Bookmarks (175)

Installing the sassc Gem on a Mac: A Debugging Story — Native extensions are often the source of a failed bundle install and never particularly fun to figure out (at least for me). Luckily, Richard takes us on a tour of the issues here, advice that could be useful beyond just sassc.

Ruby Debugging Tips and Recommendations in 2025 — A brief piece but packed with advice from Stan (who knows a thing or two from all his work on debug.rb and modernizing IRB). Did you know you can use the Ruby LSP extension with debug.rb?

iri: Simple Immutable Ruby URI Builder — Offers an interesting chain-able fluent API for adding various elements to URLs.

Psyllium: A Gem Making It Easier to Use Fibers — Adds convenience methods to the Fiber class to make it easier to use in the same way that threads might be used.

Confused About Request Queue Time? — Check out our illustrated guide, with diagrams galore and just a tiny bit of math.

TruffleRuby 24.2: The High Performance Ruby Implementation — Now supporting Ruby 3.3.5 features, TruffleRuby is an interesting Ruby implementation based upon GraalVM (a variant of the JDK with ahead-of-time native compilation well suited for dynamic languages).

Just the Docs: A Jekyll Theme for Documentation Sites — Only tangentially Ruby related (but it is for Jekyll) but I love the look of docs/project sites using this. It’s clean, simple, and makes a lot of right design decisions for you out of the box.

🚀 Need to Upgrade Ruby? Here is a Free Step by Step Guide by FastRuby — The team behind Bonsai and the next_rails gem shares their best practices for upgrading to any Ruby version.

Finding the Opposite of What You Have with Rails invert_where — Rails has so many helpful methods that many simply skip my radar as someone who’s been using Rails for so long. invert_where is certainly new to me and does something quite interesting..

Simple Declarative Presence for Hotwire Apps with AnyCable — How to implement user presence tracking in a Hotwire application with minimal effort by using AnyCable and its new primitives.

Creating Value Objects the Idiomatic Way — If you’ve got a value more elaborate than a number, string or simple list or hash, you might choose to use a class to create objects that represent those values: value objects. The modern way to do this in Ruby is with the Data class and Lucian shows it off here.

▶  Building an 'Always-On' Production Profiler — A talk from Ruby Kaigi 2024 on Datadog’s production profiler. There’s a lot of detail here on how and what (CPU profiles, GC, allocations, heap live objects) to profile, various challenges of profiling in production, and using Rust in a gem.

Ruby, Ractors, and Lock-Free Data Structures — An extensive, multi-chapter article that goes into serious depth about Ractors, lock-free data structures and shared mutable global state in multi-threaded Ruby apps. There’s also code if you want to play along or experiment.

Turnstiled: Use Cloudflare Turnstile in Rails Apps — Turnstile is a Cloudflare service that replaces CAPTCHAs – you’ve almost certainly encountered them on many sites.

Introducing Sidekiq 8.0 — Ruby’s most popular background job framework has a new release that adds easy-to-do profiling, a significant overhaul to its WebUI, a new ‘job iteration’ feature for dividing long running jobs into smaller chunks, and more. Redis 7+ and Ruby 3.2+ are now required.

Better Know a Ruby Thing: Method Lookup — “Let’s talk about method lookup in Ruby, which is from one perspective really clean and simple, and from another angle, kind of messy.”

Tech Debt Slowing You Down? A Case Study About Bonsai — See how Bonsai by FastRuby.io  transformed Valid Eval with 2–5x performance gains, speedy upgrades, and enhanced security. Read the case study and boost your productivity. 🚀

Four Choices for Packaging Ruby Binary Distributions — Well, not exactly. Many attempts have been made over the years to distribute Ruby apps in binary form, but most seem abandoned. However, Tebako is looking like a good, maintained option with an active community.

Rails 8's Solid Trifecta: Cache, Cable, and Queue — A comparison of Rails 8’s new systems for caching, WebSocket management, and background job queues versus the established options.

An Opinionated Guide to Configuring Rails on Heroku — A variety of settings and other considerations for getting the most out of your Heroku setup.

✅ What Happens When Code Reviews Aren’t Mandatory? — Code reviews can feel like bottlenecks, slowing progress and increasing frustration. Find out about an experiment to make them optional.

Debugbar: DevTools-Like Introspection for Rails Apps — Debugbar adds an area to the bottom of your Rails app’s views (in dev only) that shows off queries, jobs, request details, and more. GitHub repo.

🤖 RubyLLM: Work with AI the Ruby Way — A single, Ruby-centric way to interact with LLM models. RubyLLM currently supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and DeepSeek models and can analyze PDFs, generate images, and integrate into Rails applications.

Want to Roll Your Own Autoscaling? Here Are Our Secrets 🤫 — Does it make sense for us to write this guide? No! Did we do it anyway? Yes! We did it for you ❤️

What’s the Deal with Ractors? — Introduced in Ruby 3.0, Ractors provide an actor-based, truly parallel (bye GVL!) execution model, but they still remain experimental and any idea of their widespread use hasn’t panned out. Jean digs into what makes them tick, what they offer, and why they still have their uses, despite the current shortcomings.

Optimize Ruby App Performance in Real-Time — Visualize Ruby performance using detailed flame graphs to identify bottlenecks and latency. Debug and optimize your code by tracing requests across web servers, databases, and services with Datadog APM. Start a free trial today.

The Pitchfork Story — Rails core member and Shopify engineer Jean led the development of a Rack HTTP server called Pitchfork. Here, he goes into a lot of fascinating depth about the motivations behind Pitchfork’s creation, the memory efficiency it offers, and teaches us quite a bit about Ruby along the way.

Rails Views, Web Components, React.. Why Make a Choice? — A novel take on choosing an approach for your app’s views. Most shops pick Rails+Hotwire or React SPAs, but Aha! looks at where each view framework excels and uses them all.

Using Phlex for Emails: Action Mailer Without ERB — Phlex has grown in popularity as a more OO ERB replacement and it suits emails pretty well too.

Keep Postgres Maintenance from Slowing Down Your Ruby App — Secure your spot to learn the proactive maintenance practices that uncover hidden database performance risks before they escalate.

Exeggutor: A Unified Interface for Managing Subprocesses — A library aiming to bring some added calm to dealing with the often fraught process of executing other programs from Ruby by way of exeg and exeg_async methods that can do it all.

🤖 OmniAI 2.0: A Unified Ruby API for Multiple AI Providers — If you’ve worked with hosted LLM platforms from Ruby before, you’ve probably used ruby-openai, but OmniAI abstracts things to support various platforms and their different features without shoehorning everything into the OpenAI approach. GitHub repo.

Seamless Rails Upgrades: Expert Maintenance. Fixed Price — Upgrade RoR smoothly. We offer expert Rails maintenance at a fixed price. Secure, performant, minimal disruptions. Outdated gems? Breaking changes? We handle it.

ParallelTests 5.0: More Cores == Faster Tests — Speed up Minitest, RSpec, Turnip, Cucumber or Spinach by running in parallel across multiple cores. v5.0 brings Ruby 3.4 support.

The Git Gem 3.0: A git Wrapper for Use from Ruby — If you want to work with the git client from Ruby, this provides an interface.

Sorbet Adds Support for RBS Comments — Long before RBS was a thing, Sorbet brought type checking to Ruby and it now has (experimental) support for using RBS comments for adding types to methods. This is a neat synergy given that most Ruby type checkers for Ruby are converging towards RBS for type annotations.

Bsky Parser: Bluesky Text Parser That Outputs Rich Text Facets — If you’ve ever written code to post to Bluesky, you’ve probably run into what a headache it is to embed links, mentions, and hashtags properly. This aims to remove that headache.

Rails::Diff: Compare Rails-Generated Files with the Ones in Your App — You might diligently upgrade your app to new Rails versions but still have differences from how Rails’ default app generator now does things. This lets you see what those differences are.

So About Those “Noisy Neighbors”… 😬 — Discovering some unfortunate realities of shared hardware (standard dynos??) and how they impact your app (also, tigers?).

Why Ruby on Rails Still Matters — You’re reading a Ruby newsletter, so you probably don’t need to be convinced of Rails’ relevance. This post doesn’t say a lot but did lead to a rather extensive Hacker News discussion.

Building an Inertia App with Rails — Get the benefits of a React-based SPA approach on the frontend while keeping Rails in the backend.

Dealing with (Hypothetical) Sham Packages — A fictional-but-based-on-experience account of how a malicious version update for a package/gem can easily make it into your codebase. Do you check every version bump from every dependency? This account might make you think a bit differently about blindly accepting minor version upgrades.

How to Submit a Better RailsConf Talk Proposal — The CFP for RailsConf 2025 closes tomorrow so if you’d like to speak, now’s the time to submit your proposal, and following the tips in this post could increase your chances.

Tech Debt Dragging You Down? A Case Study About Bonsai — Too many security CVEs in production? Is your Rails app lagging due to tech debt? See how Bonsai transformed Valid Eval with 2–5× performance gains, smoother upgrades, and enhanced security. Read the case study and reclaim your time. 🚀

Compiling Ruby Apps to Binaries with Tebako — A look into Tebako, a tool (written in Ruby itself) for packaging and distributing apps written in numerous languages into binaries that can be distributed for Windows, macOS and Linux users. It does this by essentially turning an app into a self-executing container. GitHub repo.

🚀 FastRuby.io Makes Your Rails Upgrade Delightfully Boring with Bonsai — The team behind RailsBump.org offers gradual, 0-downtime upgrades — transform your engineering culture with our experts.

Honeybadger Keeps Getting Better — Honeybadger delivers real-time insights with performance and uptime monitoring, log management, and support for 10+ languages. Your favorite error tracker just leveled up. →