Bookmarks (226)

Hanami 2.0: The Better, Faster, Stronger Web Framework — I love seeing new takes on classic concepts especially when they're actively maintained and used. Hanami is a great example and 2.0 represents a lot of work. We get a ‘blazing fast’ new router, improved app structure, type-safe app settings, and more. Want to give it a spin? Enjoy the v2 Getting Started guide.

Magnus 0.4: Ruby Bindings for Rust — If you’ve been stepping a toe into the Rusty waters, why not use it to work with Ruby? With Magnus you can write Ruby extensions in Rust or even call Ruby code from Rust itself.

IRB v1.5.0 has been released 🎉 With the goal to make transitioning from IRB to other tools more seamless, it intro… https://t.co/pbQnYXWXWm

Scaling Mastodon in the Face of a Twitter Exodus — How a Mastodon (which is a Rails app) server coped with the onrush of new users in the #TwitterMigration. It boiled down to a lot of Sidekiq and database configuration that will show you a way to handle scale with Sidekiq.

System Notifications with Noticed and CableReady in Rails — The author of Advanced CableReady walks through how to add database, browser, email, and other notifications to a Rails app to inform users of events in real time.

Ruby 3.2's New Data Class Explained — The post accidentally says ‘Ruby 3.1’ but you’ll need to wait till Xmas Day for this feature for representing simple immutable value objects (think Struct but immutable and with several added niceties).

Improving Your Rails and Ruby Versioning and Gemfile Policy — The effects of having a solid versioning policy can spread far and wide, not just to users of your projects, but to your own peace of mind. It takes work but David outlines basic steps for good versioning hygiene here.

Ruby Concurrency is Hard or 'How I Became a Rails Contributor' — Concurrency is hard, but luckily the author is both brave and smart. He found an issue affecting the use of Concurrent::Hash and Concurrent::Map and came up with a fix for several popular gems (that’s true concurrency, I guess) including those in Rails. A neat story.

JRuby 9.4 Released, Now with Ruby 3.1 Compatibility — An understated release post for a huge release. The popular JVM-based implementation leaps up to supporting all of Ruby 3.1’s features (except ractors and the IO/lock/fiber scheduler interface). This means JRuby can now run Rails 7.

Ciao 1.8: A Rails Webapp for Performing HTTP Checks and Tests — A modern, open source Rails app that provides a clean interface for performing simple, automated checks of HTTP-based services (such as for uptime). There’s a Docker image too for quick deployment. GitHub repo.

Ruby 3.2.0 Preview 3 Released — Two months on from preview 2 comes an almost identical post for preview 3. I read both posts side by side. The differences:

Memetria: Secure, Scalable, Full-Featured Redis Hosting — The latest Redis features, instrumented and scaled with the tools teams need as they grow.

🏢  Rails Gets Its Own Foundation — The Rails Foundation’s goal is to improve various educational, marketing, and community outreach efforts in the Rails ecosystem, and it’s been kickstarted (not Kickstarter-ed) with a million dollars from companies like 37signals, Shopify, GitHub, and Cookpad, with a promise of $400k/yr to follow that. The foundation has also got a long-term exclusive license to all the Rails trademarks.

An RSpec Story About Disappearing Classes — TLDR: Anonymous classes and modules get garbage collected. A fun writeup though I can’t help but feel uneasy at a need to introduce caching layers for classes in testing.

How to Safely Remove a Column from an Active Record Model — ALTER TABLE .. DROP COLUMN right? Whoa, slow down right there – that’s the rm -rf approach to database management. There are ways to do it properly, including first getting Active Record to ignore the column.

A Deep Dive Into Semantic Versioning in Ruby — An introduction to the concepts of semantic versioning, a common approach for applying version numbers to projects. Both an article and nine minute screencast.

Adding Sidekiq Job Context to ActiveRecord Query Log Tags — Rails 7 has a feature called query log tags you can enable to tag SQL queries with runtime info in the logs. This can help you track down just where in your apps slow queries are coming from, say.

Quick Tip: Use Private Debugging Aliases — A way to add debugging shortcuts to a project without modifying the codebase for other folks. (TIL how to define a global git ignore file.)

🙂❤️🐙  Gemoji 4.0: Work with Emoji Images and Names — 4.0 adds skin tone support and adds the latest emoji standard characters.

Squasher: Squash Down Old Migrations in a Single Command — Long standing apps often have lots of migrations and tidying up all those migration files could be beneficial.

Aws::Record: A Data Mapping Abstraction for Amazon DynamoDB — v2.9 was just released with support for extending Aws::Record models via standard Ruby inheritance.

LambdaKiq: Use Amazon SQS and AWS Lambda with ActiveJob — Aimed at Rails users running their apps on AWS Lambda (via Lamby) and who want Sidekiq-like functionality but on SQS instead.

▶  YAGNI Podcast: A New Podcast on Practices and Tools — Host Matt sold this to me as being a “Ruby-adjacent podcast” – only three episodes so far but they cover writing good commit messages, the use of staging servers, and feature an interview with David Copeland, well known for writing several popular Ruby books.

A Walkthrough of Creating a Gem with CI and CD — Building a gem is a pretty well trodden path by now, but I love fresh walkthroughs that take current tooling into account. Bundler keeps the gem smithing simple, with GitHub Actions running the tests for you in the background across multiple Ruby versions.

Debugging in Ruby with AppSignal — An APM is not just useful for seeing how your application performs through graphs and visuals. You can go deeper and use it to handle debugging when an error occurs. This post is all about advanced debugging with AppSignal.

➕🎲➗ Test Yourself on Ruby Operator Precedence — A fun (and potentially embarrassing..?) quiz with an accompanying blog post that’s harder than you may think it is (at least, that’s what we’re telling ourselves.)

Vanilla Rails is Plenty — Since Rails was born at 37signals, they sometimes tout their approach to Rails as canon, eschewing many design patterns found in the ecosystem. So how do they avoid structural issues big apps face while staying on the ‘vanilla Rails path’? Jorge explains. 🎵 I like vanilla, it's the finest of the flavors..

Announcing Hanami 2.0 Release Candidate 1 — Hanami 2.0 is really shaping up to be something special. The final 2.0 release is expected in a couple of weeks, but for now you can pick up what this modern take on a Ruby Web framework is all about through its getting started guide. Think more structure than Sinatra, but not as much as Rails!

RubyMine 2022.3 Beta Released — The latest version of JetBrains’ powerful commercial Ruby IDE has exited its ‘early access’ phase. One new feature coming to 2022.3 for Windows users is the ability to run within WSL2.

Class Variants: Configure Component Styles and Apply Them as Classes — Create and maintain custom Tailwind components using classes and states.

Reducing Memory Usage with an Environment Variable — Want to use less memory in thread heavy apps? Tuning glibc’s memory usage behavior with the MALLOC_ARENA_MAX environment variable can help. Using jemalloc is another (if more complex) alternative (more on this here – also, Fullstaq Ruby uses jemalloc).

Crunchy Bridge's Ruby Backend: Sorbet, Tapioca, and Parlour-Generated Type Stubs — We’ve all talked a lot about Sorbet and typing this year, but what does a real process of using it look like? Brandur goes through the tools used in their team along with the benefits (and risks) of going all-in on Sorbet.

Tips for Navigating RubyConf 2022 as a Newcomer — If you’re headed to your first RubyConf this year and you’re worried about getting the most out of it, fear not – heed these words of past attendees. (RubyConf 2022 is later this month in Houston, Texas.)

If You Are Building a Notification Microservice Internally: Read This — Learn about internal & external UX requirements, what to plan for with scaling, reliability, audits, and observability.

Faster Pagination in HEY — 37signals’ shiny new developer blog gets another post about how they approached improving the performance of their MySQL-backed HEY email service by way of tenant-ID prefixed indexes.

Using Watir to Automate Web Browsers with Ruby — I’ve never been a big fan of Selenium but if you want to access its browser automation powers, Watir is a very mature way to do so from Ruby. Ferrum is a worthy alternative if you want to just remote control a Chrome instance instead.

'RSpec Examples are, well, Examples' — A look at a subtle shift in mindset for writing specs to let your expectations be an example of how to use the underlying code rather than just be for testing.

Introducing Sidekiq 7.0 — Ruby’s most popular background job execution system gets a major release with some “splendiferous” new features, such as new graphs and metrics, a potential memory-saving embedded mode (more on that next), and lots of internal API changes that may affect your plugins (so do check).

▶  Discussing the Apprenticeship Pattern with Dave Paola — Dave is the founder of Sierra Rails, a dev agency based on the idea that combining Rails with the apprenticeship model can produce big results. An episode for anyone passionate about newer Rails devs finding roles.

▶  The Pursuit of Mentorship with Meghan Gutshall — Meg is a Rails developer at Penn Medicine – she talks to Brittany about her role as a core team member of Ruby for Good, plus a little on geriatric technology™, mentorship, and coming together over Virtual Coffee.

An Introduction to dry-schema — One of the dry-rb family of libraries, dry-schema offers a faster and more feature-rich alternative to ActiveModel validations that you can use inside or outside of Rails to validate keys, values, and types of your objects.

Wrapping Third Party APIs in Service Wrappers to Simplify Your Code — A fantastic problem-driven article demonstrating the value of creating service wrappers to make interactions cleaner, coupling looser, and boundaries clearer.

🧈 Retire Your Legacy CMS with ButterCMS — ButterCMS is your new content backend. We’re SaaS so we host, maintain, and scale the CMS. Enable your marketing team to update website + app content without needing you. Try the #1 rated SaaS Headless CMS for Ruby today. Free for 30 days.

Sidekiq 7.0's Embedding Feature — Sidekiq is so important we’ll feature it twice! One of the biggest changes in 7.0 is you can embed Sidekiq within another process (e.g. Puma or Passenger). This could make deployment a lot easier if your use case isn't too intensive and allow you to use Sidekiq’s abstractions in a broader range of scenarios.