Bookmarks (1622)

Modern Rails Flash Messages — A two-part series that uses ViewComponent, Tailwind CSS, and Stimulus to make nice flash messages complete with features like soft-delete.

Tracking a PaperTrail Version from a Single Request with Correlation UUIDs — PaperTrail provides a way to track/audit changes to data managed by Active Record models. Here’s how to go a step further from just tracking the history of an object to the specific request that caused changes.

Interacting with NFC on a Raspberry Pi from Ruby with Taptag — Near Field Communications (NFC) is a wireless point-to-point protocol and Taptag works with the Waveshare PN532.

Writing a Ractor Base Job Scheduler — Another Ractor article (which is great), this one focusing on the most parallel-worthy of tasks: job processing. There are some issues, but it’s still very promising.

Staff Engineer (SF) — Join our team, and help us make mortgage closings fast, secure, transparent, and error-free.

▶  Russ Hanneman from Silicon Valley Loves StimulusReflex 3.3 — If you like the TV show Silicon Valley this will give you a laugh as the creators of StimulusReflex, a way to bring reactive, real-time features to Rails, got the Russ Hanneman character to endorse their 3.3 release 😂 The 3.3 release focuses on Morphs, a fresh way to think about how StimulusReflex updates your live pages. Even if you don't like this, it's always fun to see an open source project trying a novel way to get the word out. GitHub repo.

Puma 5: We Made Puma Faster With Sleep Sort — Puma 5 includes three experimental performance enhancements that should reduce latency at high loads and memory usage. They need people to try them and report back, so upgrade and get experimenting.

Reduce Test Time Without Sacrificing Security 🚀 — Run your build infrastructure on your terms. Self-hosted agents mean the choice between the speed of cloud-native and security of on-prem is over. Buildkite works with all source code tools, languages and platforms, speeding up mobile tests at scale. Try now.

Under Deconstruction: The State of Shopify’s Monolith — This is a long post about the status of Shopify’s move to modularity with some wonderful lessons learned and insights on how they got here and where they are going based on what they’ve learnt.

Packwerk: Enforce Boundaries for More Modular Rails Apps — A gem created at Shopify that can be used to enforce boundaries and modularize Rails applications.

Rubyspeed: Compile Basic Ruby Functions to C — Certainly an experimental work in progress, this project compiles (the most primitive of) Ruby functions to C which results in a sizable performance boost. A fun tangent is that the Hacker News post about this project turned into a big debate about the continuing relevance of Ruby (or not) 😏

▶  Triage with Me: 11 Issues and 2 PRs in 1.5 Hours — The creator of CodeTriage takes us behind the curtain to see how he triages and works with issues on open source projects. Well worth watching if you’re curious how to productively work on open source projects or are just curious how another experienced developer does so.

The defined? Keyword in Ruby — block_given? may be slower than defined?(yield) but I know which is easier to read.

A Gentle Introduction to Web Services with Go — Written from a ‘coming from Ruby’ perspective which you might find intriguing.

ValidEmail2: ActiveModel Validation for Email — Check the legitimacy of email addresses including MX lookup and checking against a list of disposable email services.

Ruby Next 0.10.0 Brings in Some Ruby 3.0 Features to Ruby 2 — Specifically, find pattern, leading arguments in forwarding (so def method(name, ...), and Hash#except. Ruby Next is more generally a transpiler and set of polyfills to allow modern Ruby code to run in older versions.

Circuitry: Decouple Apps Using SNS Fanout with SQS Processing — If you’re interested in decoupling your app using message and event passing via AWS’s notification and queue services, this provides a framework to do so.

Klipse: A Javacript Plugin for Embedding Interactive Code Snippets in Blog Posts — Supports many languages, including Ruby, Python, C++, Clojure, and Google Charts. The Ruby interpretation is done via Opal so there will be limitations.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Ruby Object Allocations — A transcription of Richard’s talk at EuRuKo last year that uses a Marie Kondo “Does it bring you joy?” look at allocations and how to remove the joyless offenders. In addition, Richard says: “Follow along as I trace some memory allocation hotspots and clean them up in the Rails codebase,” which sounds good to me.

RubyJard: Just Another Ruby Debugger — It’s early days for this new Byebug and Pry powered debugging system but it already looks pretty cool. Here’s a view of it in action.

▶  30 Talks from RubyKaigi Takeout 2020 — For 2020, the usual RubyKaigi (Japan’s ‘home’ Ruby conference) went virtual in ‘takeout’ form – however, the same high quality of speakers and mixed Japanese/English sessions remained, and now you can enjoy the talks on YouTube. Some highlights:

▶  Discussing Ruby 3.0 JIT and Its Performance Benefits — The Ruby Rogues panelists are joined by Takashi Kokubun who’s developing Ruby’s still experimental JIT functionality – they cover the progress, problems, and strategies for implementing JIT in Ruby to meet expected performance goals.

Principal Engineer (SF/Remote) — Come be a leader here. Raise the bar. We're changing user behavior in an entire industry and need strong engineers to join up.

Fullstack Ruby on Rails Developer (Full Remote) — We're looking for smart devs to join our fast-growing, well-funded company that makes thousand of African fashion designers happy.

▶  Contributing to the Thor Project — In just 18 minutes, this is a neat example of how you might approach improving an existing tool. Thor is a toolkit for building CLIs in Ruby, parsing arguments, etc.

Zero-Downtime Migrations in Rails — More specifically, this is a way to rename a column without downtime or your exception alerts getting upset.

Another Reason to Avoid constantize in Rails — Really, one should avoid using (or overriding) const_missing, as doing so can lead to memory leaks and vulnerabilities.

⌛ TimescaleDB for Ruby Developers Quickstart — Learn how to connect your Rails apps to TimescaleDB (relational time-series database), run your first query & more.

Creating an SMS Reminder Service with Ruby and a Raspberry Pi — I think one could automate their entire house with a few RPis and Ruby.

Rails Concerns: To Concern Or Not To Concern — If you’ve ever seen the app/controllers/concerns and app/models/concerns folders in a Rails app and not gone near them, this is for you.

Rails Adds Support for Adding a Default Value to Rich Text Areas — Expect this to land in Rails 6.1 (which probably isn’t too far away now).

Writing a Ractor-Based TCP Server — Ractor is an actor-like mechanism for getting true parallel execution support in Ruby without any thread safety concerns. An initial implementation has been merged into the main Ruby branch and people are starting to play such as with this attempt at creating an HTTP server. Richard Schneeman’s Twitter thread about ractors is also interesting. The future is coming!

DNS::Zonefile: A Library for Working with DNS Zonefiles — Works with the format as defined in RFC 1035 §5 and RFC 1034 §3.6.1.

Active Admin 2.8: An Administration Framework for Rails — A Rails plugin for generating admin interfaces. v2.8.0 just came out and drops Ruby 2.4 support. GitHub repo.

Elixir Is Not Ruby. Elixir Is Erlang — Elixir is an interesting language that looks somewhat like Ruby but built on top of the Erlang VM. It looks enough like Ruby that we’re often asked to include Elixir tutorials in this newsletter, but it’s a whole different beast 😁

Behavior-Driven Test Data — Most of us truncate the database after a test, but what if we saved that data as input to subsequent tests? Turns out, that could be useful.

Integrating Chargebee Subscriptions and Recurring Billing with a Rails App — Chargebee is a commercial service that helps with subscription management and recurring billing.

A Q&A with Sandi Metz — We talk to the author of Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby and 99 Bottles of OOP. You may have seen this in issue 516.

Tips and Tricks to Protect Your Apps From Link-Based Vulnerabilities — Learn how reverse tabnabbing, broken-link hijacking, and open redirect exploits work so your app isn’t a target.

▶  Using GitHub Actions with a Rails App — GitHub Actions provides a way to automate software workflows in the cloud and this 13-minute screencast covers the basics of setting it up with a Rails app for automated testing, code coverage checking, etc.

The Difference Between let, let! and Instance Variables in RSpec — RSpec’s let helpers provide ways to define values you use within your tests, but you could also use instance variables, right? Jason reflects on the differences.

Rails 5.2.4.4 and 6.0.3.3 Released — To patch a potential XSS vulnerability in Action View (when a default string is used for a missing translation key, the string can be incorrectly marked as HTML safe).

These Rails Apps Are Overpacking Their JavaScript Bundles — Several examples of well-known sites that split their JavaScript into packs, only to make things much worse for the browser and the user. The road to slow page load is paved with good intentions.

symbol-fstring: Access Symbols' Internal Strings Without Duplicating Them — In Ruby 3.0, Symbol#name will return the name of a symbol as an immutable string rather than how Symbol#to_s creates a new string every time it’s involved. This backports the same idea to Ruby 2.7.

Sinatra v2.1.0 Released — Believe it or not, it’s over three years since Sinatra 2.0 dropped, so a 2.1 is a big deal 😁 The popular web application DSL has dropped Ruby 2.2 support, and moved from Thin to Rainbows for the dev-side HTTP server environment, plus a variety of smaller things.