DevOps articles

Subdomain takeover: ignore this vulnerability at your peril

Using custom subdomains can open your application up to potential security issues. Jump into this article to understand what subdomain takeover attacks are and learn how you can avoid them.

Top ten Git tips & tricks

Have you ever felt that Git is an infuriatingly useful tool that you're stuck with? What if you could make git more friendly and convenient? Learn how to make your workflow faster and less stressful with these helpful Git tips.

How does Git work?

Without version control systems like Git, life as a developer would be very different. Git is the center of modern collaborative software development. But how does Git work under the hood? Dig into this article to learn how Git works.

Adding config to AWS ECS tasks

If you want to run a Docker container in AWS ECS, but the image requires a configuration file to work properly, are you stuck creating a custom image just to add that file? Nope! Learn how to add that file at deployment time.

Conditionally deploying parts of your CloudFormation stack with the Serverless Framework

What do you do when you want to customize which resources are deployed via CloudFormation?

Protecting Your Apps From Link-based Vulnerabilities: Reverse Tabnabbing, Broken-Link Hijacking, and Open Redirects

Links are so fundamental to web development that they're almost invisible. When we link to a third-party page, we hardly ever consider how it could become an opportunity to exploit our users. In this article, Julien Cretel introduces us to three techniques that bad actors can use to target our users and discusses how to avoid them.

WTF is a Convolutional Neural Network?

If you are a software engineer, there's a good chance that deep learning will inevitably become part of your job in the future. Even if you're not building the models that directly use CNNs, you might have to collaborate with data scientists or help business partners better understand what is going on under the hood. In this article, Julie Kent dives into the world of convolutional neural networks and explains it all in a not-so-scary way.

Plugging Git Leaks: Preventing and Fixing Information Exposure in Repositories

Have you ever been neck-deep building a new feature? You're working at capacity. You need to test something out so you paste an API key into your source file with every intention of removing it later. But you forget. You push to GitHub. It's an easy mistake, and potentially a very expensive one. In this article, Julien Cretel explores the nuances of this kind of data leak, offers suggestions for recovery when leaks happen and gives us options for preventing them in the first place.

Configure Your App with SSM Parameter Store

Configuring your Rails app via environment variables works well, but sometimes you want to be able to update your configuration on the fly. Here's a way to update your app's environment using SSM Parameter Store.

Why would you want to do this? Well...

What if I called FLUSHALL on your Redis instance? 😱

At Honeybadger, we use Redis a lot. It's our Swiss Army Knife; it's a cache, a single source of truth, it stores background jobs, and more. Basically, Redis is one of those services that should never fail.

I was pondering the DevOps apocalypse recently...

Building Autocomplete With DynamoDB and Lambda

We recently released a new search key autocomplete feature here at Honeybadger. It was such a fun project that I just had to write it up for you all. Not only does it showcase an exciting use of DynamoDB, but it also shows the challenges of using DynamoDB cost-effectively with large amounts of frequently-updated data.

My 2017 Arch Linux desktop setup

I recently rebuilt my multi-purpose desktop system with Arch Linux; in this post I talk about my computing goals, my solutions, and the results.

Our Postgres Infrastructure

We love Postgres at Honeybadger, but it does require some care and feeding. Here's what we've done to scale Postgres along with the growing needs of our business.

Monitorama 2016 Recap

Our co-founder and resident human exception tracker, Josh, recently went to Monitorama 2016. He brought back goodies to share with our team!

How I hacked a fitness tracker to wake me - but not my wife - when I get paged

The only thing worse than getting paged in the middle of the night is to also wake up your partner. In this post I show you how you can set up a fitness tracker wristband to silently wake you up the next time you get paged.

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...

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...