Bookmarks (168)

ImageProcessing 1.14: High-Level Image Processing Wrapper for libvips and ImageMagick — “The goal of this project is to have a single gem that contains all the helper methods needed to resize and process images.”

🫠 AI Isn’t Magic, and It Isn’t Here to Save You — It won’t fix messy workflows, tech debt, and shaky fundamentals on its own. AI doesn’t replace developers—it raises the bar for them.

🔭 Ephem: Track Positions of Space Objects Accurately in Ruby — From the creator of the Astronoby astrometry gem comes a new space-themed release for tracking the position and velocity of ‘major Solar System bodies’ using data supplied by NASA.

Rhino Editor: An Action Text Compatible Rich Text Editor — As well as being a clean, simple rich text editor, a big selling point is being able to use ProseMirror and TipTap plugins, as well as some good docs page.

Fixing asdf 0.16.x Breakages — Last week, we mentioned that the popular asdf runtime version manager was entirely rewritten in Go. This caused Dave’s setup to break and here’s how he fixed it.

Flexible API Versioning with Rails — There are two truths about API versioning: 1. It’s required. 2. It’s hard to do right. Petr offers an example of how fast it can go wrong, followed by a more maintainable method to keep things sensible.

Ruby Source Parsing — A look at several interesting ways to dynamically work with Ruby source and to extract useful information.

The Role of Size Pools in Ruby Garbage Collection — Garbage collection improvements have fuelled a lot of the performance gains in Ruby 3.2 onwards. As a part of his Ruby Under a Microscope rewrite, Pat runs an experiment showing how Ruby uses size pools to speed up allocating memory for new objects.

Tiny JITs for a Faster FFI — FFI (Foreign Function Interface) lets Ruby call dynamically-linked native libraries, but it can impose a performance tax. Aaron Patterson demonstrates this ‘FFI tax’ and experiments with JIT-compiling FFI bindings to dramatically boost performance.

Ruby Boy: A Game Boy Emulator Written in Ruby — A fun one! You can play it in the browser, too, thanks to WebAssembly and ruby.wasm. (GitHub repo.)

Ruby on Rails on WebAssembly: The Full-Stack In-Browser Journey — This post takes DHH’s famous “build a blog in 15 minutes” tutorial and embeds it in the browser using WebAssembly. While this is a bit of a parlor trick, it shows the possibilities of WASM. The author goes on to show how the magic happens and points out more practical and exciting use cases.

WebMock 3.25.0: Stub and Set Expectations on HTTP Requests for Testing — Supports lots of HTTP libraries like Net::HTTP, Excon, the http gem, and Curb::Easy.

Parklife: Turn a Rack App into a Static Build — Got a Rack-powered app and want to spin it into a static version to quickly deploy on GitHub Pages, S3, or just your own basic HTTP server? The latest version adds Rails 8 support.

Marksmith: A GitHub-Style Markdown Editor for Rails — Well known for his Avo Rails app dev framework, Adrian is back with another banger: a GitHub-style Markdown editor you can use in your Rails apps. It features a similar toolbar, supports Active Storage, and is ready to drop in.

Is Heroku Still Worth It in 2025? 💸 — You might want to give this guide a read — we took a tour through PaaS alley and found some worthy (💵) alternatives.

Ruby 'Thread Contention' is Simply GVL Queuing — We’ve enjoyed a great run of articles on the depths of Ruby’s implementation recently and it continues with this look at how threads wait politely for their time to shine, thanks to Ruby’s GVL (Global VM Lock). But all this politeness has a downside.. so you may have to get involved and tune things a bit.

How to Avoid Problems with Turbo Morphing — The most significant feature of Turbo 8 isn’t without its issues. Here, Radan examines three common Turbo ‘gotchas’ and how to solve them so you don’t morph into a frustrated developer.

📊 Benchmarking Caching in Rails with Redis vs Alternatives — There are now many ways to speed up caching in Rails. This benchmark includes open-source options, SolidCache with Postgres, and a couple of SQLite options. The results may surprise you.

Inserting One New Element into Hashes of Varying Sizes — An experiment from Pat’s work on updating Ruby Under a Microscope shows how performance can spike on specific insertions into a hash. It’s explained well and is a detail worth knowing.

🚀 FastRuby.io Makes Your Rails Upgrade Delightfully Boring — FastRuby.io ’s monthly maintenance services keep security and uptime high & costs low (starting at $4,000/month). The team behind RailsBump.org offers gradual, 0-downtime upgrades — making technical debt remediation feel delightfully boring.

☠️ Feature Creep Kills Great Products — Why (and how) to exercise intentional restraint to boost user satisfaction, operational efficiency, and lasting success.

So You Want to Remove Ruby's GVL? — The GVL is a CRuby implementation detail that prevents Ruby code from running in parallel across multiple threads, and there have been many calls over the years to get rid of it in order to improve concurrency and performance. Is it that easy? And would it make much difference? Ruby committer Jean Boussier digs in..

Updating Ruby Under a Microscope: A Look into Hashes — Pat is updating his highly successful 2013 book that digs into Ruby’s internals to meet the modern reality of Ruby 3.x and its many changes. As a teaser, he shares an excerpt diving into how hash tables are implemented.

🔥 Make Rails Upgrades Budget-Friendly & Boringly Reliable — FastRuby.io’s monthly maintenance services keep costs low (starting at $4,000/month) and uptime high. The team behind RailsBump.org offers Bonsai for gradual, 0-downtime upgrades — making technical debt remediation feel delightfully boring.

Seven Things I Know After 25 Years of Development — Victor, creator of the Ruby Changes documents and many fantastic blog posts, shares some broad insights he’s gained from being a Rubyist and a serving member of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Monitoring Action Cable — If you’re ever paged asking why the real-time features of your Rails app are breaking, you’ll have wished you read this technical tale.

Building Rails Apps with Components — Superview is a gem that makes it possible to build Rails apps from the ground-up using nothing but components. Here’s how to automatically render Phlex and ViewComponents for controller actions with Superview.

CSS Zero 1.0: A 'No Build' CSS Starter Kit for Rails Apps — Imagine something akin to Tailwind CSS in terms of offering a design system and utility classes but with no build step and fully integrated with Rails 8. There’s an online showcase of some components built with it.

Puma 6.6.0: Ruby's Fast, Multi-Threaded HTTP 1.1 Server — Now essentially the de facto server for Rack apps, Puma continues to be well maintained with v6.6 offering some benefits for JRuby users, “a few debug/logging/observability related goodies”, and a new after_refork hook for recreating any resources shut down prior to a refork (e.g. database connections).

Horizontal, Vertical, Diagonal? What Even IS Scaling?! 👀 — Up, down, left, right… A+B, A+B?? No no.. scaling isn’t that complicated. Let’s unpack horizontal vs. vertical scaling.

Hitimes: High Resolution Timer Library for Recording Performance Metrics — Uses different high resolution clock sources on different systems (more on that here).

has_some_of_many: Optimized Top-N-Per-Group Active Record Associations — Adds optimized association methods (has_one_of_many, has_some_of_many) for ‘top N’ queries to Active Record using efficient JOIN LATERAL queries.

AutoHtml: Filters That Transform Plain Text Into HTML Code — For situations where even Markdown might be overkill (although it is an option..)

🚀 Need to Upgrade to Rails 8.0 + Ruby 3.4 but Not Sure How? — Bonsai by FastRuby.io is the monthly upgrade service trusted by top-notch engineering teams. Upgrade with confidence.

Lrama: Pure Ruby LALR Parser Generator — An official Ruby project to implement an LALR parser generator in pure Ruby with a goal of providing error tolerant Ruby parsing.

Rage: An HTTP API Framework Compatible with Rails — There are plenty of ‘alternative’ Ruby webapp and HTTP API approaches (e.g. Sinatra, Roda, or Hanami) but ‘Rails compatibility’ is the big win for this high performance, fiber-based API-only option. v1.12.0 adds a Redis adapter for scaling Cable-based apps across servers.

Stealthly Browsing and Scraping with Ferrum — Ferrum is a Ruby library for remotely controlling Chrome and Harrison shares some tips for staying under the radar when using it. (As always with these things, obey local laws and use your best judgment as to what is responsible.)

Using CloudFlare Turnstile to Protect Certain Pages on a Rails App — Turnstile is a free service that replaces CAPTCHAs with Cloudflare’s proprietary bot detection approach.

Optimizing Ruby’s JSON — Rails core team member Jean concludes a seven-part series going super deep into efforts made to significantly boost the performance of Ruby’s json library, with the end results trumping many of the alternatives. We linked to this when Jean began the series, but now the whole epic journey is here to enjoy.

Ruby Next: Transpile Modern Ruby Code to Run on Older Versions — An interesting way to get Ruby code written with the latest syntax to run on older versions or alternative implementations (like mruby or Opal, say). This playground shows off the basic idea, and this could be useful for library maintainers or anyone who wants to experiment. GitHub repo.

Zverok's Guide to Ruby 3.4's Language Changes — Each year, Victor blesses us with a mammoth roundup of changes that arose in the Ruby language in the latest major version. Ruby 3.4 wasn’t one of the largest leaps forward in this sense, but he still has lots of great examples here, making this a must read/skim.

Optimize Postgres Performance and Reduce Costs with Crunchy Bridge — YNAB (You Need A Budget) switched to fully managed Crunchy Bridge for Postgres and experienced a 30% performance increase and 10% cost reduction. YNAB enjoys seamless scaling, high availability, and expert support for a better Postgres experience.

Yake 1.2: A DSL for Writing AWS Lambda Handlers Rake-Style — It includes the ability to write Sinatra style routes and feels like an idiomatically Ruby-ish way to work with AWS’s serverless platform.

SyntaxFinder: Analyze Your Ruby Scripts with Prism — A new tool being worked on by Ruby core team member ko1 to find syntax patterns in Ruby code using the new Prism Ruby parser.

Superglue 1.0: A Way to Bring Rails and React Together — Superglue is a library for bringing Rails and React closer together in a way that feels as natural as Rails’ default Hotwire and Stimulus-based approach to the frontend.

Back Away from the Backlog 🛑 — Your product doesn’t need bloat. Simplifying drives bigger outcomes, happier teams, and real impact. Learn how to start now.

Escaping Ruby's Gem:SafeMarshal Sandbox — Gem::SafeMarshal was introduced to RubyGems as a way to ‘safely’ load marshalled specs from gems. Of course, that means folks will set out to see if it really is safe.

What is it (in Ruby 3.4)? — A quick look at one of a minor addition to Ruby 3.4, but one that might change your everyday code because it certainly looks nicer than _1 or |i| i.

Why Bundler Checksums Are a Security Game-Changer — As the source of many of our code’s dependencies, the RubyGems system is a potential vector for security issues. Bundler 2.6 introduced checksum verification as a way to at least ensure the gems you install are identical to the ones recorded in Gemfile.lock.

▶  How To Build Basic Desktop Applications in Ruby — The recently released recording of a workshop given at RubyConf 2024 by the creator of the Glimmer suite of Ruby DSL-driven desktop and Web app building frameworks. We’ll have more on Glimmer in a future issue, but this is a great way to get started.