~rubyweekly | Issue 695 - Chilling out with Ruby strings (18)

VideoInfo 4.2: Get Video Info from Dailymotion, Vimeo, Wistia, and YouTube URLs — Grabs metadata relevant to the videos, such as duration, date, thumbnail URLs, etc. Now recognizes YouTube ‘live’ and ‘shorts’ videos.

'Chilled Strings': Working Toward Frozen Strings by Default? — A language proposal that would introduce “chilled strings” that masquerade as frozen strings but issue a FrozenError warning when first modified (while allowing the modification). The goal here is to get closer to freezing all strings by default without immediate breakage.

The Rails Guides Get a Facelift — Back in 2021, Rails 7.0 landed along with a major spring clean for the Rails brand and site design, but the ever useful Rails Guides didn't benefit from this. A new design and updated content is on the way and can be enjoyed via the Edge Guides for now.

TruffleRuby 24.0: Oracle's High Performance Ruby Implementation — Created by the late Chris Seaton, TruffleRuby is a Ruby implementation leaning on GraalVM and the broader Truffle framework, used for implementing a variety of dynamic languages, including Ruby. v24.0 adopts the Prism parser and boasts full Ruby 3.2 and 3.3 syntax support, including pattern matching.

History of the end-less Method Syntax — An interesting look at the many proposals (both joking and serious) to rid Ruby of some/all instances of the end keyword. And, the end of ending ends may not be at an end, yet?

▶  SQLite on Rails: It's Serious — Stephen does a lot of work with SQLite and has helped push its use with Ruby forward with epic posts like 'How and Why to Run SQLite in Production'. Here, he spent an hour with Charles Max Wood and Valentino Stoll to win them over on the idea of SQLite as a serious database.

Don't Know How to Pick Indexes for Postgres + Rails? Try Out pganalyze — The new pganalyze Index Advisor 3.0 finds missing indexes across your query workload. Configurable, with easy drill-down into the underlying model.

▶  Deploying a Rails App to Railway, Fly.io, and Render — A practical look at using three modern platforms for hosting a basic Rails app. We’ve used all of them and they’re all pretty good.

The Day Soft Deletes Caused Chaos — Using soft deletes where rows are marked as deleted without actually being deleted is often considered a best practice for data retention and integrity purposes, but Arjun is definitely not a fan..

Rails 8's allow_browser to Enforce Minimum Browser Version — This is an odd approach, given user agent strings frequently mean little these days, and it uses the wrong HTTP status code for the purpose as well..

Introducing props_template: A Jbuilder Alternative — Jbuilder is a popular Ruby DSL for creating JSON responses, but thoughtbot wanted more – they wanted layouts, more speed, and more flexibility, while keeping as close to Jbuilder as possible. Enter PropsTemplate…

Faiss-Ruby: Efficient Similarity Search and Clustering — Faiss provides a way to efficiently search and cluster dense vectors.

Config 5.4: Add Multi-Environment Settings to Ruby Projects — Using simple YAML config files, this provides a mechanism for adding a settings/configuration features to Ruby apps of all types (not just Rails!)

Zero Downtime Rails Version Updates Are Within Reach 🎉 — Don’t put off version updates. Later means never. Check out quick-read blogs and a talk for an incremental approach.

ActiveRecord-Import 1.6: Bulk Data Insertion with ActiveRecord — Does some clever things like generate the minimal amount of SQL inserts by analyzing associations.

Grover: Transform HTML into PDFs, PNGs or JPEGs — Google Puppeteer and Chromium do the heavy lifting. (Worth a look for the mascot alone.. 😆)

CodeCare Plus: Ruby on Rails Maintenance Service — Are bug fixes draining your development time? Streamline your Ruby on Rails application the easy way with CodeCare Plus.