Errors are part of our daily lives as Ruby developers. We first encounter them in our development environments where they materialize from a misplaced comma, an eagerly-typed bracket, or a misunderstood method call. We fix them and move on, dismissing them as creatures of our own creation.

Sometimes the cause is deeper--not readily apparent. We learn to debug. We learn to rescue . We set traps for our insubordinate creature creations. We write tests to make sure our code is creature-free.

When we’re satisfied that we’ve tamed our code, we rejoice. “Ship it!”, we declare triumphantly. Emoji abound as our servers herald the deploy.

Of course, we haven’t tamed our code. The exceptions we encountered in development were not our creations--they were the cavalry scouts. In the depths of our code, on the outer edges of our test cases, the creatures lurk. They will follow paths that we never knew existed. They’ll cause mischeif and mayhem at every turn.

Their tactics will confound reason, but we will prevail. Through knowledge we’ll illuminate their hideouts. Through reason we’ll thwart their sabatoge. We’ll become experts in our craft.

It will take exceptional developers to defeat Ruby’s Exceptional Creatures!