Bookmarks (177)

Ruby 3.4's Modular Garbage Collection and MMTk — Ruby’s garbage collector has been the subject of numerous tweaks and improvements over the years, but in Ruby 3.4 you can replace it with an alternative implementation at runtime. It’s a cutting edge, experimental idea, but will allow implementers to improve things and try out new approaches faster.

Active Record Adapter for AWS Aurora DSQL — The “very beginnings” of an Active Record connection adapter for Amazon’s new Aurora DSQL database (essentially a Postgres-compatible serverless, distributed database service).

Rumale 1.0: A Machine Learning Library for Ruby — Offers a similar interface to Python’s Scikit-Learn for working with support vector machines, regression, perceptrons, decision trees, K-means, component analysis, and similar concepts and algorithms.

Sanitize 7.0: Ruby HTML and CSS Sanitizer — A popular, long-standing library that, oddly, we’ve never linked to before despite using it a lot. Sanitize removes all HTML and/or CSS from a string you supply except for the things you want it to contain. v7.0 requires Ruby 3.1+ and improves its set of default ‘relaxed’ rules to fit modern standards.

Gem Shop: A Vulnerable Rails 8 App for Security Education — An intentionally vulnerable Rails app with various security issues so you can see them, explore fixes, and learn about cybersecurity issues in a more hands-on manner rather than encountering them via a text message at 4am..

Refrigerator: A Way to Freeze All Core Ruby Classes — Designed to be used in both production and testing to make sure no code is making unexpected changes to core classes or modules at runtime.

Dissecting Puma: Anatomy of a Ruby Web Server — You might need a few cups of coffee at the ready for this epic! Dan digs into the popular Puma server for serving up Rack apps over HTTP and covers a huge amount of ground about how it works.

Can Kamal Really Beat a PaaS? ⚔️ Read the Developer’s Guide — With Rails 8 hot off the presses, we explore just how far Kamal can take your app.. and exactly where it can’t! 😱

How Honeybadger Migrated from Sidekiq to Karafka — Honeybadger ran into some limitations with Sidekiq’s Redis backend, so decided to try Karafka’s Kafka-based approach. Here’s what they learnt.

A Simple Trick to Understand Ruby’s Lazy Enumerator — This article employs some simple, effective, and interactive visuals to drive home the benefit of lazy enumeration in Ruby.

Useful Things You Can Do with the Rails Console — It’s always a good sign when you see people linking to an article saying they’ve been using the Rails console for ten years or more and still learnt something from it! There’s a lot of great stuff here.

💎 The Previous Ruby Weekly, If You Missed It — I wouldn’t normally feature a prior issue, but it was a ‘surprise’ one to focus on the Christmas Day Ruby 3.4 release, so it’s worth a read if you missed it. We also had some sad news about a much appreciated community member, Noah Gibbs.

Ruby 3.4 Released — It wouldn’t be Christmas without a major Ruby release and this year delivers Ruby 3.4 complete with a variety of improvements and updates:

eBook: Best Practices for Enterprise-Scale DevOps — Learn how to improve software quality, lower support costs, and effectively enable DevOps teams.

A Fresh Getting Started with Rails Tutorial — By way of the Rails Foundation, investments have been made in Rails 8.0 learning materials, starting off with this revamped ‘getting started’ guide, covering building a complete site using all Rails 8 has to offer — including the built-in authentication generator, Solid Queue, Solid Cache, and Kamal. Numerous Rails Guides have also been updated with new...

Optimizing Ruby’s JSON — The new maintainer of Ruby's json gem decided to focus on performance and shares the tale of how a little profiling led to relatively straightforward tweaks yielding improvements for all of us. (This is a two parter, for now, with part two here.)

🎄“All I Want for Christmas Is a Boring, Slow, & Steady Rails Upgrade” — Top engineering teams rely on Bonsai for 0-downtime upgrades—making technical debt remediation feel delightfully boring.

1. A Decent VS Code Setup for Ruby and Rails Development — A demonstration, if any were needed, of how popular VS Code is in the Ruby space now. “Setting up VS Code for Ruby on Rails development can be tricky, so I wrote this article to help. In it, I share different VS Code extensions for things like autocomplete, linting, formatting and more.”

2. 'VSCode + WSL Makes Windows Awesome for Web Development' — Amazingly popular despite being a brief link at the time. In early 2024, DHH was doing all sorts of experimentation with his dev setup and was enjoying a brief Windows phase (before ultimately falling in love with Linux and releasing Omakub.)

4. How Does Sidekiq Work? — Sidekiq remains the most heavily used background job system in the Ruby world (though Active Job is giving it a run for its money in Rails 8) and this post went deep into how it works, its architecture, and what’s going on under the hood.

5. A Cookbook of Ruby One-Liners — Ruby is fantastic for one-liners, whether in IRB or from the command line. We’ve linked to this cookbook before but it continues to prove very useful and is always a popular item.

14 Tools and Gems Every Ruby Developer Would Love — Fine, it's a bit of a cheat, but this was the most clicked link relating to code and tools ;-) Joé rounded up his favorite tools and gems as of early 2024, covering areas from email and databases to performance monitoring and analytics. All solid recommendations.

37signals' Open Sourced Thruster — Thruster, first seen as part of the Campfire app, is a minimal HTTP/2 proxy for production Rails deployments – it runs alongside Puma but offers HTTP/2, Caching, SSL via LetsEncrypt, and static file serving with compression, filling a similar role to Traefik or Caddy. It ended up becoming a key part of Rails 8.0.)

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

Cyperful: An Interactive System Testing UI for Capybara — One developer’s side project to offer a Cypress-like experience, but for Ruby developers. You can visualize assertions/commands as they happen, view all API requests, errors, and logs in the timeline, etc. No updates in months, but maybe this mention will encourage the developer to pick it up again..? 🤞

Vernier: A Next Gen CRuby 3.2+ Profiler — A sampling profiler that can track multiple threads, GVL activity, GC pauses, idle time, etc. It’s just reached v1.5 which now records fiber activity too.

Ruby 3.4.0 Release Candidate 1 Released — Christmas is almost here, and that means the imminent release of Ruby 3.4. If you haven’t played with it yet, 3.4.0-rc1 is worth trying as it includes everything the final release will, including the switch over to the Prism parser (so certainly worth testing). We’ll do a full 3.4 rundown once it’s released, but this is a...

Keeping Rails Cool: The Modern Frontend Toolkit — If you’re like me, building backend apps is the fun part and the frontend.. not so much. With numerous approaches to building frontends for Rails apps, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, but Irina explains four tools/approaches to keep things simple.

10 Tips from 10 Years of Hotwire Native — Admittedly, Hotwire Native only launched a few months ago, but Joe has been working with its underlying ancestor technologies for a long time.

Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer — If even looking at Python is sacrilege to you, skip this one, but Andrew does a reasonable job of comparing two rather different ecosystems, but one you may be asked to look at with Python's current lingua franca status.

Turbo Morphing Woes — We all know inventing the ship also invented the shipwreck. Morphing has some excellent applications but also comes with a new set of gotchas.

Product for Engineers: A Newsletter Helping Flex Your Product Muscle — Get curated advice on building great products, lessons from building PostHog, and the strategies of top startups.

Nokogiri v1.17.0: The Long Standing XML and HTML Library — As a mature library, Nokogiri doesn’t see many big updates, and while this is a stability/bugfix release, it’s a substantial one with improvements to the SAX parsers, fragment parsing, error handling, and schema validation. Keyword arguments have also been added to many methods, thanks to RubyConf 2024 Hack Day participants.

Rails Icons 1.0: Add SVG Icon Libraries to Rails Apps — You can set any one of a number of popular icon libraries as the default and then use those icons (which are dynamically pulled from their home repos) easily with a quick helper. GitHub repo.

rvm-windows 1.0: A Ruby Version Manager for Windows — Despite the name, this isn’t related to RVM but offers similar functionality for native Windows use cases (no Cygwin or WSL needed) whether at the traditional Windows command line or in PowerShell.

ferrum-har: Capture Ferrum Traffic to a HAR File — Quite niche, but quite handy too if you’re using the Ferrum gem to remote control a Chrome instance and you want to log the interactions in HAR format.

▶  Botcasts: A Do-It-Yourself Hotwire-Powered Podcast Player — This isn’t ready to run, but is the foundation for an interactive tutorial called Hotwire Essentials where you build a dynamic podcast player with the latest Rails and Hotwire features.

Lightstorm: A Minimalistic Ruby Compiler — It’s not every week we get to hear of a new Ruby implementation or compiler, especially not on the official LLVM blog. Lightstorm (source here) comes from the same folks as DragonRuby and is largely motivated by potential performance gains.

💤 Make Rails Upgrades Budget-Friendly & Boringly Reliable — Stuck on Rails 5.2? FastRuby.io’s monthly maintenance keeps costs low and complexity minimal. Top engineering teams rely on Bonsai for gradual, 0-downtime upgrades—making technical debt remediation feel delightfully boring.

Oniguruma-to-ES: Convert Patterns from the Oniguruma Regex Engine to Native JS — Oniguruma is a powerful regex engine used by Ruby, TextMate, and other projects. This could be useful if you need to share regexes between Ruby, TextMate grammars, and JavaScript, say. There’s a demo.

pg_query 6.0: Parse, Deparse and Normalize SQL Queries with Postgres' Own Parser — Uses the actual Postgres server source to parse SQL queries and return their internal Postgres parse tree. v6.0 upgrades to using the Postgres 17 parser and the new features it supports (e.g. new JSON functions).

Building a Better Ruby ORM for Time Series and Analytics — TimescaleDB is a popular extension for adding high performance time series data functions to Postgres and the Timescale team has been working on a way to bring its enhanced time series features into Active Record.

Mission Control Jobs 1.0 Released — A dashboard and set of extensions that improve the operation and monitoring of background jobs running through Active Job and Solid Queue (or Resque).

Ruby Evolution: New Ruby Features Added in 2.0 → 3.3 — First launched a couple of years ago covering up to Ruby 3.1, Victor’s handy resource covering the key changes to the Ruby language over the years now goes up to Ruby 3.3. A fantastic way to check your knowledge of modern Ruby features.

What You Need to Know About SQLite — Lessons on what the SQLite database engine can and cannot do, how Rails helps you work with SQLite, and why it may, or may not, be a good choice to back your Rails 8 app.

Overriding Methods in Rails: A No-Code-Editing Approach — How to override a class or instance method without editing its source file in Rails.

Rails is Better 'Low Code' Than 'Low Code' — Radan plays out parallel story arcs for a ‘simple’ CRUD app that evolves new features and ultimately hits the low code ceiling. This thought piece provoked a rather lively Hacker News discussion.

▶  An Interview with Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto — Ruby’s creator Matz was interviewed at the recent Baltic Ruby event about Ruby as well as his work-life balance, hobbies, and experiences being a father. It’s not super technical, but a good interview if you want to get a more rounded view of Matz and how he’s thinking about Ruby’s future.

Speeding Up Ruby by Rewriting C.. in Ruby? — A fascinating look at Ruby performance and how actually writing more of Ruby’s core implementation in Ruby itself can yield surprisingly large speedups thanks to how YJIT works (I seem to recall Rubinius had a similar thesis years ago). A lot of fun and a must read, IMO.

Awesome Nested Set: The Nested Set Pattern for ActiveRecord Models — Billed as a replacement for acts_as_nested_set and BetterNestedSet, this now supports Rails 8.