Articles by Starr Horne
Starr Horne is a Rubyist and Chief JavaScripter at Honeybadger.io. When she's not neck-deep in other people's bugs, she enjoys making furniture with traditional hand-tools, reading history and brewing beer in her garage in Seattle.
Watch Ruby as it parses your code
In this post we'll use a little-known command line flag to spy on Ruby as it parses our code.
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By Starr Horne
- Nov 30, 2015
Spying on running Ruby processes
Did you know that it's possible to log all method calls as they occur in a running process in real time? How about injecting code to be executed inside of a running process? You can – via the magic of the rbtrace gem.
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By Starr Horne
- Nov 17, 2015
Lexical scoping and Ruby class variables
In this post we'll discuss some non-obvious behavior of class variables and show how it's all the fault of lexical scoping.
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By Starr Horne
- Nov 16, 2015
Slicing and dicing Ruby Enumerables
Have you ever needed to group items in an array, or lines in a file? In this post we'll discuss a few often-overlooked Enumerable methods that let you do just that.
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By Starr Horne
- Nov 10, 2015
Using splats to build up and tear apart arrays in Ruby
The humble splat operator (*) is one of those features of Ruby that just gets more interesting the more you look at it. In this post we'll talk about how you can construct and manipulate arrays with splats.
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By Starr Horne
- Nov 4, 2015
How Ruby Interprets and Runs Your Programs
In this post we'll follow the journey of a simple program as it's lexed, parsed and compiled into bytecode. We'll use the tools that Ruby gives us to spy on the interpreter every step of the way.
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By Starr Horne
- Nov 3, 2015
Understanding `self` in Ruby
A lot of problems faced by beginning Rubyists are caused by not understanding self. In this post we'll take a deep dive into self under conditions both common and uncommon.
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By Starr Horne
- Nov 2, 2015
Cool Ruby regex tricks
Ruby supports using regex in lots of interesting ways that go beyond the basic String#match method. In this post I cover a few of my favorites.
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By Starr Horne
- Oct 27, 2015
Using conditionals inside Ruby regular expressions
In this post, we'll dive into regex conditionals and discuss how to work around the limitations in Ruby's implementation of them
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By Starr Horne
- Oct 26, 2015
Benchmarking Ruby refinements
Are refinements slow? I wrote a few benchmarks to find out. The answer was surprising.
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By Starr Horne
- Oct 20, 2015
Understanding Ruby refinements and lexical scope
If you've never used Ruby's refinements, you might be surprised to learn that they're lexically scoped. We'll discuss what this means, and the implications for your code.
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By Starr Horne
- Oct 19, 2015
Multiple levels of subnavigation with Jekyll
In this post, we'll discuss how to separate an HTML document into logical sections based on heading tags. I'll all also show you a cool trick for rendering arbitrarily-deep subnavigation trees using Liquid templates.
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By Starr Horne
- Oct 13, 2015
Automatically generate subnavigation from H2s in Jekyll
Longer pages often benefit from subnavigation. In this post, we'll make a Jekyll plugin to dynamically generate subnavigation from H2 tags.
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By Starr Horne
- Oct 12, 2015
Ditching your single page app for...turbolinks?
You tried turbolinks, once, and soon your app began to fail in strange and wonderful ways. But some people make it work. What's their secret? The answer is so simple, it just might amaze you.
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By Starr Horne
- Sep 9, 2015
Creating Ruby enumerators on the fly
When you treat your collections as enumerators, you get to use all your favorite functions like #map and #reduce without having to write any extra code. In this post I show you how easy it is to create enumerators on the fly, without defining extra classes or messing around with the Enumerable module.
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By Starr Horne
- Sep 3, 2015
When to use freeze and frozen? in Ruby
These days it's pretty common to see #freeze used in Ruby code. But it's often not entirely clear WHY freeze is being used. In this post we'll look at the most common reasons a developer might freeze variables.
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By Starr Horne
- Sep 2, 2015
How to exit a Ruby program
If you want your app to behave well in a unix environment, it's important that it exit correctly. In this post you'll learn all about unix exit codes, the mechanism that Ruby uses to exit a program, and how you can add custom behavior on exit.
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By Starr Horne
- Sep 1, 2015
Avoid these traps when nesting Ruby modules
But buried within Ruby's nesting implementation - and Rails' autoload system - are a few traps that can cause your code to fail in strange and wonderful ways. In this post, we'll discuss the origin of these traps and how you can avoid them.
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By Starr Horne
- Aug 26, 2015
