Bookmarks (203)

A New Chapter for RubyGems: How Ruby Central is Building a Sustainable Future — Ruby Central sits at the heart of the Ruby community, maintaining things like RubyGems and Bundler and running RubyConf. Here they tell the full story of RubyGems, its management, and how the new Ruby Central OSS Committee is pushing it forward.

Stringer: A Self-Hosted, 'Anti-Social' RSS Reader — A Rails app that sticks to the feed reading basics, boasting no social features or ‘fancy machine learning’ at all! It does look pretty nice though.

Help Needed: Shoryuken: Amazon SQS Thread Based Message Processor for Ruby — A popular library that's just gone into ‘maintenance mode’ and is actively seeking a new maintainer, so do reach out to them if you’re interested.

Rails Form Builder: A Copy & Paste Library of Form Building Helpers — “Since there is so much value in having this form builder be a part of your code base, we didn’t want to hide the code away in a gem.” GitHub repo.

Redmine 6.0: Ruby's OG Project Management App — A blast from the past! Redmine is a very long-standing Ruby app (now in its third decade..) that you’re sure to have used at some point, if only on Ruby’s issue tracker. It now supports Ruby 3.3 and uses Rails 7.2.

Point-and-Click Observability in Honeybadger — Gleaning insights from your logs has never been easier with Honeybadger’s new point-and-click query mode for BadgerQL. Click to learn more!

Literal: Runtime Type-Checking for Ruby — Provides types, structured objects, properties, and enums. The built-in types include generic structures that enable some neat use cases (e.g. check that an array is all integers, and other constraints.) It integrates nicely with Rails too. Literally, check it out.

wxRuby3: A Cross Platform GUI Library — Based on the mature wxWidgets GUI toolkit which aims to provide a native look on Windows, macOS, and Linux/GTK. Note the licensing – wxRuby3 is MIT licensed, wxWidgets is LGPL.

Transformation Is Hard, but These CIOs Shared Lessons Learned 🧠 — Tips from CIOs on change, community, iteration, challenges, leadership, collaboration, and human-centered innovation.

▶  DragonRuby Game Toolkit: Lessons Learned — DragonRuby is a fantastic Ruby-based game engine (though it’s not CRuby) that’s no mere toy but used in hundreds of games on multiple platforms. Its creator tells the full story here, including its design, how it differs from standard Ruby, and shows off some examples.

Streaming Rack with Falcon — Rack 3 adds input and output streaming to the web server interface, and here, Samuel runs through all the variations with Ruby and Rack, including how to use it with Rails. Ruby continues to shine as a solid choice for real-time, interactive, performant webapps.

How We Made a Ruby Method 200x Faster — If you like digging into performance issues and seeing strong end results, this is for you. rack-mini-profiler and flame graphs are used to pinpoint a problem and refactor around it.

🚂 Rails 8.0 Released (No PaaS Required) — Rails 8 has been with us for so long now, the final release almost felt like an anti-climax last week, but it’s a fantastic milestone nonetheless. Kamal steps in to improve deployment, Solid Queue lets you drop Redis and running a separate background job framework (if you wish), Propshaft replaces Sprockets, SQLite steps up to being a...

Pagy 9.2: The Popular Pagination Gem — It’s been around for years and still claims to be “the best pagination gem” – who are we to argue? v9.2.0 makes v9’s keyset pagination approach even more ‘wicked fast’ and adds more apps to its playground to play with and get started fast. GitHub repo.

json v2.8: Ruby's JSON Implementation Gets Faster — Ruby’s json is depended on by (almost) everything so updates like this have far reaching implications. v2.8 includes significant performance improvements (up to 1.7x faster on real world documents) and support for optionally parsing trailing commas.

Ruby 3.3.6 Released — Don’t get too excited, it’s a scheduled minor bug fix release and removes some default gem warnings. Nonetheless, it’s a straightforward upgrade for Ruby 3.3 and the last one of 2024 as v3.3.7 is expected on January 7.

Memetria K/V: High-Performance Key-Value Hosting — Boost your Ruby apps with Memetria K/V, providing portable, easy-to-use hosting for Redis OSS and Valkey. Scale your applications with ease and achieve high performance. Includes detailed analytics and large key memory tracking.

What is Rack? — An in-depth journey through Rack, the protocol that makes Sinatra sing and Rails run, starting from scratch by creating a Rack-compliant app before using the conveniences of the Rack gem. A good look under the hood.

🌸 Hanami 2.2: Persistence Pays Off — A major release for the popular, alternative framework for building Ruby webapps. v2.2 adds a new and improved database layer, shown off well in this post. The new version represents the team’s complete vision for Hanami, so give it a test drive.

When it Comes to Weird Lexical Syntax, Ruby Wins? — When an experienced programmer goes on a tour of 42 languages while building a syntax highlighter, some fun insights pop up with, amusingly, Ruby getting a special mention: “Now here’s a language whose syntax evades all attempts at understanding.”

JRuby 9.4.9.0 Released — An update to the Ruby 3.1 compatible line of the popular JVM-based Ruby implementation with a security fix and some compatibility and Java integration fixes.

🚨Running Unsupported Rails? Need to Catch Up Little by Little? — Rails 6.1 reached EOL! Avoid vulnerabilities & upgrade with 🌳 Bonsai, our fixed-cost monthly maintenance service.

Argon2id: Ruby Bindings to the Argon2 Password-Hashing Function — The goal is to be a drop-in replacement for bcrypt-ruby’s BCrypt::Password but using Argon2 instead. Precompiled for all major platforms and with no runtime dependencies.

ValidEmail2 6.0: ActiveModel Validation for Email — Check the legitimacy of email addresses including MX lookup and checking against a rather extensive list of disposable email services.

❄️ Festive Errors: Add Some Year-Round Holiday Cheer to the Rails Error Page — Spice up your Rails error pages with fun holiday themes. Tis the season?

Shale: Object Mapper and Serializer for Text Formats — A library for converting JSON, YAML, TOML, CSV and XML into Ruby data structures and back again. The homepage features many interactive examples worth checking out.

Ruby Video: An Index of ~4000 Ruby Talks — Over the past year, Ruby Video has brought together almost 4000 videos from over 2000 speakers and you’re encouraged to contribute your own too (though I'd be surprised if many talks remain to be found with these numbers!)

Benchmarking Ruby Parsers — Prism is (almost certainly going to be) the new default parser in Ruby 3.4, but is it the best-performing option? Benoit looks at several candidates, including Ripper and ruby_parser, and gives us the good news that yes, Prism is fast!

How to Compare Postgres EXPLAIN Plans & Tune Slow Queries — Are slow Postgres queries impacting your Ruby app performance? Join this webinar to learn how to diagnose and tune them effectively. We'll use pganalyze to walk through how to compare plans & debug common scenarios like inefficient nested loops & missing indexes.

Next Generation Out-of-Band Garbage Collection — ‘Out of band’ garbage collection is when GC is performed outside of the time when a user request is being served. This yields latency improvements in many scenarios, since you won’t have the GC ‘stopping the world’ at critical points. It’s hard to get just right, though, but that isn’t stopping attempts to make it better.

Supercharge the One Person Framework with SQLite — A written version of Stephen Margheim’s ▶️ exciting Rails World talk about Rails 8’s enhancements when it comes to SQLite and how SQLite can truly supercharge Rails development at the scales most of us are working.

How I Upgraded My Pet Project from Rails 7 to Rails 8 in 30 Minutes — Here’s a task a lot of us are likely to procrastinate about diligently do once the final version of Rails 8 lands.

Exploring Campfire's Tests — 37signals’ pay-once-host-yourself chat app provides a good look at how the canonical Rails shop builds things, so Kadu decided to check out its tests and found an elegantly simple approach.

GitHub Shortcut Commands That’ll Speed Up Your Code Reviews 💻 — Roundup of some of the best GitHub keyboard shortcuts that came up during a recent conversation on our dev team’s Slack.

HexaPDF 1.0.0: Powerful PDF Generation from Ruby — Ruby’s arguably most versatile PDF creation and manipulation library reaches v1.0, and there are still many more features to come, says Thomas. You can check out numerous examples with code here. Note that HexaPDF is AGPL licensed with a commercial licence option.

Rubocop Obsession: Cops for Higher-Level Concepts — The RuboCop linter is commonly used to raise the alarm on stylistic issues like long lines, indentation problems, and naming conventions. This goes a step further with code not broken into identifiable ‘paragraphs’, method ordering, and only testing public methods, among other things.

Fixed Price Monthly Code Maintenance for Rails Apps — No time to do those small but critical updates and features? CodeCare will take care of necessary tweaks, bug fixes, upgrades and ongoing improvements for your app.

sqlite3-ruby 2.2.0: The Ruby Bindings for SQLite3 — With v2.2 we get improved multiline SQL syntax errors, as well as being able to use URI filenames when ‘connecting’ to a SQLite database.

ActiveAdmin v4 Beta: New Features, Upgrades, and How to Migrate — ActiveAdmin is one of the most popular Rails administration tools. It now supports Rails 7, bringing Hotwire support and improved performance, and includes better CSS theming and batch actions, so it’s worth a look.

Move Fast and Fix Things with Honeybadger — Honeybadger transforms your logs into rich events that help you fix issues before your users know what happened. Try our free plan!

sequel-activerecord_connection 1.5: Let Sequel Reuse Active Record Connections — An extension for the popular Sequel database toolkit to enable reusing of an existing Active Record connection rather than setting up a new one.

Denko 0.14.0: Electronics / GPIO Programming in Ruby — lgpio is a wrapper around the access Linux provides to GPIO features and Denko and denko-piboard use it to let you program electronics devices in Ruby (think LEDs, buttons, sensors, etc.) Here’s a list of the microcontrollers supported.

Awkward Alert: How to Ask “Why Are You Building This?” 😨 — Everyone wants to know *why* the thing is being built. But it’s hard to ask. Practical tips to avoid seeming critical.

Rails World 2024 Recap: All Talks Now Online — Rails World was a resounding success (save for a fire alarm that woke everyone up at 2am, we hear!) and while it’s great to hear what a good time everyone had, it’s even better to finally get to enjoy all the great talks for ourselves. I’ve been watching for hours and point out some highlights below.

Wikidata is a Giant Crosswalk File — Wikidata is the Wikipedia of structured data. Here we see how to use DuckDB and Ruby to create ‘crosswalks’ from Wikidata to map identifiers in the data to third party services. Neat to see an example of using Ractors in a blog post, too.

RubyGems.org Gets a New Design — A new design is gradually rolling out to improve support for a wider range of devices, as well as adding a much-needed ‘dark mode.’ You’re encouraged to help review the update and report any usability issues.

Leveraging Falcon and Rails for Real-Time Interactivity — A thoroughly educational history of the Async gem, its influence on Rack 3, real-time interactivity in Rails, and how the integration of Async 2, Rack 3, Falcon, and Rails ‘provides a powerful foundation for building highly interactive and scalable web applications.’

🙈 CRuby's Monkey Patch Detection — CRuby includes many optimizations to allow core classes representing essential concepts like numbers, arrays, and strings to operate as quickly as possible. If a core class is monkey patched, however, these optimizations might need to be dropped, but how does Ruby detect this and ‘de-optimize’ itself?

Become a Better Engineer in Less Than 5 Minutes a Week — Hacking Scale is a bi-weekly newsletter about building and scaling software. Get an engineering story explained in <1000 words, with hand-drawn visuals, delivered to your inbox. Ship with secrets from Figma or OpenAI.

recursive-open-struct 2.0: OpenStructs in OpenStructs in OpenStructs? — An OpenStruct subclass that returns nested hash attributes as RecursiveOpenStructs.