Bookmarks (188)

🚀 Need to Upgrade to Rails 8.0 and Ruby 3.4 but Not Sure How? — Your 0-downtime upgrade journey begins with a Roadmap. Know how long it will take before you begin.

The Ultimate Guide to Scaling Sidekiq — Ooooh, pretty diagrams! Yeah I made them myself and I think they’re quite nice.

Sharding a Real Rails App (Mastodon) with PgDog — PgDog is a Postgres proxy server that can be used to shard data and route queries appropriately.

Streaming LLM Responses with Rails: SSE vs. Turbo Streams — If you want to get the results of LLMs into the hands of users ASAP, streaming is the way to go, but in a Rails app there’s more than one way to pull it off..

Creating Beautiful Charts with JRuby and JFreeChart — One of the biggest wins of using JRuby is the direct access you get to established, mature libraries used in the Java ecosystem. Here’s an example of taking advantage of that by using JFreeChart to render graphs, but you could use the same technique with many other Java libraries too.

Inline RBS Comments Support for Sorbet — The story of how engineers at Shopify added support for inline RBS typing comments to the Sorbet static type checker. It’s still experimental but could hugely improve the DX of using types.

Rails Is Super Easy to Upgrade … — … as long as you're on 6.0 or higher. You don't need to pay a retainer to keep Rails up-to-date, but if you're stuck on Rails 5, 4, or 3, or a custom fork of 2 (we’ve seen it!) you might need help getting over the hump. Ready to enter the 2020s?

📊 Ruby Gem Analytics Powered by ClickHouse and Ruby Central — How would you like to quickly run SQL queries to do analytics over every single Ruby gem download since 2017? Now you can. There’s a lot of interesting data in here, and it’s a fascinating collaboration to boot.

Itsi: A Fast, New Ruby Rack Server — Itsi is an interesting new player joining the world of Ruby app servers. It’s written in Rust, is Rack compliant, and works as a reverse proxy, API gateway and static file server. You can choose between a typical blocking model, an (optional) fiber-based scheduling approach, or even mix the two in a hybrid model.

ruby-mcp-client: An MCP (Model Control Protocol) Client Library — We’ve recently highlight Fast MCP which provides a way to create MCP servers from Ruby – this project provides the other angle, giving you a way to use MCP servers, such as an AI agent would. Even if you don’t use AI, this could provide an interesting alternative to certain APIs.

HUGLO: A Forthcoming Hyper-Ultra-Giga Low-Overhead Tracing Profiler — A tracing profiler that captures function calls, system calls, thread state changes and GC activity with overhead “low enough for continuous use in large-scale production systems.” It’s not open source yet but Matt says if there’s enough interest he’ll consider it..

mruby 3.4.0 Released — mruby began life about ten years ago as an alternative lightweight standards-compliant Ruby implementation (led by Matz himself) with a focus on being both small and embeddable. v3.4 adds private and protected support and several new hooks.

🤖 Raif: An AI Framework in a Rails Engine — There are many Ruby libraries for interacting with LLMs and AI APIs now, but Raif goes a step further with a web-based admin interface and some abstractions around tasks, conversations, creating agents, and embedding generation that integrate into Rails apps in an idiomatic way.

Errbit: A Self Hosted Error Catcher — If you want to catch and manage errors from production apps in a structured way, this is for you. It’s compatible with the Airbrake API so you can use the existing airbrake gem with it.

JRuby 10.0 Released — Before Easter, we mentioned the imminent release of JRuby 10, the latest Ruby 3.4-compatible version of the high performance JVM-based Ruby implementation which Charles Oliver Nutter explained in depth here. It’s now out, for real, and marks a huge leap forward for the project.

Introducing Herb: A New HTML-Aware ERB Parser for Smarter Developer Tooling — Herb was created to help view-based tooling catch up with the rest of the Rails tooling stack. It’s written in C, so it’s suitable for real-time development, and it comes with a slick playground so you can see it in action.

TableTennis: Print Stylish Tables at the Terminal — A Ruby library for printing tabular data in the terminal that includes theming (e.g. light or dark), automatic layout, automatic formatting of dates and numbers, coloring for numeric values, and more.

Because Reading Error Logs Is Not a Hobby — When *$!% breaks, you want to quickly understand and fix it—not sift through logs for the next hour. Learn how Honeybadger can help →

Ruby 3.5.0 Preview 1 Released — Christmas Day may be eight months away, but it’s time to start counting the days to Ruby 3.5’s eventual release with this initial preview version. The updates are far less significant than for 3.4 so far, but if you’re a library developer, it’s worth putting it through its paces early.

🚀 FastRuby.io Makes Your Rails Upgrade Delightfully Boring with Bonsai — FastRuby.io’s monthly maintenance service keeps uptime high and costs low (starting at $4,000/month). The team behind next_rails offers Bonsai for gradual, 0-downtime upgrades — making upgrading Ruby and Rails feel delightfully boring.

Extracting Deprecation Warnings from Rails' Source Code — While FastRuby does this to improve their Rails upgrade services, you could use similar techniques for all sorts of Ruby source processing shenanigans.

Introducing MonkeysPaw: A Prompt-Driven Web Framework in Ruby — You probably won’t be rolling this into production any time soon, but MonkeysPaw explores the curious idea of just writing pages as prompts and then letting a large language model just get on with it(!)

JRuby 10: 'Our Most Important Release Ever' — I think it’s easy to argue the JVM-based JRuby is the second most important Ruby implementation behind CRuby, so it’s exciting to see it take a huge step forward with Ruby 3.4 compatibility, Java 21 support, and more optimizations enabled by default. v10 is ready to use now, though it’s not formally released till next week....

RoR in 2025: Outdated or Underrated? — From fast frontends to smart backends, Rails is leveling up. Check out its potential with Hotwire, modern SQLite, and AI-powered capabilities for building robust apps. Build better, deliver faster with the latest RoR trends.

📅  Ruby Events: 6,000+ Talks from 200+ Ruby Events — Formerly known as Ruby Video, this mammoth repository of Ruby videos and event information is only getting better and better. The goal is to index all Ruby events, and their talks, and make it easier to look through them.

Let There Be Docs: Generating an OpenAPI Schema Across the Rails Stack — Do you prefer to write API docs first or start with the implementation? For the latter, it’s possible to use Typelizer and RSwag to automatically extract type info from serializers, controllers, and the database that stays synchronized with the implementation.

Heroku SSL Revisited (2025 Edition) — Reflections on the quirks of getting Heroku and Cloudflare to play nicely together when it comes to certificates – something that is now achievable, says Adam.

▶️ Boolean vs Datetime for Marking States — Rather than mark a row in your database as being published or unpublished, boolean style, why not use a datetime column to indicate when it was published? David looks at how this can work in a Rails app.

RubyLLM 1.1: Work with AI the Ruby Way — One of a recent group of libraries to simplify working with LLM models provided by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and DeepSeek from Ruby. (Homepage.) v1.1 extends support to AWS Bedrock, adds configurable retries and smarter tool error handling, and provides a simpler way to provide system prompts.

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

Hypershield 0.5: Shield Sensitive Data in Postgres and MySQL — Looking to hide sensitive data to help comply with GDPR, say? Hypershield creates ‘shielded’ views that can hide sensitive tables and columns.

bidi2pdf: Convert a URL to PDF using Ruby and Chrome — A proof of concept offering both a CLI and Ruby library interface to using Chrome to render PDFs of Web pages.

Rage 1.15: An HTTP API Framework Compatible with Rails — A high performance, fiber-based API-only Web framework that boasts compatibility with Rails. v1.15.0 introduces an OpenAPI Explorer for experimenting with Rage’s OpenAPI support without needing to set up a project first.

Nōdo: A Way to Call Node.js from Ruby — A mechanism for letting Ruby scripts make calls to Node.js-based functions via a Unix socket-based IPC approach. (We also learn that “ノード” means “node” in Japanese.)

🛤️ Don’t Let Tech Debt Stop You in Your Tracks — Hire engineers with 15 years of experience to keep your Ruby on Rails app up to date, stable, and secure.

Hiding Unfinished Features in Rails — A quick and easy tip for adding a under_construction helper that hides features outside of the development environment.

Profiling Rails Apps with Rails Debugbar — Julien Bourdeau’s DebugBar gives you an extra way to get insights into what your Rails app is doing behind the scenes, directly from a toolbar in the browser. Akshay explains how to use it to find things worth fixing.

💤 Make Ruby Upgrades Budget-Friendly & Boringly Reliable — FastRuby’s fixed-cost, monthly maintenance services keep security tight and uptime high. The team behind the `next_rails` gem makes tech debt remediation feel delightfully boring so your team can keep up with your product roadmap. 🚀

How Ruby Makes Advanced CLI Options Easy — Ruby’s OptionParser standard library offers a straightforward way to work with command line options without pulling in any dependencies.

RubyUI 1.0: Reusable Copy-and-Paste Components for Rails Apps — Formerly known as PhlexUI, RubyUI is a collection of reusable Phlex-powered components you can generate or copy and paste into your apps. There’s full documentation, as well as a page for each of the 43 components on offer, covering things like badges, checkboxes, cards, sheets, and tables. GitHub repo.

Fast MCP: A Ruby Implementation of the Model Context Protocol — MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers enable certain LLM-based agents (such as Claude, Claude Code, and Cursor) to perform actions/call tools outside of their usual restricted environment. This library lets you build tools in Ruby which such agents can then reach out to and use.

Ruby 3.2.8 and 3.1.7 Released — These minor releases fix the vulnerabilities in CGI and URI described here. Ruby 3.1.7 is also considered the final release of the 3.1 series with users encouraged to upgrade to 3.3 or 3.4.

Terrapin 1.1: Run Shell Commands Safely — A little extra abstraction for running shell commands that provides safer interpolation, particularly if using user-supplied values.

RuboCop v1.75.0: The Static Code Analyzer and Formatter — RuboCop gains improved support for Ruby 3.4. As creator Bozhidar Batsov noted on X: “You won’t be able to tell it from the outside, but this release required a ton of work to get to the point where Ruby 3.4 functionality was exposed via Prism’s Parser translation layer.”

PicoRuby: A Tiny Ruby Implementation for Microcontrollers — An interesting alternative mruby implementation designed to get its footprint down even smaller to run on small one-chip microcontrollers. Just 256KB of ROM and 128KB of RAM is needed.

🚀 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.

Examples of Value Objects with Ruby's Data Class — We linked to Lucian’s article on value objects last week. He follows up with some useful examples of using them to remove boilerplate code and handle API responses.

New Policies to Support the Growth of RubyGems — In response to a potential legal issue that arose around taking down a gem with a possibly trademarked name, Ruby Central is tightening up its official policies which can be read in full here – the policies will take final effect in late May, after a review period.

Exploring Ruby Ractors — Inspired by some recent posts about Ractors, John set out to see if he could use them to peg his CPU usage (“I paid for 10 cores, I’m gonna use 10 cores”). A fun exploration, including a look at just how much YJIT contributes to the modern Ruby performance story.

NEW: Get Real-Time Alerts from Your Logs in Honeybadger — We just shipped a new feature for log management. Alarms allow you to combine a query (“count all slow requests in the past five minutes”) with a threshold (”when count is > 2”) and trigger alerts when the result exceeds the threshold. Read the blog post →