveibeenpwned.com, we also take a quick look into the inner workings of Two-Factor Authentication.

Because Ruby is an object-oriented language, we tend to model the world as a set of objects. We say that two integers (x and y) are a Point, and a Line has two of them. While this approach is often useful, it has one big problem...

If you love Ruby and Lambda like we do, then re:Invent 2018 was like Christmas arriving early. Here's how you can get up to speed quickly with running Ruby code on Lambda.

Last week we released version 4.0.0 of the honeybadger Ruby gem. This release includes a long-awaited feature which makes it even easier to customize your error reports before they are sent to Honeybadger. We also did some much-needed refactoring, and made a few removals and deprecations for good measure. Don't worry, though—most of the API remains unchanged, so upgrading should be a relatively painless process for most users.

Ad-hoc nil usage causes a lot of problems in Ruby. In this post we explore a more explicit way to handle nil conditions, inspired by Rust.

We recently shipped version 3.2 of the honeybadger Ruby Gem, which includes a new feature to make it easier to add context to your error reports.

When your autoscaling group terminates instances running Sidekiq, you should finish the Sidekiq jobs before the instance gets terminated. This is how we do that at Honeybadger.

When we have to work with text, we often reach for regular expressions. But they're not the easiest solution to every problem. Recently I was struggling with a large regexp, when I realized it'd be less work to write a parser. This article explains the process.

This article covers one of my favorite techniques for improving performance: memoization. It's a source of easy little performance wins that eventually add up and only occasionally reduce your application to a heap of smoldering rubble. Only very occasionally.

If you want Ruby's string methods to play nicely with Unicode, it's a good idea to normalize them. This article is a brief introduction to Unicode normalization for Rubyists.

The latest version of the honeybadger Ruby gem includes a lot of improvements and new features. Check it out!

One often-overlooked feature of Ruby's hashes is that you can use any object as a hash key, not just strings and symbols. In this post we examine how Optcarrot, the Ruby NES emulator, uses this feature to optimize its mapped memory implementation.

To see how far Ruby's Unicode support has come, I tested every string method to see which ones violate the principle of least surprise. The results are presented as a handy table that you can reference to see which string manipulation methods are Unicode-unfriendly.

Here's an easy way to run multiple Sidekiq processes via systemd.