The Honeybadger Developer Blog

Bitwise hacks in Ruby

If you've ever thought of using Ruby to access libraries in C or Java, or to manipulate the operating system then it's critical that you know the basics of bit manipulation. We start out with the basics of binary in Ruby and finish with John Carmack's legendary inverse square root approximation.

Profile your gem memory usage with Derailed

Is your Rails app is taking up a lot of RAM? Perhaps your application’s memory footprint is being enlarged by one or more bloated gems. The Derailed gem provides some awesome tools for detecting gem bloat.

Understanding the rails-jquery CSRF vulnerability (CVE-2015-1840)

Several new security disclosures were released recently. One of them was for rails-jquery, the javascript library that implements "remote" links and forms in Rails. In this post we'll dissect the problem and see how it was fixed.

Using Lambdas in Ruby

Did you know you can use lambdas as a kind of dynamic hash replacement? The truth is, lambdas are pretty cool once you start to investigate them. In this post we'll cover basic usage and then show you some cool lambda tricks.

Securing environment variables

In a previous post we showed you how the environment variable system works, and busted some common myths. But as one helpful reader pointed out, we didn't say much about security. Since it's become common to use env vars for storing secret API keys and other valuable information, It's important to understand the security implications. Let's take a look.

The Rubyist's guide to environment variables

If you want to be able to effectively manage web apps in development and in production, you have to understand environment variables. This post will show you how environment variables really work - and perhaps more importantly, how they DON'T work. We'll also explore some of the most common ways to manage environment variables in your Rails apps.

Working with exceptions in Pry

By now I think everyone agrees that Pry is the best thing to happen to the Rails console since...well, ever. Built-in to pry are a few really cool features that make it much easier to work with exceptions than it was in plain old IRB. Let's take a look.

Understanding the Ruby exception hierarchy

In this post we look at Ruby's exception class heirarchy, and how you can use it to be as broad or as narrow as you like when rescuing exceptions.

Custom exceptions in Ruby

Exceptions are classes, just like everything else in Ruby. This post will show you how to create your own custom exceptions without falling into some common traps that snare beginners.

Capturing stdout & stderr from shell commands via Ruby

tl;dr If you want to run a shell command from Ruby and capture its stdout, stderr and return status, check out the Open3.capture3 method. If you'd like to process stdout and stderr data in a streaming fashion, check out Open3.popen3.

So many bad choices