John Gallagher

Talk: Squash Production Defects Quickly - The Power of Structured Logging in Rails

A joyful programming coach and Ruby engineer.

Squash Production Defects Quickly - The Power of Structured Logging in Rails

Rails apps can be a black box. Ever seen a defect where you just can’t figure out what’s going on?This talk will give you practical steps to improve the observability of your Rails app, taking the time to understand and fix defects from hours or days to minutes.

Rails 8 brings an exciting new feature: built-in structured logging. This talk will delve into the transformative impact of structured logging on application observability and fixing defects.

Structured logging, as a cornerstone of observability, offers a more organized and query-able way to handle logs compared to traditional text-based logs. This session will guide you through the nuances of structured logging in Rails, demonstrating how it can be leveraged to gain better insights into your application’s behavior.

This talk will be a deep technical dive into how to make structured logging work with an existing Rails app.

Bio

John is a joyful programming coach and Ruby engineer.

He’s passionate about bringing more joy to the world of web development and helping engineers feel powerful and confident within their Rails apps.

He’s worked with Rails for more than a decade and is obsessed with design, refactoring, TDD, architecture, structured logging, events and fast test suites.

He lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK.