Articles by Starr Horne

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...

Announcing the New Honeybadger iOS App

Have you ever wished you could use honeybadger on your iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch? Well now you can.

We're super excited to announce the release of the official Honeybadger app for iOS.

With this new app you'll get flexible push notifications for...

A more visible backtrace & cleaner error summary

Last week we sent out a survey to our users asking them what changes they would make to Honeybadger. We're planning on redesigning the user interface and wanted some feedback.

As we read through the responses it became clear that a lot of the things...

Introducing the new 2.x Honeybadger gem

After nearly six months of effort that nearly cost us the sanity of our beloved Joshua Wood, we are proud to officially announce the release of version 2.x of the Honeybadger gem. Upgrade instructions are here.

If you're thinking to yourself, "Wait...

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...

Speeding up WordPress with ModPagespeed on Ubuntu

We recently moved our blog to WordPress. And though WP seems to be the best blogging platform around, it's not exactly fast. Scratch that. It's slow. It's really slow.

You know how we love to hate the Rails asset pipeline? If it did nothing else,...

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...

Honeybadger helps Less Accounting stay bug-free this tax season.

LessAccounting has been in production since 2007 and it was started in Ruby 1.8.6 and Rails 2. Yeah, it’s been around for a while.

Even though its simple accounting software, it’s still large and complex with lots of moving pieces and different parts...

Honeybadger partners with Cloud 66

We’re excited to announce our partnership with Cloud 66 - a service to provision, deploy and scale Ruby apps on your own servers on any cloud.

Since launching last year, they’ve taken the Ruby world by storm. They have an amazing product. People are...

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...

Vim tips that will change your life

Vim is objectively the best code editor there is. [Editor's note: Opinions are those of the author. Honeybadger remains neutral in the vim/emacs/sublime holy war]

No matter how much you know about Vim, there's still more to learn. Here are a few features...

Introducing feedback

Here at Honeybadger we're big fans of eating our own dog food. We were all contractors when we started Honeybadger, and still use our own software regularly to monitor our personal projects. One of the main benefits of this is that it's not difficult...

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...

Move a file in *nix without retyping whole path

If you've been using the Unix/Linux command line for any length of time, you're certainly familiar with time-saving techniques like tab completion and reverse-i-search. Chances are you use these darling keystroke-savers daily.

These features of course...