Ben Curtis
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bencurtis.com
Ben Curtis
@bencurtis.com
Christian, husband, dad, co-founder of Honeybadger.io, fan of Ruby, creator of the faker gem, EV nut (1, 2, and 4-wheel), LSU football fan, and cycling enthusiast in the PNW.
I don't trust AI enough to let it loose managing my infrastructure, but ChatGPT and Claude sure are helping in creating runbooks and modifying terraform configurations in response to a an incident!
January 17, 2026 at 1:31 PM
It's pretty wild to be looking at code that I haven't touched in ten years, especially when this app is getting updated every day.
January 16, 2026 at 2:38 AM
This is pretty cool :)
Here's something I cooked up over the weekend: a terminal user interface (TUI) that renders @honeybadger.io observability dashboards from our YAML source format (which we recently made public, more to come on that).

www.honeybadger.io/changelog/in...

#Monitoring #Rust #Ruby #RubyOnRails #Sidekiq
January 15, 2026 at 8:18 PM
Some details on how AI helped…

* Product name: workshopped with AI
* Color scheme, HTML, CSS: generated by AI
* Homepage content: workshopped with AI
* Early access form: suggested by AI
* OpenGraph image: created/iterated with prompts
* Terms and privacy policy: *not* generated by AI ;)
I’m amazed at how good Claude has gotten recently. It accelerates my work so much that I launched a new product to over the Christmas break:

www.breakwaterapp.com

It went from an idea to launched with less than 20 hours of my time. 2026 is going to be wild for B2B SaaS, y’all.
January 15, 2026 at 5:03 PM
I’m amazed at how good Claude has gotten recently. It accelerates my work so much that I launched a new product to over the Christmas break:

www.breakwaterapp.com

It went from an idea to launched with less than 20 hours of my time. 2026 is going to be wild for B2B SaaS, y’all.
January 15, 2026 at 5:12 AM
One of the perks of using Fastmail: easy setup for outbound email for your side projects. Set up your new domain with Fastmail, then create an app password in Fastmail (limited to just SMTP access), then use that password and Fastmail's SMTP server in your app's mail configuration.
January 6, 2026 at 7:37 PM
Reposted by Ben Curtis
And see, even in that post I let out yet more context:

I didn't see any condensation around my exterior doors, including on latches and hardware. What little I saw in those rooms was due to the air trapped between the blinds and the glass. Just hard to explain my whole reasoning concisely.
December 31, 2025 at 3:56 AM
Reposted by Ben Curtis
There are a few people that do realize that racism was wrong, and those people are welcomed with open arms.♥️👍🏿

But what usually happens, is people conflate "Leopards are my face!🤡" with true reconciliation. Eg, as people are trying so hard to do right now with MTG.

No. Rejected. Stay on that side.
December 31, 2025 at 2:30 AM
Merry Christmas!
December 25, 2025 at 11:59 AM
Kafka pro tip: If you're having performance issues, try increasing your batch size. It's magical! :)
December 9, 2025 at 10:13 PM
Reposted by Ben Curtis
Don’t forget to instrument your turkey for #observability today. 📈

Happy Thanksgiving!

blog.thermoworks.com/accurate-pro...
Proper Probe Placement in Your Turkey
Temperature control is key to cooking a turkey, and it all starts with accurately placing your oven thermometer's probe.
blog.thermoworks.com
November 27, 2025 at 5:03 PM
Today I launched a big (back-end, infrastructure) thing and not one customer noticed. 💯 🎉
Just the way I like it. 😉
November 26, 2025 at 9:21 PM
Great view from the #SFRuby venue. Looking forward to day 2!
November 20, 2025 at 4:55 PM
We're doing something a bit different (and cool!) with APM at Honeybadger... Josh writes up some of our thoughts on the blog:
APMs drown you in data you'll never use, yet can't answer questions when production breaks.

Our co-founder Josh explores why—it's not lack of data, it's paying for complexity that doesn't translate to capability.

www.honeybadger.io/blog/apm-par...

#Observability #DevOps #Monitoring
The APM paradox: Too much data, too few answers
Most dev teams don't need 47 dashboards or petabytes of logs—they need answers at 2 AM. Explore the evolution from APM to observability.
www.honeybadger.io
November 14, 2025 at 8:50 PM
Happy Halloween! Watch out for zombie processes!
The only thing scarier than errors in your logs is not knowing about them. 👻

Honeybadger turns your cryptic logs into actionable alerts with all the context you need to exorcise those errors fast.

Sleep better knowing we're watching for the things that go bump in your logs.

#Logging #Monitoring
October 31, 2025 at 6:50 PM
This was great!
October 26, 2025 at 6:17 PM
Pro tip: Include the git SHA in an HTML comment when deploying your app... it's super handy to know what is actually deployed in production, especially when you're looking at a side project that hasn't been deployed in months. :)
October 16, 2025 at 8:51 PM
If you haven't taken a look at the Dashboards tab in your Honeybadger project yet, now is a great time to do it. Our new project overview dashboard combined with Insights automatic instrumentation makes it super simple to see your app's health at a glance.
Traditional APM tools bury you in dashboards you'll never use. Meanwhile, the things you actually care about require complex custom instrumentation. That's why we built smart dashboards that adapt to your stack. 🧵 👇

www.honeybadger.io/changelog/pr...

#RubyOnRails #ElixirLang #Laravel #Django
Smart dashboards that adapt to your stack
Traditional APM tools bury you in dashboards you'll never use. Meanwhile, the things you actually care about—such as signups, payment failures, and that one background...
www.honeybadger.io
October 15, 2025 at 5:53 PM
Your blog post on ClickHouse was a great read, @tjmiller.bsky.social ... thanks for the love! 😊
October 14, 2025 at 6:26 PM
I had a blast at @rmrubyconf.bsky.social and @xoruby.com last week. It was great to see old Ruby friends and make some new ones.

Also, I'm pretty sure that was the first time I've attended two conferences in the same week. :)
October 13, 2025 at 5:57 PM
Insights keeps rolling! Even the Honeybadger loves snakes. ;)
Great news for Pythonistas!

We just launched automatic dashboards for #Django, #Flask, and #Celery. Get instant visibility into your #Python apps.

Try it for free with 50MB/day (1.5GB/month) plus error tracking and uptime monitoring.

Click to learn more: www.honeybadger.io/blog/python-...
Python performance monitoring in Honeybadger
Get automatic Django, Flask, and Celery dashboards in Honeybadger. Zero-instrumentation Python performance monitoring with real-time observability.
www.honeybadger.io
October 9, 2025 at 7:13 PM
🛫 SEA ➡️ DEN … I’m looking forward to Rocky Mountain Ruby!
October 5, 2025 at 4:30 PM
The tip in this post about git log reminded me of my most frequently-used git alias:

glods='git log --graph --pretty="%Cred%h%Creset -%C(auto)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%ad) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset" --date=short'

Try it... you'll like it! 😉
As developers, we live in #Git, so we'd love to see your go-to Git hacks and tips in the comments. 🧐

Speaking of Git hacks... Stitch Fix engineer Julie Kent outlined her top 10 tips for getting the most out of Git

Level up -> www.honeybadger.io/blog/git-tri...

#GitTips #GitWorkflow
Ten Git tips and tricks you need to know
Git is an infuriatingly useful tool, but you're stuck with it. Learn how to make your workflow faster and less stressful with these 10 helpful Git tips
www.honeybadger.io
September 22, 2025 at 6:25 PM