Debugging is an important skill to develop as you work your way up to more complex projects. Seasoned engineers have a sixth sense for squashing bugs and have built up an impressive collection of tools that help them diagnose and fix bugs.

I'm a member of Heroku’s Ruby team and creator of CodeTriage and today we’ll look at the tools that I used on a journey to fix a gnarly bug in Sprockets. Sprockets is an asset packaging system written in Ruby that lies at the heart of Rails’ asset processing pipeline.

At the end of the post, you will know how Sprockets works and how to debug in Ruby.

Unexpected Behavior in Sprockets

Sprockets gives developers a convenient way to compile, minify,...

This blog post is adapted from a talk given by Joe Kutner at Devoxx 2018 titled "10 Mistakes Hackers Want You to Make."

Building self-defending applications and services is no longer aspirational--it’s required. Applying security patches, handling passwords correctly, sanitizing inputs, and properly encoding output is now table stakes. Our attackers keep getting better, and so must we.

In this blog post, we'll take a look at several commonly overlooked ways to secure your web apps. Many of the examples provided will be specific to Java, but any modern programming language will have equivalent tactics.

1. Ensure dependencies are up-to-date

Every year, OWASP, a group of...

This blog post is adapted from a talk given by Stella Cotton at RailsConf 2018 titled "So You’ve Got Yourself a Kafka."

2018 was an amazing year for Heroku and our customers. We want to extend a big thank you for your feedback, beta participation, and spirit of innovation, which inspires us every day to continuously improve and advance the platform.

In the past year, we released a range of new features to make the developer experience more productive, more standards based, and more open. We achieved significant compliance milestones, provided trust controls for creating multi-cloud apps, and improved our existing lineup of data services.

With that, we’d like to take a moment and look back at some of the highlights from 2018. We hope you enjoy it, and we look forward to an even more exciting 2019!

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The Ruby committers have again continued their annual holiday tradition of gifting us a new Ruby version: Ruby 2.6 was released today, including the long awaited Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler that the Ruby team has been working on for more than a year.

Just-In-Time compilation requires Ruby to spin up a compiler process on startup, and we're proud to say that this feature is supported today on Heroku thanks to the diligent efforts of our very own Richard Schneeman. We'd also like to thank fellow Herokai Nobuyoshi Nakada for his effort making sure the new JIT works well with all of the officially supported compilers: GCC, Clang and Microsoft Visual C++.

Using Ruby 2.6 on Heroku

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