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?
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. I don't have kids yet, but when I do, I want them to learn two things: Whether or not you believe that the singularity is near, there's no denying that the world runs on data.
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.
Have you ever been neck-deep building a new feature? You're working at capacity. You need to test something out so you paste an API key into your source file with every intention of removing it later. But you forget. You push to GitHub. It's an easy mistake, and potentially a very expensive one. In this article, Julien Cretel explores the nuances of this kind of data leak, offers suggestions for recovery when leaks happen and gives us options for preventing them in the first place.
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.
Breadcrumbs can help you debug client-side JavaScript applications, and are available to all Honeybadger customers as of today. One of the things that makes fixing JavaScript errors so difficult is that everything happens on the client-side. When an obscure error happens in a callback, you often lack the context to reproduce it. If the error is critical, you may even resort to deploying debug code to get more information about the events leading up to it.
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.
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.
