Bookmarks (247)

Prism in 2024 — Ruby 3.3 included a new standard library called Prism, a Ruby language parser that can be used internally by Ruby itself or as a library by your own code. It’s been a huge effort, and Kevin shares the full story of Ruby parsing (starting all the way back in 1994!) and how Prism is rapidly becoming a key part of...

validates_email_format_of: Validate Email Addresses Against RFC 2822 and RFC 3696 — “This gem is the O.G. email validation gem for Rails.” It can now validate email addresses using internationalized domain names too.

Zammad 6.3: A Web-Based Open Source Customer Support System — A long standing, full scale Rails app (currently on Rails 7.0) that we first linked to seven years ago! If you need an app to handle an influx of emails for management by a team of agents, this is for you. Screenshots.

APM Deployment That Isn’t Painful and Is Free - Try Scout Monitoring — Renaissance developers, rejoice. One gem, five minutes to performance insights. No DevOps team required.

Gemfast: A Drop-in Replacement for Geminabox — A new self-hosted Rubygems server written in Go, so it can be compiled down a single file and easily deployed on multiple operating systems. You can mirror and cache gems from the main RubyGems registry, as well as serve up your own internal gems, of course.

sqlite3-ruby 2.0: The Popular Ruby SQLite Driver — As implied by the version number, this is a major release and, notably, drops support for Ruby 2.7. Native gems are now shipped for 11 platforms, newly including an array of Musl-based Linux ones. It now runs SQLite 3.45.3 and there are numerous smaller improvements.

Making a (Sidekiq) Batch Recipe — If you have multiple jobs that can run concurrently, but you need to bring their individual outputs together, you can batch them and listen for callbacks, provided you’re a Sidekiq Pro user.

▶  Implementing One Time Payments with Pay and Stripe — Pay is a gem that implements a payments engine for Rails and you can quite quickly integrate it with Stripe to get one-time payments in your apps. (39 minutes.)

Need to Pay Down Tech Debt on a Budget? Let’s Talk 🚀 — Too many vulnerabilities? Too much tech debt slowing you down? FastRuby.io’s maintenance services start at $2,000/month.

How I Read the Rails Source Code — How do you start reading the code for a codebase the size (and age) of Rails? Grab the debug gem (Rails includes it) and use Bundler to start your coding journey. You can use a similar approach for running all (or some) of Rails’ tests, too.

A Reintroduction to Ruby's Heredocs — If you think you know everything you need to know about heredocs (essentially a syntax for multi-line strings), this article might throw up some surprises.

SQLite on Rails: The How and Why of Optimal Performance — Stephen is the person I look to when it comes to thinking about using SQLite in Ruby and Rails, and he’s been digging deep into the hows and whys of getting the best performance out of a SQLite + Rails setup. Here, he also covers some of the problems he’s stumbled upon (and...

Memetria: Secure, Scalable Redis Hosting — High performance Redis hosting with large key tracking, detailed metrics, and a superior uptime record.

Creating a Flappy Bird Clone with Ruby — How has it been ten years since Flappy Bird was the hit game of the moment?

CrystalRuby: Embed Crystal Code Directly in Ruby — Crystal is a Ruby inspired programming language that boasts a lot of great features and is well worth a try IMHO. One benefit is performance, and this gem lets you write Crystal code, inlined in Ruby, giving you a potential performance boost without a huge shift in syntax. New and YMMV!

🇯🇵  Matz on Static vs Dynamic Typing — This article is in Japanese, so get your browser’s translation feature ready. It’s a transcript of thoughts by Ruby’s creator (in a talk given in 2022) on the pros and cons of static and dynamic typing, and why Ruby hasn’t adopted type declarations so far (complexity and potential bad feelings in the broader Ruby community).

A Docs-First Approach to Rails API Development? — Writing documentation for APIs is rarely an exciting job and often gets left till last, but what if you wrote it first? This article looks at how this can work in practice, and introduces Skooma, a new Ruby library for validating API implementations against OpenAPI documents.

▶  Setting up Ruby and Rails on Windows and WSL — If you’re considering 'doing a DHH' and giving Windows a try for Ruby development, this quick look at setting up a fresh Windows 11 environment for Rails development could be very handy.

Using Lambdas and Callables for Deferred Evaluation, Control Flow, and New Language Patterns — When might you write a block vs a “stabby lambda?” Procs and blocks and lambdas (oh my!) are fantastic and while Ruby has conventions and patterns to follow, there’s a lot you can do with the basics, as Jared shows here.

How Our Amazon ECS Autoscaler Works — Building an autoscaler for ECS was a bit more complex than a Heroku add-on, so here’s a taste of our secret sauce.

Abstract Methods and NotImplementedError — Learn what the NotImplementedError exception is actually for and some other approaches for handling situations where abstract classes don’t provide methods meant to be implemented in their subclasses.

How PlanetScale Makes Schema Changes — Did you know Rails powers the popular MySQL platform’s main API? Here’s a look at how they approach handling schema changes at scale by separating migrations from deploys, along with some GitHub Actions and PlanetScale’s own magic.

Maybe MOAR Is Not the Answer 🫠 — Turns out a relentless push for MOAR features and developers was wrong. Leaders could do with some reflection on less.

Synvert: Write Code Snippets to Transform Existing Source Code — Supporting Ruby, JavaScript, and TypeScript, this is essentially a scripted, AST-powered form of 'find and replace' for code, letting you implement code transformations in a structured way. It can even be given input and output code and write a potential transformation for you to tweak. Full Ruby docs here and a bunch of example...

Phlex 1.10.0: Build Object Oriented View in Ruby — A minor release by number, a pretty big release by features! Phlex lets you treat everything in a view as a distinct component and manage them as plain old Ruby objects. v1.10 unveils some exciting experimental features including selective rendering, component kits, and CSV view rendering – all explained in detail here.

form_props: The Power of Rails Forms, Now for React Too — If you want the convenience of form_with but when building forms in React apps, this is for you. GitHub repo.

Need to Upgrade Rails with Zero Downtime? — Ready for Rails 7.2? Top-notch engineering teams (from startups to Fortune 500 companies) trust the FastRuby.io team in mission-critical upgrades. Leverage our 30,000+ dev hours of experience: Get to Ruby 3.3 and Rails 7.2 with zero downtime🔥

▶  🤡 How to Make Your Rails App 'Fart' — Clearly intended as an April Fools’ joke, but with a nonetheless practical angle that you could hopefully use for something more edifying than fart noises.. 😅

Rails 8 Adding Rate Limiting to Action Controller via Kredis Limiter Type — Rails 8 will provide a rate_limit method to define rate limiting rules within controllers.

Introducing Ruzzy: A Coverage-Guided Ruby Fuzzer — Fuzzing is a form of dynamic testing that feeds random inputs to a test subject and Ruzzy is the latest gem to offer fuzzing Ruby code. After a quick usage example, there’s a lot of information here about implementation details.

Gemsmith 21.5: CLI Tool for Smithing New Ruby Gems — An ideal tool if you want to go a step beyond Bundler’s gem skeletons. The homepage does a good job showing off the main features, but there’s also its GitHub repo.

📋 Clipboard: Cross-Platform Access to the Clipboard — A library of over 10 years’ vintage, but still maintained, supporting modern versions of Ruby (including JRuby), and clipboard access on Linux, macOS, Windows, WSL, and more.

PermanentRecords: Soft-Delete for Your ActiveRecord Records — A way to prevent Active Record objects being destroyed, as long as their model has a deleted_at column available. An alternative to ActsAsParanoid.

React on Rails 14: Bringing React, Webpack, and Rails Together — A major release because Ruby 2.7 support is dropped, but otherwise broadly stays the same and still worth a look if you want to integrate more closely with React in a Rails app – here’s how it works.

ActiveRecordCursorPaginate: Cursor-Based Pagination for Active Record — Paginate through an AR relation using cursor pagination. It also supports ordering by any column on the relation.

Kamal: Hot Deployment Tool to Watch — or a Game Changer? — First published about what was then called MRSK, the Evil Martians have updated their take on DHH’s container-based deployment tool from a 2024 perspective. If you’re not yet using Kamal or want to understand when/why you should/shouldn’t use it, this is for you.

Vernier: A Next Generation CRuby (3.2+) Profiler — A sampling profiler that can track multiple threads, GVL activity, GC pauses, idle time, and more. If you’ve been enjoying Tenderlove’s recent livestreams, you may have ▶️ seen it on there. Once you’ve captured a profile, you can view it in a few ways (including on the web), but here’s some example output.

RubyGems Not Vulnerable to the xz/liblzma Backdoor — If you follow tech news more broadly, you’ll have seen news about a backdoor in the xz/liblzma project. While the vulnerability has far reaching implications, the RubyGems team has done an audit of its effect on RubyGems (including every gem) and found no issues.

Ruby Benchmark: Data.define, Struct, OpenStruct — A comparison of Data.define, Struct, OpenStruct – all ways to conveniently define data objects.

▶  Frontend Ruby with Glimmer DSL for Web — A talk from last month’s Montreal.rb meetup by Andy Maleh, best known for his work on Glimmer, about taking Ruby into the browser to create frontend apps.

RubyFann 2.0: Library for Interfacing with FANN (Fast Artificial Neural Network) — FANN is an open-source C library for implementing multilayer neural networks. RubyFann provides the bindings so you can build and train your own neural networks entirely from Ruby.

HotwireCombobox: A Turbo + Stimulus Autocompleting Combobox — Simple, sweet, and well explained on the homepage, complete with live demo. Designed for modern Rails 7 apps. GitHub demo.

Brute-Forcing a 2FA System with Ruby — This was to pass a made-up security exercise, not to actually break anything, but provides an example of how Ruby can appeal to cybersecurity professionals.

14 Tools and Gems Every Ruby Developer Would Love — I wouldn’t usually feature a list-driven article but this has been a quiet week and it's a good one! Joé rounds up his favorite tools and gems of the moment, covering areas from email and databases to performance monitoring and analytics. All solid recommendations.

Do You Tune Out Ruby Deprecation Warnings? — In the middle of a project, it’s easy to overlook warnings, but you can tweak how they are reported.

rails-new: Create a New Rails App Without Ruby Installed — A new official project under the Rails org. It works by using Docker to take care of making the right versions of Ruby and Rails available. An interesting idea in its initial stages. Built in Rust.

Need to Upgrade Rails with Zero Downtime? — Ready for Rails 7.2? Top-notch engineering teams (from startups to Fortune 500 companies) trust the FastRuby.io team in mission-critical upgrades. Leverage our 30,000+ dev/hs of experience: Get to Ruby 3.3 and Rails 7.1 with zero downtime 🔥

Solid Queue 0.3: The Active Job Backend Gains Recurring Jobs — First introduced just three months ago, Solid Queue is already a great way to run background jobs on modern Rails apps and v0.3 gets even better by adding support for cron-style recurring tasks.