~rubyweekly | Bookmarks (178)

🚀 FastRuby.io Makes Your Rails Upgrade Delightfully Boring with Bonsai — The team behind RailsBump.org offers gradual, 0-downtime upgrades — transform your engineering culture with our experts.

Phlex 2.0: Component-Oriented Server-Side Rendered Views Library — A way to build HTML, SVG and CSV views directly in Ruby in an object-oriented fashion with components that are simple Ruby classes. It’s pure Ruby and can be used with any Ruby framework, though phlex-rails makes it particularly easy for Rails apps. The docs are good and communicate the idea well.

Ruby 3.4.2 Released — It’s not just Christmas Day when we get new Ruby releases, it seems to have extended to Valentine’s Day too 😍 This is one of the scheduled routine updates to meet the goal of releasing a new stable Ruby update every two months and solely fixes some bugs this time.

The State of Security in Rails 8 — Greg gave ▶️ a talk about Rails security at Rails World and while you could just watch it, maybe you’d prefer his writeup here.

Boosting JRuby Startup with AppCDS and AOT Caching — JRuby’s maintainer shares the results of an ahead-of-time caching feature being previewed in JDK 24 and how it can benefit JRuby startup times. “A huge improvement you’ll get for free”, he says.

▶  Why to Use Jupyter Notebooks with Ruby — There have been a few attempts at bringing ‘notebook’ style programming, commonly associated with Python, to Ruby (such as with IRuby) but Landon does a good job of explaining the why and the benefits here.

Camera Access with Hotwire Native — Hotwire Native is 37signals’ Rails-aligned (but not Rails exclusive) framework for building native mobile apps from webapps.

Honeybadger Keeps Getting Better — Honeybadger delivers real-time insights with performance and uptime monitoring, log management, and support for 10+ languages. Your favorite error tracker just leveled up. →

ImageProcessing 1.14: High-Level Image Processing Wrapper for libvips and ImageMagick — “The goal of this project is to have a single gem that contains all the helper methods needed to resize and process images.”

Tiny JITs for a Faster FFI — FFI (Foreign Function Interface) lets Ruby call dynamically-linked native libraries, but it can impose a performance tax. Aaron Patterson demonstrates this ‘FFI tax’ and experiments with JIT-compiling FFI bindings to dramatically boost performance.

The Role of Size Pools in Ruby Garbage Collection — Garbage collection improvements have fuelled a lot of the performance gains in Ruby 3.2 onwards. As a part of his Ruby Under a Microscope rewrite, Pat runs an experiment showing how Ruby uses size pools to speed up allocating memory for new objects.

Ruby Source Parsing — A look at several interesting ways to dynamically work with Ruby source and to extract useful information.

Flexible API Versioning with Rails — There are two truths about API versioning: 1. It’s required. 2. It’s hard to do right. Petr offers an example of how fast it can go wrong, followed by a more maintainable method to keep things sensible.

Fixing asdf 0.16.x Breakages — Last week, we mentioned that the popular asdf runtime version manager was entirely rewritten in Go. This caused Dave’s setup to break and here’s how he fixed it.

Rhino Editor: An Action Text Compatible Rich Text Editor — As well as being a clean, simple rich text editor, a big selling point is being able to use ProseMirror and TipTap plugins, as well as some good docs page.

🔭 Ephem: Track Positions of Space Objects Accurately in Ruby — From the creator of the Astronoby astrometry gem comes a new space-themed release for tracking the position and velocity of ‘major Solar System bodies’ using data supplied by NASA.

🫠 AI Isn’t Magic, and It Isn’t Here to Save You — It won’t fix messy workflows, tech debt, and shaky fundamentals on its own. AI doesn’t replace developers—it raises the bar for them.

Ruby Boy: A Game Boy Emulator Written in Ruby — A fun one! You can play it in the browser, too, thanks to WebAssembly and ruby.wasm. (GitHub repo.)

Ruby 'Thread Contention' is Simply GVL Queuing — We’ve enjoyed a great run of articles on the depths of Ruby’s implementation recently and it continues with this look at how threads wait politely for their time to shine, thanks to Ruby’s GVL (Global VM Lock). But all this politeness has a downside.. so you may have to get involved and tune things a bit.

WebMock 3.25.0: Stub and Set Expectations on HTTP Requests for Testing — Supports lots of HTTP libraries like Net::HTTP, Excon, the http gem, and Curb::Easy.

Marksmith: A GitHub-Style Markdown Editor for Rails — Well known for his Avo Rails app dev framework, Adrian is back with another banger: a GitHub-style Markdown editor you can use in your Rails apps. It features a similar toolbar, supports Active Storage, and is ready to drop in.

Is Heroku Still Worth It in 2025? 💸 — You might want to give this guide a read — we took a tour through PaaS alley and found some worthy (💵) alternatives.