Bookmarks (173)

An Opinionated Guide to Configuring Rails on Heroku — A variety of settings and other considerations for getting the most out of your Heroku setup.

Four Choices for Packaging Ruby Binary Distributions — Well, not exactly. Many attempts have been made over the years to distribute Ruby apps in binary form, but most seem abandoned. However, Tebako is looking like a good, maintained option with an active community.

Tech Debt Slowing You Down? A Case Study About Bonsai — See how Bonsai by FastRuby.io  transformed Valid Eval with 2–5x performance gains, speedy upgrades, and enhanced security. Read the case study and boost your productivity. 🚀

Better Know a Ruby Thing: Method Lookup — “Let’s talk about method lookup in Ruby, which is from one perspective really clean and simple, and from another angle, kind of messy.”

Introducing Sidekiq 8.0 — Ruby’s most popular background job framework has a new release that adds easy-to-do profiling, a significant overhaul to its WebUI, a new ‘job iteration’ feature for dividing long running jobs into smaller chunks, and more. Redis 7+ and Ruby 3.2+ are now required.

Turnstiled: Use Cloudflare Turnstile in Rails Apps — Turnstile is a Cloudflare service that replaces CAPTCHAs – you’ve almost certainly encountered them on many sites.

Want to Roll Your Own Autoscaling? Here Are Our Secrets 🤫 — Does it make sense for us to write this guide? No! Did we do it anyway? Yes! We did it for you ❤️

🤖 RubyLLM: Work with AI the Ruby Way — A single, Ruby-centric way to interact with LLM models. RubyLLM currently supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and DeepSeek models and can analyze PDFs, generate images, and integrate into Rails applications.

Debugbar: DevTools-Like Introspection for Rails Apps — Debugbar adds an area to the bottom of your Rails app’s views (in dev only) that shows off queries, jobs, request details, and more. GitHub repo.

✅ What Happens When Code Reviews Aren’t Mandatory? — Code reviews can feel like bottlenecks, slowing progress and increasing frustration. Find out about an experiment to make them optional.

Rails 8's Solid Trifecta: Cache, Cable, and Queue — A comparison of Rails 8’s new systems for caching, WebSocket management, and background job queues versus the established options.

🤖 OmniAI 2.0: A Unified Ruby API for Multiple AI Providers — If you’ve worked with hosted LLM platforms from Ruby before, you’ve probably used ruby-openai, but OmniAI abstracts things to support various platforms and their different features without shoehorning everything into the OpenAI approach. GitHub repo.

The Git Gem 3.0: A git Wrapper for Use from Ruby — If you want to work with the git client from Ruby, this provides an interface.

Exeggutor: A Unified Interface for Managing Subprocesses — A library aiming to bring some added calm to dealing with the often fraught process of executing other programs from Ruby by way of exeg and exeg_async methods that can do it all.

ParallelTests 5.0: More Cores == Faster Tests — Speed up Minitest, RSpec, Turnip, Cucumber or Spinach by running in parallel across multiple cores. v5.0 brings Ruby 3.4 support.

What’s the Deal with Ractors? — Introduced in Ruby 3.0, Ractors provide an actor-based, truly parallel (bye GVL!) execution model, but they still remain experimental and any idea of their widespread use hasn’t panned out. Jean digs into what makes them tick, what they offer, and why they still have their uses, despite the current shortcomings.

Optimize Ruby App Performance in Real-Time — Visualize Ruby performance using detailed flame graphs to identify bottlenecks and latency. Debug and optimize your code by tracing requests across web servers, databases, and services with Datadog APM. Start a free trial today.

The Pitchfork Story — Rails core member and Shopify engineer Jean led the development of a Rack HTTP server called Pitchfork. Here, he goes into a lot of fascinating depth about the motivations behind Pitchfork’s creation, the memory efficiency it offers, and teaches us quite a bit about Ruby along the way.

Rails Views, Web Components, React.. Why Make a Choice? — A novel take on choosing an approach for your app’s views. Most shops pick Rails+Hotwire or React SPAs, but Aha! looks at where each view framework excels and uses them all.

Using Phlex for Emails: Action Mailer Without ERB — Phlex has grown in popularity as a more OO ERB replacement and it suits emails pretty well too.

Keep Postgres Maintenance from Slowing Down Your Ruby App — Secure your spot to learn the proactive maintenance practices that uncover hidden database performance risks before they escalate.

Seamless Rails Upgrades: Expert Maintenance. Fixed Price — Upgrade RoR smoothly. We offer expert Rails maintenance at a fixed price. Secure, performant, minimal disruptions. Outdated gems? Breaking changes? We handle it.

Rails::Diff: Compare Rails-Generated Files with the Ones in Your App — You might diligently upgrade your app to new Rails versions but still have differences from how Rails’ default app generator now does things. This lets you see what those differences are.

Sorbet Adds Support for RBS Comments — Long before RBS was a thing, Sorbet brought type checking to Ruby and it now has (experimental) support for using RBS comments for adding types to methods. This is a neat synergy given that most Ruby type checkers for Ruby are converging towards RBS for type annotations.

Compiling Ruby Apps to Binaries with Tebako — A look into Tebako, a tool (written in Ruby itself) for packaging and distributing apps written in numerous languages into binaries that can be distributed for Windows, macOS and Linux users. It does this by essentially turning an app into a self-executing container. GitHub repo.

Tech Debt Dragging You Down? A Case Study About Bonsai — Too many security CVEs in production? Is your Rails app lagging due to tech debt? See how Bonsai transformed Valid Eval with 2–5× performance gains, smoother upgrades, and enhanced security. Read the case study and reclaim your time. 🚀

How to Submit a Better RailsConf Talk Proposal — The CFP for RailsConf 2025 closes tomorrow so if you’d like to speak, now’s the time to submit your proposal, and following the tips in this post could increase your chances.

Dealing with (Hypothetical) Sham Packages — A fictional-but-based-on-experience account of how a malicious version update for a package/gem can easily make it into your codebase. Do you check every version bump from every dependency? This account might make you think a bit differently about blindly accepting minor version upgrades.

Building an Inertia App with Rails — Get the benefits of a React-based SPA approach on the frontend while keeping Rails in the backend.

Why Ruby on Rails Still Matters — You’re reading a Ruby newsletter, so you probably don’t need to be convinced of Rails’ relevance. This post doesn’t say a lot but did lead to a rather extensive Hacker News discussion.

So About Those “Noisy Neighbors”… 😬 — Discovering some unfortunate realities of shared hardware (standard dynos??) and how they impact your app (also, tigers?).

Bsky Parser: Bluesky Text Parser That Outputs Rich Text Facets — If you’ve ever written code to post to Bluesky, you’ve probably run into what a headache it is to embed links, mentions, and hashtags properly. This aims to remove that headache.

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.

🚀 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.

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. →

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

▶  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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

🫠 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.

🔭 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.

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.

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.

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.