The Honeybadger Developer Blog

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...