Bookmarks (179)

Zverok's Guide to Ruby 3.4's Language Changes — Each year, Victor blesses us with a mammoth roundup of changes that arose in the Ruby language in the latest major version. Ruby 3.4 wasn’t one of the largest leaps forward in this sense, but he still has lots of great examples here, making this a must read/skim.

Yake 1.2: A DSL for Writing AWS Lambda Handlers Rake-Style — It includes the ability to write Sinatra style routes and feels like an idiomatically Ruby-ish way to work with AWS’s serverless platform.

Campsite: A Large Rails + JavaScript SaaS App Goes 'Source Available' — Campsite is/was a webapp offering something akin to a Slack-style interface to forum-like posts for team communication. It’s a good example of a fully fledged, commercial Rails app with lots of moving parts and a surprising number of best practices, if you’d like to see how such apps are built. (Note: They say...

☢️ Tech Debt, Performance or Dev Process Problems in Your App? — Our Application Assessment service can help you figure out how to deal with them.

SyntaxFinder: Analyze Your Ruby Scripts with Prism — A new tool being worked on by Ruby core team member ko1 to find syntax patterns in Ruby code using the new Prism Ruby parser.

Superglue 1.0: A Way to Bring Rails and React Together — Superglue is a library for bringing Rails and React closer together in a way that feels as natural as Rails’ default Hotwire and Stimulus-based approach to the frontend.

Back Away from the Backlog 🛑 — Your product doesn’t need bloat. Simplifying drives bigger outcomes, happier teams, and real impact. Learn how to start now.

Escaping Ruby's Gem:SafeMarshal Sandbox — Gem::SafeMarshal was introduced to RubyGems as a way to ‘safely’ load marshalled specs from gems. Of course, that means folks will set out to see if it really is safe.

What is it (in Ruby 3.4)? — A quick look at one of a minor addition to Ruby 3.4, but one that might change your everyday code because it certainly looks nicer than _1 or |i| i.

Why Bundler Checksums Are a Security Game-Changer — As the source of many of our code’s dependencies, the RubyGems system is a potential vector for security issues. Bundler 2.6 introduced checksum verification as a way to at least ensure the gems you install are identical to the ones recorded in Gemfile.lock.

▶  How To Build Basic Desktop Applications in Ruby — The recently released recording of a workshop given at RubyConf 2024 by the creator of the Glimmer suite of Ruby DSL-driven desktop and Web app building frameworks. We’ll have more on Glimmer in a future issue, but this is a great way to get started.

Optimize Postgres Performance and Reduce Costs with Crunchy Bridge — YNAB (You Need A Budget) switched to fully managed Crunchy Bridge for Postgres and experienced a 30% performance increase and 10% cost reduction. YNAB enjoys seamless scaling, high availability, and expert support for a better Postgres experience.

YJIT 3.4: Even Faster and More Memory-Efficient — YJIT (Yet Another Ruby JIT) is an optimizing compiler built into CRuby since Ruby 3.1 and it got even faster in Ruby 3.4 (by 5-7%). Maxime, who started Shopify’s YJIT team, explains the improvements as well as new options and techniques you can use to get more out of it.

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.

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! 😱

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.

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 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:

🎄“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.

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.)

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

💤 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.

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.

▶  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.