Ruby articles

Brought to you by Honeybadger—simple application monitoring that helps developers move fast and fix things.

 

Neural Networks in Ruby: A Not-So-Scary Introduction

Building a neural network isn't exactly like building a human brain, but it's the closest any of us are going to get. In this article Julie Kent introduces us to neural nets as a concept and shows us how to implement a simple one in Ruby.

Building a Toy Programming Language in Ruby

Few projects are as enticing or as rewarding as creating your own programming language. It's impractical, sure. But as an exercise, it strengthens muscles that most of us don't get to use very often and makes us better all-around developers. In this article — the first in a series — Alex Braha Stoll shows us how to get started building our own toy language and interpreter from scratch using Ruby.

Rails Performance: When is Caching the Right Choice?

We've all been there. You're clicking around your Rails application, and it just isn't as snappy as it used to be. You start searching for a quick-fix and find a lot of talk about caching. Take your existing app, add some caching, and voila, a performance boost with minimal code changes. However, it's not this simple. Like most quick fixes, caching can have long-term costs. In this article, Jonathan Miles discusses what caching is and what can go wrong, as well as explains non-caching strategies you can use to speed up your Rails app.

Predicting the Future With Linear Regression in Ruby

The world is full of linear relationships. When one apple costs $1 and two apples cost $2, it's easy to figure out the price of any number of apples. But what happens when you have 100s of data points? What if your data source is noisy? That's when it's helpful to use a technique called linear regression. In this article Julie Kent shows us how linear regression works, and walks through a practical example in Ruby.

Why and How to Host your Rails 6 App with AWS ElasticBeanstalk and RDS

When you deploy a new Rails app, you typically face a double-bind. If you use an easy platform like Heroku, you could create problems for yourself as your application scales. If you use a more fully-featured platform, you risk wasting time on ops that could be spent on your product. What if you could have both: an easy deployment option that is easy to scale? In this article, Amos Omondi argues that AWS Elastic Beanstalk gives us both, then he shows us everything we need to know to get a Rails 6 app up and running on EB.
  • A photo of Amos Omondi By Amos Omondi
  • Mar 25, 2020

Why Every Web Developer Should Explore Machine Learning

If software's been eating the world for the past twenty years, it's safe to say machine learning has been eating it for the past five. But what exactly is machine learning? Why should a web developer care? This article by Julie Kent answers these questions.

Ruby's Bitwise Toolbox: Operators, Applications and Magic Tricks

How often do you think about the bits -- the ones and zeroes -- that make up your app's data? If you're doing web development in Ruby there's rarely any need to. But what if you want to interact with the operating system or a piece of hardware? What if you'd like to understand network protocols or databases? In that case, a solid understanding of bitwise operators is foundational. In this article José M. Gilgado will introduce you to bitwise operations in Ruby, give practical examples of how they can be useful, and finish big with with some fun math tricks.

Why Pry is one of the most important tools a junior Rubyist can learn

As programmers we often have to mentally run code. To imagine how a program will behave given certain inputs. This is hard enough for experienced developers. But for juniors? It can seem impossible. In this article, Melissa Williams argues that pry is an invaluable tool for junior rubyists because it allows them to see exactly what is going on as their code is run.
  • A photo of Melissa Williams By Melissa Williams
  • Mar 3, 2020

Decoupling Ruby: Delegation vs Dependency Injection

We've all worked with tightly-coupled code. If a butterfly flaps its wings in China, the unit tests break. Maintaining a system like this is...unpleasant. In this article, Jonathan Miles dives into the origins of tight-coupling. He demonstrates how you can use dependency injection (DI) to decouple code. Then he introduces a novel decoupling technique based on delegation that can be useful when DI is not an option.

Opening The Ruby Concurrency Toolbox

As a Ruby developer you probably use tools like Sidekiq that rely on concurrency. But would you know how to build your own sidekiq, or add concurrency to an existing app? This article will open Ruby's concurrency toolbox and show you how each tool works. It shows you how to solve the same problem in multiple ways, so you can compare tools. And it looks at new tools that might possibly ship with future versions of ruby.

Exploring Big-O Notation With Ruby

You know Big-O is important - not only for acing your next job interview but for knowing how code works at scale. But have you ever taken the time to go beyond a superficial understanding of the subject? In this article, Julie Kent uses equal parts math and Ruby to reveal the beating heart of Big-O and show us how it ticks.

A Rubyist's Introduction to Character Encoding, Unicode and UTF-8

Have you ever dealt with a unicode bug? Where plain text — the substance you work with all day — can no longer be trusted? It can be disorienting to say the least! This article will help prepare you so that the next time that happens you’ll be able to spend less time hyperventilating and more time troubleshooting.

Managing PostgreSQL partitioned tables with Ruby

Introducing the pgpartitionmanager gem: It helps you easily maintain PostgreSQL partitioned tables that need to be created and dropped over time as you add and expire time-based data in your application.

How To Track Timeouts In Honeybadger

Most people consider timeouts to be a kind of error, so it'd be nice to have them reported by Honeybadger like any other errors. This article will show you how to set that up.

Account Security Updates

Alongside introducing new security features like Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) and integration with haveibeenpwned.com, we also take a quick look into the inner workings of Two-Factor Authentication.

Going deep on UUIDs and ULIDs

A chance conversation let me to the realization that the world of unique identifiers is larger and more wondrous than I ever could have imagined. In this post we discuss five types of UUIDs and their upstart cousin, the ULID. We explore what makes each of them special and when they may be particularly useful.

Avoiding Junk-Drawer Classes in Ruby

Because Ruby is an object-oriented language, we tend to model the world as a set of objects. We say that two integers (x and y) are a Point, and a Line has two of them. While this approach is often useful, it has one big problem...

Using Ruby on AWS Lamba

If you love Ruby and Lambda like we do, then re:Invent 2018 was like Christmas arriving early. Here's how you can get up to speed quickly with running Ruby code on Lambda.

The honeybadger gem 4.0 has been released!

Last week we released version 4.0.0 of the honeybadger Ruby gem. This release includes a long-awaited feature which makes it even easier to customize your error reports before they are sent to Honeybadger. We also did some much-needed refactoring, and made a few removals and deprecations for good measure. Don't worry, though—most of the API remains unchanged, so upgrading should be a relatively painless process for most users.

The Case of the Flaky Test Suite

In this story, Jason Swett of The Ruby Testing Podcast discusses the pitfalls of external dependencies in your test suites, and how to avoid them.
  • A photo of Jason Swett By Jason Swett
  • Aug 1, 2018
Honeybadger's logo: a lightening bolt inside of a diamond shape.
Product
Stacks
Company
Resources
Switching to Honeybadger