The Honeybadger Developer Blog

Ruby's Exception vs StandardError: What's the difference?

Never rescue Exception in Ruby! - Maybe you've heard this before. It's good advice, but it's pretty confusing unless you're already in the know. Let's break this statement down and see what it means.

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...

Testing object allocations with RSpec

Everyone is talking about Ruby performance lately, and with good reason. It turns out that with some smallish tweaks to your code it's possible to increase performance by up to 99.9%.

There are plenty of articles out there on how to optimize your...

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...

Incoming: uptime monitoring WebHooks

When your site is totally unresponsive (i.e. down), it's a big deal. Oddly enough, application errors may not surface during major outages if the failure is outside of the application. That's why we built uptime monitoring into Honeybadger: in addition...

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,...