Bookmarks (249)

Phlex with Hanami: Make Your Views Written in Ruby. Completely. — Plenty of Rubyists don’t use Rails and prefer frameworks like Hanami to do their Web business. What about Rubyists who don’t use Rails and don’t even want to use HTML either? Say hello to Phlex, a way to write your views entirely in Ruby.

rubocop-disable_syntax: 'Disable' Ruby Syntax You Don't Like — What if you don’t like the ternary operator, numbered parameters, or unless and don’t want them to creep into your project? This RuboCop plugin covers eleven such bits of Ruby syntax some people dislike.

Natalie: An Alternative AOT Compiled Ruby Implementation — It’s been a couple of years since we linked to it, but progress on this Ruby implementation/ahead-of-time compiler has been consistent and it now passes ~70% of the ruby/spec tests. There’s also a YouTube channel where the lead developer shows off the implementation of new features.

Authentication Zero: Auth System Generator for Rails — Rather than being an authentication library, this generates a pre-built authentication system within your app directly which you can then modify as you see fit.

Monotime: An Interface to Monotonic Time in Ruby — Monotonic time is a measurement of the time since a system was powered on and runs independently of system clock changes. This library auto-selects from some underlying clocks provided by the system, such as macOS’s CLOCK_UPTIME_RAW, as also used by Rust.

Put Us Out of Business and Build Your Own Monitoring Stack 😳 — Learn Ruby's built-in errors, how to use log levels and tagging to customize the log output, display errors, and more.

x-ruby: A Ruby Interface to the X (Formally Twitter) API — An efficient rewrite of the Twitter Ruby library for the new X-themed world. If X’s API remains useful to you in its current half-arsed state, this library is for you, especially as the Twitter gem is no longer maintained. GitHub repo.

Minitest Heat: A Custom Reporter to Help Fix Code When Tests Fail — A reporter that makes it easier to identify patterns and hot spots when testing. More detail and examples here.

Navigating Personal Information with Care — A high level look at how the developers at 37signals avoid unnecessary exposure to customer information and some suggestions of ways to replicate their efforts in your own Rails apps.

Why You Might Not Want to Run rails app:update — It’s there to help you update your apps when upgrading Rails and it usually does a good job, but there are some reasons to approach it with caution.

🌳 Need to Upgrade Rails on a Tight Budget? Try Bonsai by FastRuby.io — Let the experts on Rails Upgrade Workshops (RailsConf) gradually upgrade your app to be compliant (security wise) 🔐

▶  Bringing Ruby to the JVM: Making the Impossible Possible — Core JRuby developer Charles Nutter tells the whole JRuby story from both a historical and technical perspective and touches on the future of JRuby too.

An Introduction to LiteStack for Rails — There’s been a lot of buzz around apps getting simpler lately with SQLite taking a central role. Litestack is an interesting gem that uses SQLite to provide a database, cache, and job queue all in one. Rails isn’t required, but this tutorial focuses on building a Rails app that interfaces with the Replicate pay-as-you-go machine learning service.

Strada: Create Native Controls from Server-Rendered HTML — Hotwire is a family of technologies for building modern web apps around an ‘HTML over the wire’ approach, with Turbo and Stimulus being the most familiar parts to Rails developers. The long-awaited Strada completes the family and allows hybrid mobile apps (whether built in Rails or not) to have fully native controls while simply emitting HTML.

🇩🇪  Germany Continues to Invest in Ruby — The German government's Sovereign Tech Fund is a publicly funded effort to support ‘open digital infrastructure.’ With a new round of funding for Ruby Central, the fund is showing a huge level of support for Ruby by helping to fund all sorts of things, including a 24/7 rotation of folks to handle critical security issues. Danke!

Artemis 0.9: A GraphQL Client for Rails That's Quick to Use — “You’ll never have to make trivial decisions or spend time on boring setup. Start making a GraphQL request in literally 30s.”

Ruby 3.3’s YJIT Runs Shopify’s Production Code 15% Faster — YJIT in Ruby 3.2 has yielded big performance boosts to production workloads for many Rubyists, and Ruby 3.3 is looking to be even more promising with Shopify finding YJIT in 3.3 to be notably faster than in 3.2. How? Takashi explains all. Roll on Christmas Day and Ruby 3.3!

Applications Now Open to Join Ruby Central's Board — Ruby Central, the non-profit behind Rubygems and Bundler, is looking for people to join their board. Responsibilities include helping with RubyConf and RailsConf and supporting community growth efforts.

Scale Rails with Nginx Response Times — No one likes a slow website. Scale your Rails application automatically on any cloud using metrics like Nginx response time. Reduce response time when traffic goes up and reduce costs when they come down. Try it today for free, and get $100 in credits with the code: RubyWeekly100

Kamal 1.0 Released: DHH's Zero-Downtime Deployment Tool — Originally called MRSK and built as a way to quickly deploy Rails apps, Kamal bills itself as ‘Capistrano for containers’ and with Rails 7.1 automatically providing Dockerfiles, it’s clearly being positioned as the future Rails app deployment tool of choice. DHH has written more about the motivations behind the project. Note that v1.0 is different enough to...

▶  An Introduction to Ruby in the Browser — In a talk for Montreal.rb, Andy, the creator of Glimmer, spoke about the potential for Ruby to take more of an active role in the browser by way of either WebAssembly or compilation to JavaScript via Opal.

Enhancing Your Rails App with SQLite: Array Columns — The sixth of a series of posts on making SQLite a part of your production deployment. This time, the focus is on how to match the behavior of Postgres’ array columns, but the whole series is worth a read.

Free eBook: Advanced Database Programming with Rails and Postgres — Learn about subqueries, materialized views, and custom data types in Postgres & Rails and follow along with our examples.

From Bloat to Sleek: A Rails Memory Tale with jemalloc — It’s long been a suggestion in the Ruby world to try switching to the jemalloc memory allocator to see what memory savings you can get, and Dhaval had a good end result. (We recently shared Solidus’ case study of doing so, too.)

How to Create a New Rails 7.1 (or main Branch) App — Rails 7.1 hasn’t landed yet (other than in beta) but don’t let that stop you from building Rails 7.1 apps..

Building a Sinatra App in Ruby — With the recent release of Sinatra 3.1, maybe you’ve been waiting for a tutorial to grok the long-standing web framework. Shorten some URLs while lengthening your Ruby knowledge.

▶  The Transformation of Trailblazer — Trailblazer is a project that provides an opinionated architectural style with which to implement business logic in Ruby apps. It’s most commonly associated with Rails and used to extend the basic MVC approach with higher level patterns, but is technically framework agnostic.

Plain: An AI Assistant for Your Rails Project — From the folks behind the Rails-powered Chaskiq live chat system comes a curious new Rails engine (built during Rails Hackathon 2023) that uses AI to provide explanations and insights about your Rails project during development. It’s tricky to explain but luckily there’s 🐦 a quick video demo on Twitter.

TruffleRuby 23.1: High-Performance GraalVM-Based Ruby Implementation — Originally started by the late Chris Seaton, TruffleRuby is a Ruby 3.2.2-targeting implementation built atop GraalVM (essentially a high performance JVM with JIT and strong non-Java language support).

ruby-clock: A Standalone Job Scheduler atop Rufus Scheduler — A cron replacement that runs jobs in their own thread in a persistent process. The author has even made a feature matrix comparing it to other solutions like Crono and Clockwork. You can even see the genesis of the project on GitHub when the creator asked the creator of Rufus Scheduler if there was a...

Blazer 3.0: Ruby-Powered Business Intelligence Tool — A system for putting together charts and dashboards based on business data queried with SQL. Supports a wide variety of data sources.

Goldiloader 5.0: Just the Right Amount of Rails Eager Loading? — The goal here is to stop you having to think about eager loading and have Active Record just do the ‘right thing’ by default. Your mileage may vary.

RoleModel Confirm: Upgrade data-turbo-confirm to Support Custom Dialogs — The convienience of Turbo-Rails but without the native confirm() dialog.

Linguist: GitHub's Language Detection System — The library that GitHub itself uses to detect the languages used in git repos. It can also be used as a CLI tool.

Fully Managed Postgres + Great Support — "What a different support experience Crunchy is. Not only is it timely, it's informed, it's on topic. We’re encouraged to ask questions. We’re able to do so much more working with a partner who cares as much about data as we do." Rob Sullivan, CareRev.

'We Turned Lobste.rs into a Benchmark for YJIT' — Related to my comments (above) on how YJIT is continuing to get faster and faster, Noah Gibbs has some real world data on just how well YJIT, the default JIT in CRuby, optimizes Rails apps. The ‘real world’ scenario is formed by testing against the Ruby-based code that runs Lobste.rs, a Hacker News-esque social link...

JRuby 9.3.11.0 Released — The Ruby 2.6.x compatible branch of the JVM Ruby implementation get some bugfixes, as well as an update to strscan.

Wasting Time and Budget Interviewing the Wrong Candidates? — Get better outcomes from recruiters who speak engineering. Find the right hire faster.

nats-pure: Pure Ruby Client the NATS Cloud Native Messaging System — NATS is worth exploring if you’re unfamiliar with it. It provides a lot of supporting functionality for building distributed apps of any kind. (Trivia: It was originally built in Ruby itself, but was later ported to Go.)

re2 v2.0: Ruby Bindings to the RE2 Regular Expression Library — RE2 is a fast, thread-safe regular expression engine built by Google (and used in products like Gmail) that, notably, avoids recursive backtracking by using finite automata-based techniques (Russ Cox has an article about this). Note that the regex syntax is slightly different to PCRE. As of v2.0, the Ruby gem includes vendored versions...

Using the Cursor IDE to Make Changes in a Rails App — A quick look at the curious Cursor ‘AI-first code editor.’

We Used to Store Files as Base64 Strings in Postgres.. Not Anymore — Just because you can, doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

How to Improve Rails Caching with Brotli Compression — Improving cache performance can be a game changer for larger apps, so better compression and a strategy that intelligently includes an in-memory cache is worth checking out (or you can just slip Rails Brotli Cache into your app).

Express Yourself Clearly with positive? and negative? — Two handy numeric methods that were added in Ruby 2.3 but which may have escaped your attention till now. They can help you clean up things like if num > 0 or if num < 0 though Andy touches on a couple of downsides too.

▶  Go Passwordless with WebAuthn in Ruby — A ~40 minute talk on WebAuthn, an authentication method that uses public-key cryptography together with biometrics. Braulio explains how it works and how to add it to a Ruby app.

When Counting Lines in Ruby Randomly Failed Deployments — Sometimes the obvious or idiomatic way to do something can be quite inefficient under the hood, as in this case of using str.lines.count to count lines in a string. Luckily, there was a much faster approach..

▶  Building Authentication from Scratch in Rails 7.1 — With a particular focus on features that Rails 7.1 introduces, like authenticate_by and generate_token_for.

Rails Middleware: (Almost) Everything You Need to Know — Akshay continues his run of posts digging into various facets of Ruby and Rails with a look at the use of middleware, a concept introduced by Rack but for which Rails has added a lot of sugar and helpers.

Ruby 3.3 Preview 2 Released — With Christmas Day as the traditional day that new versions of Ruby land, things begin to pick up in the fall. Major performance improvements over 3.2 are already on offer thanks to ongoing improvements with YJIT, but there’s also an optional experimental pure-Ruby JIT compiler called RJIT to try.

Rails 7.1 Beta 1 Released — It looks like things are gearing up for lots of Rails 7.1 news (and perhaps even a release) at the forthcoming Rails World 2023. This beta puts you on the cutting edge with support for the Bun JavaScript runtime, a new perform_all_later Active Job method for scheduling jobs en masse, support for composite primary keys in AR, improved...