The Honeybadger Developer Blog
Tutorials, product info, and good advice from the Honeybadger crew.
How to add context data to exceptions in Ruby
Sometimes the standard backtrace / error message combo isn't enough. Sometimes you need extra data to locate the cause of an error. In this post we'll discuss three easy ways to add more context to your exceptions.
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By Starr Horne
- Jul 23, 2015
Understanding Ruby's strange "Errno" exceptions
If you've ever taken a look at Ruby's exception hierarchy, you may have noticed something weird. In addition to all of the normal exceptions like RuntimeError and NoMethodError, there's an odd reference to Errno::* . This post discusses what these exceptions are and how to interpret them.
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By Starr Horne
- Jul 22, 2015
A theoretical introduction to unix daemons in Ruby
Unix daemons are programs that run in the background. Nginx, Postgres and OpenSSH are a few examples. They use a some special tricks to “detatch” their processes, and let them run independently of any terminal. I thought it’d be fun to do a post illustrating how they work in Ruby.
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By Starr Horne
- Jul 21, 2015
Logging local & instance variables when exceptions occur in Ruby
With hard-to-reproduce bugs, it can be really handy to log all of the local and instance variables along with the exception. This post shows you how. Along the way we'll introduce Ruby's binding system as well as the bindingofcaller gem - a powerful tool for introspection.
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By Starr Horne
- Jul 20, 2015
Go write a web app! Five interesting Go web frameworks
Go is such a new language that even more established frameworks can have interesting quirks. One of the key issues learning the Go framework is the availability of useful documentation. Unfortunately, Go framework maintainers don’t always prioritize writing the documentation necessary to get new programmers up to speed on their frameworks. The five frameworks below, however, have usable documentation and are straightforward to use.
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By Starr Horne
- Jul 16, 2015
Ruby's case statement - advanced techniques
Nothing could be simpler and more boring than the case statement. It’s a holdover from C. You use it to replace a bunch of ifs. Case closed. Or is it? Actually, case statements in Ruby are a lot richer and more complex than you might imagine. Let’s take a look.
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By Starr Horne
- Jul 15, 2015
Remote debugging with Byebug, Rails and Pow
Byebug is a simple to use, feature rich debugger for Ruby 2.x. In this post, we'll discuss how to set up remote debugging with byebug so that you can debug code running in Pow, Unicorn or other application servers.
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By Starr Horne
- Jul 15, 2015
How unicorn talks to nginx - an introduction to unix sockets in Ruby
In this post we start out with the basics of unix sockets and finish by creating our own simple Ruby application server which can be proxied by nginx.
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By Starr Horne
- Jul 14, 2015
Level-up `rescue` with dynamic exception matchers
When you use a rescue clause in Ruby, you can specify what kinds of exceptions you want to rescue. But what if you want to rescue exceptions by severity? By message? By time of day? In this post we'll discuss how you can create dynamic exception matchers that use your logic to decide if an exception gets rescued.
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By Starr Horne
- Jul 13, 2015
