~rubyweekly | Bookmarks (177)

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).

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.

💎 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.

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.

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.

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.

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! 😱

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.

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.

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..

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.

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.

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:

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.

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...

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.

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.