Bookmarks (260)

Tenderlove Cooks Up a Nifty Garbage Collector Optimization — Esteemed core team member Aaron Patterson has come up with a way to speed up Ruby’s garbage collector through the way it marks up instruction sequence objects. This is a very technical PR, but the TLDR is it could make GC ~60% faster in a Rails app (don’t get too excited, as this translates to...

JRuby 9.3.6.0 Released — JRuby 9.3 is the Ruby 2.6.x compatible branch and this is a minor tweak/bugfix release. The Ruby 2.5.x compatible branch sees a similar release in the shape of JRuby 9.2.21.0.

StoreModel 1.0: Handle JSON-Backed Attributes as Active Record Models — Rather than deal with JSON columns as hashes, you can treat them as mini models of their own. AttrJson is also worth a look in this space.

GoodJob 3.0: Postgres-Backed ActiveJob Backend for Rails — Simple to use, multi-threaded, and includes a management dashboard, cron-like scheduling, and job concurrency controls. v3 promises to be an easy upgrade from v2, unless you’re using Rails 5.2 for which support is dropped, but it has a significantly improved dashboard (live demo).

Getting Started with Tailwind CSS in Rails — The basics of setting things up. Can’t help but think Railwind could be a cute name.

Full-Text Search with Elasticsearch in Rails — Elasticsearch is a popular option for adding a powerful full-text search layer on top of other databases (though it is effectively a document database in its own right). This post covers the essentials of working with it from a Rails app.

An Underrated Rails Helper: dom_id — One of the oldest helpers in Rails is also the most underrated, says Matt. dom_id particularly shines for building apps with Hotwire, allowing you to easily target parts of the page without a bunch of icky interpolation.

Fixed Price Monthly Code Maintenance for Rails Apps — No time to do those small but critical updates? If you are struggling to find time, budget or resources to improve your Rails App, there is a fixed price solution for tweaks, bug fixes, upgrades and improvements with CodeCare.

Four Ways to Reduce Your Rubocop Frustrations — Being considered one of Ruby’s most loved and most frustrating Ruby tools is quite the achievement, but this post (which also comes with an optional 11-minute screencast) wants to get it into your 'loved' column only.

Write Cleaner, Self-Documented Tests by Defining Methods in RSpec — Put before, subject, and let to one side, says Caleb who demonstrates how helper methods can provide a cleaner route to similar ends.

Where is Copilot Taking Us? — A founder of Redmonk (a developer-oriented research firm) ruminates on the effects of GitHub Copilot (the new AI-powered ‘pair programmer’ service), focusing on legality, security, and quality questions.

Shopify's Updated Ruby Style Guide — Shopify, perhaps the world’s biggest Ruby shop nowadays (in both senses of the word!), maintains its own Ruby style guide inspired by Bozhidar Batsov and Rubocop’s even more extensive guide. Always good to see resources like this maintained, even if in baby steps.

Vite-lizing Rails: Get Live Reload and Hot Replacement with Vite Ruby — If you hang around in the JavaScript world, you’ve probably heard about Vite, a sister project of Vue.js, and how it simplifies and speeds up the frontend dev experience. Vite Ruby brings the party to Ruby and this post explores its value in live reloading, hot replacement, and asset compilation.

HTTP.rb 5.1: The Fast Ruby HTTP Client — Cards on the table - I’m biased, HTTP is my personal Ruby HTTP gem of choice. 5.1 is the first release of 2022 and while it’s low on new features, it’s always good to see such fundamental libraries being maintained.

rstfilter: VS Code Extension to See Execution Results Line by Line — It’s always interesting to see a new tool from a Ruby core team member, and you might find this one useful if you’re a VS Code user and enjoy a bit of puts/p-style debugging! Reminds us of Quokka in the JavaScript space.

RedisGreen: Secure, Scalable, Full-Featured Redis 7 Hosting — The latest Redis features, instrumented and scaled with the tools teams need as they grow.

Rails' Discord Server Now Open to the Public — It’s been a long time since I’ve hung out online talking about Rails (remember how great Freenode was 2005-2008?) but if you’re interested in discussing the technicalities of contributing to Rails (or just lurking, I guess), there’s an official Discord server for the purpose. It’s not for general support though – if you need that,...

Scaling Rails WebSockets in Kubernetes with AnyCable — Vito explains how he switched from the standard ActionCable to AnyCable to improve the scalability of the WebSockets mechanism behind his app.

▶  How to Build an Instagram Clone with Hotwire — A six-minute screencast showing off already written code for creating an Instagram style feature. I like these looks behind more complex examples rather than solely focusing on the bare basics.

U Up? Let People Know with Beautiful Status Pages from Honeybadger 😘 — We've added support for custom domains and branding on our public status pages - free on all current plans 🦡

Why Ruby on Rails is Still a Good Choice in 2022 — More a selection of talking points, stats, and rebuttals to criticisms of Ruby than anything technical but a little cheerleading never hurt anyone.

State Machines in Ruby: A Simple Introduction — A bitesize example in plain Ruby before moving on to using the state_machines library for a less verbose, DSL-led approach.

Caught Out by fetch's Second Argument — A basic but easy overlooked tripping point to Hash#fetch one developer stumbled upon.

Motion 0.7: Pure Ruby Reactive Frontend UI Components for Rails — Uses ActionCable and ViewComponent to let you essentially write front-end logic but entirely on the Ruby backend. Check out the demos.

Webspicy: A Framework for Black Box Testing of Web Services — There’s a handy three-minute screencast showing it off. The basic idea is you write specifications in YAML to test inputs and outputs for HTTP-based APIs.

xchan.rb: Send Ruby Objects Between Ruby Processes with UNIX Sockets — The processes need to have a parent-child relationship.

Ruby LSP 0.1: An Implementation of the LSP Spec — This VS Code extension then hooks into this.

Code I Like: Domain-Driven Boldness at Basecamp — Jorge gives us some examples of how the folks at Basecamp employ domain-driven design (a.k.a. DDD) resulting in maintainable, readable code that might inspire you to do the same.

The Case for Pattern Matching Key Irreverence in Ruby — A thoughtful post that puts forth a keyword argument-type approach for pattern matching arguments stemming from a GitHub issue on Ruby’s csv library. Read it and give your opinion.

Fight Bugs with AppSignal in Multiplayer Mode — Fighting bugs on your own is hard. You need to get information from your app, understand the problem, and come up with possible solutions. With AppSignal, the whole team comes together.

Why attr_accessor is Faster than Regular Methods — attr_accessor, attr_writer and attr_reader are just shorthand for defining getter and setter methods, right? Yes and no. Dmitry heads down to the bytecode level to see why attr_ produced methods are a little faster than rolling your own.

Making Popular Ruby Packages More Secure — Mirroring similar moves by GitHub with the npm registry, RubyGems’ maintainers want to improve the security of the Ruby ecosystem by making maintainers of the most popular gems use multi-factor authentication on their RubyGems accounts to mitigate account takeovers. How popular? “Anybody who maintains a gem with more than 165 million downloads”.. 😮

Building a Chat App with Hanami and Hotwire — Brings together the elegant Hanami with Hotwire’s ‘HTML over the wire’ approach for a particularly tight and tidy and idiomatically Rubyish experience.

How a Rubyist Made $50,000 Profit from a Side Project Slack Bot — The $50,000 number is less interesting than the story of the five years it took to build the project to get there, giving real insight into how actual side projects work.

Migrating from Webpacker to esbuild — If you feel the need to move away from Webpacker, this guide will show you the ins and outs of transitioning to esbuild smoothly, including working around some deficiencies (like hot module reloading).

Cross Platform Machine Code — Aaron (aka Tenderlove) wanted to write a conditional-free (but pizazz-filled) set of tests for assemblers on different platforms, which he recounts here. If you’re into assembly, read on.

Self-Destructing StimulusJS Controllers — A great approach when you need a little bit of client-side behavior without a lot of cleanup.

Lockbox 1.0: Modern Encryption for Ruby and Rails — Got sensitive information you’d like to keep secure? This integrates with Active Record, Action Text, Mongoid, and more to help get it done in an ‘easy to use, hard to misuse’ way.

Phonelib 0.7: Validate Phone Numbers Using Google's libphonenumber Data — Can perform basic validations and formatting checks on international phone numbers.

Strong Migrations 1.1: Catch Unsafe Migrations in Development — Detects potentially dangerous operations and prevents them running by default.

Sidekiq 6.5: Simple, Efficient Background Processing — 6.5.0 features refactoring of Sidekiq’s internals, beta support for redis-client, and beta support for DB transaction-aware clients.

What Would It Take for Roda to Win? — The creator of the Bridgetown site generator (which itself uses Roda at its heart) explains why he’s such a huge fan of the popular routing-oriented webapp library and how it bridges the gap between small and larger Ruby webapps better than, say, Sinatra.

Why GitLab is Sticking with Rails — The CEO of the popular git forge/devops platform reflects on why GitLab started with Rails (despite its founder coming from a PHP background) and why maintaining a ‘modular monolith’ continues to make sense for them.

AppSignal Logbook: Team Discussion and Full Incident History — With Logbook you get the full incident history. Read and leave team comments, see which notifications were sent at what time, and see team activity for changes in incident states. It's easier than ever to see what the current state of an incident is.

'I Built a Ruby Parser' — A story of a side project that led to Natalie, an early-stage alternative Ruby implementation with ahead-of-time compilation, and the up-and-down journey of getting to something that works. (Natalie can already work with a reasonable subset of Ruby, as seen in an example like this.)

Observability for Your Ruby Test Suites — Get instant, real-time visibility into the performance of your Minitest and RSpec tests with Buildkite Test Analytics.