Bookmarks (258)

Ruby 3.4 Preview 1 Released — I love it when the first preview of a new Ruby version drops. It makes it easier to get playing with the new features and reminds me of Christmas.. 😂 It’s a preview so don’t throw it into prod (unless you’re Shopify) but it’s a good one to test against with a key change to how string literals...

Promptcraft: Try New System Prompts on Your AI Conversations — A Ruby-powered CLI tool for replaying a user/AI-agent conversation over and over but with a new system prompt each time so you can hone things until you get the end results you want.

Strong Migrations: Catch Unsafe Migrations in Development — Detects potentially dangerous operations and prevents them running by default. Supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB.

The Git Gem 2.0: A git Wrapper for Use from Ruby — Takes the simple approach for wrapping calls to the usual git binary.

A RailsConf 2024 Recap — Kevin had a great time at RailsConf last week and he covers some of what he saw there. Separately, he’s put together four things to take away from RailsConf 2024.

Developer’s Guide to Heroku Dynos — Which dynos should you use, and how many? (TLDR: Don’t use Perf-M!).

Why You Should Nest Modules in Ruby — Justin demonstrates a couple of gotchas you can avoid by nesting modules, if at the price of a little added verbosity.

GitHub's dependabot-core is Now Open Source — Dependabot is a tool GitHub used to monitor the dependencies of projects hosted there (and create automated PRs to update them). It’s always interesting to see them open source a key part of their infrastructure – especially when it’s mostly written in Ruby!

Running Thruster with Rails and Kamal — Josef recently installed Thruster (a new zero config proxy from 37signals) and found it be “surprisingly easy” — here’s how to add it to an existing Rails project deployed with Kamal.

Thinking About Typing in Ruby in 2024 — A prolific developer reflects upon his recent experiences with Ruby 3’s support for explicit typing, by way of RBS, after some historical experience with Sorbet. He had a reasonable experience, but fears RBS may remain an avant garde add-on like Ractors rather than a part of the mainstream Ruby experience.

IRB Adding Support for Easily Extending Its Functionality — The interactive IRB REPL has long been at the heart of the Ruby development experience, but it’s not the easiest of tools to extend. No fear, from v1.13.0 on, IRB is providing new APIs for libraries to customize and enhance it. (The Rails console is already getting prepared.)

Inexpensive and Efficient: Get Your Ruby & Rails Upgrade Done — Don’t let the risk of out of date Ruby & Rails versions become a problem. Talk to us about our free security assessment & we can discuss how our incremental upgrade service - CodeCare Shield - can improve the speed, security & stability of your app.

A New Era for Ruby Central Events — RailsConf 2024 concludes today, and if you want to influence where it might be next year, fill out this form. RailsConf 2025 is going to be significant, too, as it will be the final RailsConf. Don’t worry, RubyConf will be even bigger and better in turn.

☑️ Take the Ruby on Rails Community Survey 2024 — Every two years, Planet Argon has run this well received survey (here are the results from 2022) so, if you’re willing and able, it’s time to take it again 😅

📕 Ruby Science Updated for Ruby 3.2.2 and Rails 7 — A decade ago, Thoughtbot released the Ruby Science book containing solutions to common code smells. They’ve recently made it more accessible and updated it for the latest versions of Ruby and Rails.

A Developer’s Guide to Request Queue Time — Learn everything you need to know about the key metric for your web server's health.

Debugging in Ruby with pry-byebug — A gem that adds debugging and stack navigation to Pry using Byebug.

Working with Resourceful Routes in Rails — Outlining just what a resource is, the routes a resource generates, and how resourceful routing can provide organizational structure to your Rails apps.

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, pause/continue on any step, rewind through history, etc. Still considered early and a work in progress — so its creator is seeking feedback.

Observable Systems with Wide Events — We designed Honeybadger Insights around wide events. What are wide events, and how can you use them to monitor your Rails applications?

ruby_memcheck 3.0: Find and Debug Memory Issues in Native Gems — Use Valgrind memcheck on your native gem (it’s no use for plain Ruby libraries) to dig into memory related issues.

📕 gepub: EPUB Parser and Generator Library — EPUB is a popular e-book file format that’s basically a ZIP file of XML files. This lets you work with such files from Ruby.

Safely: Rescue and Report Exceptions in Non-Critical Code — The idea here is that while you may want to know about failures and exceptions, they don’t necessarily need to result in crashing out.

Authie: Database-Backed User Sessions for Rails — Makes it easier to invalidate sessions from afar without making changes to cookies or to see who is currently logged in.

Visualizing Wave Function Collapse with Ruby — I don’t know exactly what I’m looking at here, but it’s pretty. It’s an attempt to use an idea from quantum mechanics to create maps. Gosu provides the visual support.

Rackula 1.4: Generate Static Sites from any Rack Middleware — For turning a Rack-powered webapp into a static copy.

Fixing a Footgun in ActiveRecord::Core#inspect — Objects have an inspect method that returns a string representation that can be useful in development and debugging. ActiveRecord objects do too, with some added enhancements to highlight what you need to know. It turns out, however, inadvertently calling on ActiveRecord::Core#inspect in production can cause real performance issues..

Explaining Thruster, 37signals' HTTP/2 Proxy to Speed Up Your App — Available as a gem, though written in Go, Thruster is an HTTP/2 proxy server that addresses some of Puma’s shortfalls around serving assets. Thruster is one of many options, which Bruno explains in this good-enough-to-have-been-a-blog-post discussion.

Ruby Might Be Faster Than You Think — The “Ruby is Slow” mantra is so often chanted that many probably accept it without thought, but here’s a case where some minor tweaks result in Ruby being 5X faster than the compared language. (Say it with me “Ruby is fast enough.”)

JRuby 9.4.7.0 Released — The long standing, reliable, and performant JVM-based Ruby implementation takes another gentle step forward with dependency updates and several fixed edge cases.

Choosing the Right Audit Trail Approach in Ruby — A look across the vast landscape of tools and libraries for keeping tabs on data changes, user activity, console use, and more.

Backup Strategies for SQLite in Production — Not Ruby specific, but a fantastic primer to a topic that may begin to affect more Rubyists as the idea of running Rails apps on SQLite in production continues to take off.

Adding Your Ruby Gems to AWS CodeArtifact — Amazon Web Services is showing more love to Ruby by enabling the use of CodeArtfact as a private gem server. You can also set it up to pull gems from upstream sources (like rubygems․org) automatically so you can have your custom and public gems all on one server.

Rails, Assets, ActiveStorage and a CloudFront CDN — How to configure your Ruby on Rails app to use Amazon CloudFront for assets as well as ActiveStorage / ActionText.

XRB: Think ERB But Even More HTML-y — XRB is a simple template engine for Ruby that boasts being 10-20x faster than ERB (not to be confused with Erubi/Erubis, though) with a simpler syntax that’s closer to plain HTML (and which also supports Ruby style #{} interpolation).

rbspy 0.20.0: A Sampling Profiler for Ruby — Provides a way to profile a Ruby app even without having to restart it. v0.20.0 extends support to the latest Ruby versions, including 3.3.1.

Karafka 2.4: Advanced Kafka Processing for Ruby and Rails — A significant release for a powerful multi-threaded processing framework to use with the Apache Kafka event streaming system. GitHub repo.

Measured 3.0: Encapsulate Measurements and Their Units — A library from Shopify for storing, manipulating and converting weights, lengths, and volumes in different units. v3.0 adds Rails integration without needing a separate gem.

Pressure Kills Cognition: Budgets Shrink, But Scope Doesn’t 😱 — Been told to do more with less? Talk to Test Double about how to deliver with fewer people without losing quality.

Meta's New Llama 3 AI Chat Sucks at Ruby? — While dogpiling on big tech is fun, Justin saves us the time to evaluate Meta’s offering by asking it three questions and comparing the answers to GPT4. (Spoiler: GPT: 3, Meta: nil)

Fly.io ❤️ Kamal — Sam Ruby is researching changes for the Rails 8 Agile Web Development with Rails book and the forthcoming updates to Kamal and other deployment improvements are high on his list.

▶  Hacking on YJIT: A Livestream — Aaron ‘tenderlove’ Patterson and Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert are both prolific Ruby contributors, so if you have the time, it’s great to see them chat and code.

DHH: Rails 8 is Going to be a 'Leap Forward' in Deployment Ease — Kamal 2, auto-configuring SSL via Let’s Encrypt, single host multi app support, HTTP/2 support through Thruster, and more are all promised along with “Heroku-like ergonomics” wherever you choose to deploy your apps.

Autotuner: Speed Up Your Rails App with GC Tweaks — You can get some serious performance boosts if you tweak Ruby's garbage collection settings, but there are a lot of them, and it’s easy to get lost. Autotuner is a new tool from Shopify that can provide suggestions on how to best tune things based upon actual data collected while your app is running.

The Future of Ruby in the Age of AI — Obie (long-time Rubyist and author of The Rails Way) is bullish on Ruby’s future alongside AI, and lays out a bold case for why he thinks Rubyists have a comfortable spot in what’s to come.

Ruby 3.3.1 (and More) Released — Due to the discovery of an arbitrary memory address read vulnerability when user-supplied data is provided to Ruby’s regex compiler, releases of all maintained Ruby lines are out including 3.3.1, 3.2.4, 3.1.5, and 3.0.7. (This is also the final 3.0 release as 3.0 is now EOL.)

TurboConfirm 2.0: Upgrade data-turbo-confirm to Support Custom Dialogs — If you’re building a modern Rails 7.1 app, this upgrades Turbo’s data-turbo-confirm feature with custom dialog support and the ability to customize things further. v2.0 brings more examples to the README, native <dialog> support, and the ability to invoke it directly from app code.

Groq-Ruby: A Ruby Client for a Super Fast LLM Platform — Groq is an interesting AI platform that uses its own custom hardware to run models at atypically high speeds. If you want to get Llama or Mixtral output at hundreds of tokens per second, it’s worth a try, and Dr Nic’s library makes it easy. (Groq has OpenAI API compatibility so you can...

JSON::Stream 1.0: Streaming JSON Parser — A JSON parser built around a state machine that generates events for each state change in a memory efficient way – a bit like a classic XML SAX parser.

Preventing Timing-Based Enumeration Attacks with authenticate_by — While Rails 7.1’s authenticate_by doesn’t guarantee a constant time for authentication, the timing for valid vs invalid states is much less obvious.