Bookmarks (177)

Ruby 3.5.0 Preview 1 Released — Christmas Day may be eight months away, but it’s time to start counting the days to Ruby 3.5’s eventual release with this initial preview version. The updates are far less significant than for 3.4 so far, but if you’re a library developer, it’s worth putting it through its paces early.

🤖 Raif: An AI Framework in a Rails Engine — There are many Ruby libraries for interacting with LLMs and AI APIs now, but Raif goes a step further with a web-based admin interface and some abstractions around tasks, conversations, creating agents, and embedding generation that integrate into Rails apps in an idiomatic way.

Errbit: A Self Hosted Error Catcher — If you want to catch and manage errors from production apps in a structured way, this is for you. It’s compatible with the Airbrake API so you can use the existing airbrake gem with it.

Introducing Herb: A New HTML-Aware ERB Parser for Smarter Developer Tooling — Herb was created to help view-based tooling catch up with the rest of the Rails tooling stack. It’s written in C, so it’s suitable for real-time development, and it comes with a slick playground so you can see it in action.

TableTennis: Print Stylish Tables at the Terminal — A Ruby library for printing tabular data in the terminal that includes theming (e.g. light or dark), automatic layout, automatic formatting of dates and numbers, coloring for numeric values, and more.

Because Reading Error Logs Is Not a Hobby — When *$!% breaks, you want to quickly understand and fix it—not sift through logs for the next hour. Learn how Honeybadger can help →

Extracting Deprecation Warnings from Rails' Source Code — While FastRuby does this to improve their Rails upgrade services, you could use similar techniques for all sorts of Ruby source processing shenanigans.

mruby 3.4.0 Released — mruby began life about ten years ago as an alternative lightweight standards-compliant Ruby implementation (led by Matz himself) with a focus on being both small and embeddable. v3.4 adds private and protected support and several new hooks.

JRuby 10.0 Released — Before Easter, we mentioned the imminent release of JRuby 10, the latest Ruby 3.4-compatible version of the high performance JVM-based Ruby implementation which Charles Oliver Nutter explained in depth here. It’s now out, for real, and marks a huge leap forward for the project.

🚀 FastRuby.io Makes Your Rails Upgrade Delightfully Boring with Bonsai — FastRuby.io’s monthly maintenance service keeps uptime high and costs low (starting at $4,000/month). The team behind next_rails offers Bonsai for gradual, 0-downtime upgrades — making upgrading Ruby and Rails feel delightfully boring.

RoR in 2025: Outdated or Underrated? — From fast frontends to smart backends, Rails is leveling up. Check out its potential with Hotwire, modern SQLite, and AI-powered capabilities for building robust apps. Build better, deliver faster with the latest RoR trends.

Hypershield 0.5: Shield Sensitive Data in Postgres and MySQL — Looking to hide sensitive data to help comply with GDPR, say? Hypershield creates ‘shielded’ views that can hide sensitive tables and columns.

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

RubyLLM 1.1: Work with AI the Ruby Way — One of a recent group of libraries to simplify working with LLM models provided by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and DeepSeek from Ruby. (Homepage.) v1.1 extends support to AWS Bedrock, adds configurable retries and smarter tool error handling, and provides a simpler way to provide system prompts.

Introducing MonkeysPaw: A Prompt-Driven Web Framework in Ruby — You probably won’t be rolling this into production any time soon, but MonkeysPaw explores the curious idea of just writing pages as prompts and then letting a large language model just get on with it(!)

▶️ Boolean vs Datetime for Marking States — Rather than mark a row in your database as being published or unpublished, boolean style, why not use a datetime column to indicate when it was published? David looks at how this can work in a Rails app.

Heroku SSL Revisited (2025 Edition) — Reflections on the quirks of getting Heroku and Cloudflare to play nicely together when it comes to certificates – something that is now achievable, says Adam.

Let There Be Docs: Generating an OpenAPI Schema Across the Rails Stack — Do you prefer to write API docs first or start with the implementation? For the latter, it’s possible to use Typelizer and RSwag to automatically extract type info from serializers, controllers, and the database that stays synchronized with the implementation.

📅  Ruby Events: 6,000+ Talks from 200+ Ruby Events — Formerly known as Ruby Video, this mammoth repository of Ruby videos and event information is only getting better and better. The goal is to index all Ruby events, and their talks, and make it easier to look through them.

JRuby 10: 'Our Most Important Release Ever' — I think it’s easy to argue the JVM-based JRuby is the second most important Ruby implementation behind CRuby, so it’s exciting to see it take a huge step forward with Ruby 3.4 compatibility, Java 21 support, and more optimizations enabled by default. v10 is ready to use now, though it’s not formally released till next week....

Hiding Unfinished Features in Rails — A quick and easy tip for adding a under_construction helper that hides features outside of the development environment.

RubyUI 1.0: Reusable Copy-and-Paste Components for Rails Apps — Formerly known as PhlexUI, RubyUI is a collection of reusable Phlex-powered components you can generate or copy and paste into your apps. There’s full documentation, as well as a page for each of the 43 components on offer, covering things like badges, checkboxes, cards, sheets, and tables. GitHub repo.

How Ruby Makes Advanced CLI Options Easy — Ruby’s OptionParser standard library offers a straightforward way to work with command line options without pulling in any dependencies.

💤 Make Ruby Upgrades Budget-Friendly & Boringly Reliable — FastRuby’s fixed-cost, monthly maintenance services keep security tight and uptime high. The team behind the `next_rails` gem makes tech debt remediation feel delightfully boring so your team can keep up with your product roadmap. 🚀

Profiling Rails Apps with Rails Debugbar — Julien Bourdeau’s DebugBar gives you an extra way to get insights into what your Rails app is doing behind the scenes, directly from a toolbar in the browser. Akshay explains how to use it to find things worth fixing.

🛤️ Don’t Let Tech Debt Stop You in Your Tracks — Hire engineers with 15 years of experience to keep your Ruby on Rails app up to date, stable, and secure.

Nōdo: A Way to Call Node.js from Ruby — A mechanism for letting Ruby scripts make calls to Node.js-based functions via a Unix socket-based IPC approach. (We also learn that “ノード” means “node” in Japanese.)

Rage 1.15: An HTTP API Framework Compatible with Rails — A high performance, fiber-based API-only Web framework that boasts compatibility with Rails. v1.15.0 introduces an OpenAPI Explorer for experimenting with Rage’s OpenAPI support without needing to set up a project first.

bidi2pdf: Convert a URL to PDF using Ruby and Chrome — A proof of concept offering both a CLI and Ruby library interface to using Chrome to render PDFs of Web pages.

Fast MCP: A Ruby Implementation of the Model Context Protocol — MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers enable certain LLM-based agents (such as Claude, Claude Code, and Cursor) to perform actions/call tools outside of their usual restricted environment. This library lets you build tools in Ruby which such agents can then reach out to and use.

Terrapin 1.1: Run Shell Commands Safely — A little extra abstraction for running shell commands that provides safer interpolation, particularly if using user-supplied values.

RuboCop v1.75.0: The Static Code Analyzer and Formatter — RuboCop gains improved support for Ruby 3.4. As creator Bozhidar Batsov noted on X: “You won’t be able to tell it from the outside, but this release required a ton of work to get to the point where Ruby 3.4 functionality was exposed via Prism’s Parser translation layer.”

PicoRuby: A Tiny Ruby Implementation for Microcontrollers — An interesting alternative mruby implementation designed to get its footprint down even smaller to run on small one-chip microcontrollers. Just 256KB of ROM and 128KB of RAM is needed.

🚀 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.

Examples of Value Objects with Ruby's Data Class — We linked to Lucian’s article on value objects last week. He follows up with some useful examples of using them to remove boilerplate code and handle API responses.

A Practical Guide to Taming Postgres Isolation Anomalies — A practical, Ruby-themed (though SQL heavy) walkthrough of Postgres’ concurrency control, detailing real-world issues like lost updates, write skew, and other isolation anomalies. Even if you rarely run into conflicts, you’ll come away with valuable insights on managing transactions.

New Policies to Support the Growth of RubyGems — In response to a potential legal issue that arose around taking down a gem with a possibly trademarked name, Ruby Central is tightening up its official policies which can be read in full here – the policies will take final effect in late May, after a review period.

Exploring Ruby Ractors — Inspired by some recent posts about Ractors, John set out to see if he could use them to peg his CPU usage (“I paid for 10 cores, I’m gonna use 10 cores”). A fun exploration, including a look at just how much YJIT contributes to the modern Ruby performance story.

NEW: Get Real-Time Alerts from Your Logs in Honeybadger — We just shipped a new feature for log management. Alarms allow you to combine a query (“count all slow requests in the past five minutes”) with a threshold (”when count is > 2”) and trigger alerts when the result exceeds the threshold. Read the blog post →

Ruby 3.2.8 and 3.1.7 Released — These minor releases fix the vulnerabilities in CGI and URI described here. Ruby 3.1.7 is also considered the final release of the 3.1 series with users encouraged to upgrade to 3.3 or 3.4.

▶  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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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, 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.