A backtrace is one of those Ruby features that is extremely useful, but we never think about it. They're just always there in our time of need -- be it when an error happens, when exploring our code inside a irb or a debugger, or even when profiling our app.

In this talk, I’ll do a deep dive of how Ruby backtraces work inside the Ruby VM. If you’ve ever been curious about how this part of the Ruby VM works, this talk is for you!

I’ll then show how I’ve used this knowledge to build the backtracie gem. The backtracie gem is an experimentation ground for creating prettier backtraces; during this talk I will discuss the extra information it can provide, and in what cases it may be useful. Finally, I’ll show how you can start using backtracie in your Ruby apps, today!