Error Handling Patterns

Overview

Error Handling Patterns transforms ad-hoc try/catch blocks into systematic, comprehensive error management. It implements typed error hierarchies, recovery strategies, and proper logging that make your application resilient and debuggable.

Key Features

• Typed Error Hierarchies: Creates custom error classes organized by domain (ValidationError, AuthenticationError, NotFoundError) with proper inheritance, error codes, and metadata fields.
• Result Pattern: Implements Result/Either types for languages that support them, making error paths explicit in function signatures rather than relying on thrown exceptions.
• Recovery Strategies: Adds retry logic with exponential backoff and jitter for network calls, circuit breaker patterns for failing dependencies, and graceful degradation for non-critical features.
• Structured Logging: Integrates with popular logging libraries (Pino, Winston, structlog) to produce JSON-formatted logs with error context, stack traces, and correlation IDs for request tracing.

Error Boundaries

For frontend applications, generates React Error Boundaries with fallback UIs, error reporting to monitoring services, and recovery mechanisms. Server-side generates global error handlers with proper HTTP status code mapping.

Best Practices

Errors are categorized as operational (expected, recoverable) or programmer errors (bugs). Each category has appropriate handling: operational errors get recovery logic, programmer errors get logged and reported for fixing.