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Articles by Starr Horne

Starr Horne is a Rubyist and former Chief JavaScripter at Honeybadger. When she's not fixing bugs, she enjoys making furniture with traditional hand-tools, reading history and brewing beer in her garage in Seattle.

 

Testing Ruby's Unicode Support

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.

Simple tips to make scaling your database easier as you grow

In this post we'll discuss a few easy wins - things you can do when a Rails project is young to make it much easier to scale its data layer as the project grows.

JQuery-Free Rails and Legacy Browsers

Rails 5.1 will no longer depend on JQuery. I ran the UJS test suite on several versions of IE to see how nicely the new system plays with legacy browsers.

Rescue's elegant trick for knowing which exceptions to catch

You probably know how to ask Ruby to rescue specific exceptions. But how does Ruby know if a particular exception meets your criteria? In this article, we'll walk through Ruby's simple exception matching mechanism and see how we can use it to our advantage.

Common Rails idioms that kill database performance

Many of the most common ActiveRecord idioms produce SQL which doesn't scale well as your dataset gets larger. In this article I discuss three of the worst offenders and offer work-arounds.

A beginner's guide to exceptions in Ruby

The other day I was searching for an introduction to Ruby exceptions written for beginners - people who know basic Ruby syntax but aren't really sure what an exception is or why it's useful. I couldn't find one, so I decided to have a go at it myself. I hope you find it useful.

New: Improvements on Honeybadger's user interface

Our newest UI change includes a fully responsive site, code snippets, and easier navigation between fault occurrences. Learn more.

Sunsetting performance metrics

On October 10 we’re going to be removing the performance metrics tab from Honeybadger.

How to deploy a Sinatra app in Docker to Amazon's EC2 Container Service

Starr deploys a simple Sinatra application to Amazon's EC2 Container Service (ECS) and load-balances it across two availability zones.

Why is URI.join so counterintuitive?

I recently found myself using URI.join to construct certain some redirect URLs. But I quickly ran into a problem. URI.join wasn't behaving like I expected. In this post we trace the unexpected behavior through the source of URI.join and back to the original RFC.

Making exception alerts fit in your ops workflow

Based on customer feedback, Honeybadger has launched a suite of features that give you incredible control over how error alerts fit into your ops workflow.

Announcing DataDog, OpsGenie and Victorops integrations

We just launched three great new integrations that will make it even easier to integrate Honeybadger into your operations workflow. I'm talking about Datadog, OpsGenie and VictorOps.

Building a simple websockets server from scratch in Ruby

What exactly are websockets? How do they work? In this post we're going to answer these questions by building a simple WebSocket server from scratch in Ruby.

Making error alerts less noisy and more useful

Reduce false alarms and make sure that every error alert goes to the right person with Honeybadger.

Writing command-line apps in Ruby

In order to write a first-class command-line app, you have to understand a lot of details like arguments, environment variables, STDIN/STDOUT, and more. This post is my humble attempt to cover most of these details and bring together everything you need to know in one place.

2015 Honeybadger year in review

I'm always amazed when I think about how much our tiny team of engineers is able to accomplish in a year. So I thought it'd be fun to make a highlight reel of the things we're proudest of this year.

How HTTP headers get passed from nginx to your Ruby app

Whether you use rails, Sinatra, or Lotus, you don't really have to think about how cookies and other headers pass from nginx or apache, to the application server and into your app. We're going to examine this journey in a little more depth. Because it turns out that the story of headers contains a lot of interesting information about the history of the web.

Announcing OpsGenie integration

We are super excited to announce that Honeybadger and OpsGenie now work together. Now you can route Honeybadger alerts through to the developer on-call!

How does ARGV get set in Ruby?

You probably know that Ruby sticks any command-line arguments into a global array called ARGV. But why the heck is it called ARGV? It's an interesting history lesson that highlights Ruby's origins in C.

Working with fractions and rationals in Ruby

Most people are able to think about fractions a lot more easily than they can think about arbitrary decimal numbers -- when was the last time you measured out 0.65739 cups of flour? This post will discuss how to use ruby to work with fractions, and how you can convert gnarly floating point numbers, to nice fractional approximations.
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