Bookmarks (177)

Shopify Invests in Research for Ruby at Scale — This is exciting! If you’ve kept an eye on industry comings and goings in recent years, you may have noticed Shopify has brought together quite the team of Ruby and VM experts (whether through direct hires or collaborations) and it’s only continuing – this bodes extremely well for Ruby and reminds me somewhat of when...

DataChecks: A DSL for Regression Testing on Data — For post-hoc checks when validations or database constraints haven’t done their job (or haven’t done it in the way you were expecting, at least).

Clayoven: A Site Generator Aimed at Math-Heavy Sites — A curiously specific static site generator that’s targeted specifically at rendering math stuff.

Ruby2JS 5.0: A Ruby to JavaScript Transpiler — A transpiler aimed at keeping the resulting code looking ‘hand crafted’ rather than merely transpiled. Fiddle with the demo on the home page to get a feel for it.

Magnus 0.3.0: Ruby Bindings for Rust — We linked this project recently but it’s coming along at a fast pace. Magnus offers a way to write Ruby extensions in Rust (or, alternatively, call Ruby code from Rust) and Ruby’s string encoding API is now better supported, integer/float conversions are much better, and you can create Proc objects from Rust closures.

Linting and Auto-Formatting Ruby Code with RuboCop — An introductory post. Existing RuboCop users scroll on :-)

How to Get a Random Number in Ruby — It’s a basic thing to do, but did you know there are several options?

How Lyft's Mobile Team Does Mobile CI at Scale — How does Lyft do mobile CI/CD and unblock their ~200 mobile app contributors? Lyft shares all the details.

A Case for Query Objects in Rails — Making your queries reusable is an excellent idea and bound to save you frustration cycles later. Here are a few ways to build them right.

Syntax Tree and Lambda-Local Variables — The author of Syntax Tree (a Ruby parsing and formatting toolkit) has to deal with every dark corner of the language.

Soft Deletion with Postgres: Writing the Logic in Postgres Itself — Of course we love writing everything in Ruby, but Postgres, like many database systems, is quite powerful on its own and if you wanted to add ‘soft’ deletion (marking records as hidden rather than deleting them) to your app, you could give the job to Postgres itself by way of rules.

New Official Guides on How to Contribute to Ruby — There are lots of ways you can contribute towards the future of Ruby whether through testing it, reporting issues, making changes, submitting proposals, or improving the docs.. and the docs now have some new practical guides on how to do all of those things.

All The Convenience of Heroku Without the Cost — The convenience of Heroku, but on any cloud and in any region, with persistent storage, custom network configuration, zero downtime deployments, blue/green and canary releases, WAF, and more. Try it today for free plus an extra $100 in credits with the code: RubyWeekly!

Using Scientist to Refactor Critical Rails Code — We’ve mentioned Scientist a few times over the years as a neat way to introduce change to an untested or complex app through executing the old and new code and comparing results. The LabTech gem introduced in this post makes this process even easier.

hash_deep_diff: Get the Differences Between Two Hashes — Basically diff for hashes. Hashdiff is another option in this space.

Shopify's Experience Porting the YJIT Ruby Compiler to Rust — A project to port YJIT to Rust (rather than using C, as most of CRuby is written in) has been underway for a while and progress is going really well. The Shopify-based team’s leader tells the full story here covering both the high and low points

Have You Investigated Honeybadger Lately?🕵🏽‍♀️ — Honeybadger is so much more than error monitoring! All new plans include cron monitoring, uptime monitoring, customizable public status pages, and more - all rolled into a single, easy to use platform. Sign up now and feel the power of the badger!🦡

Report of a Now-Fixed RubyGems Vulnerability — A bug in the gem yanking (unpublishing, basically) process meant that under certain conditions gems could be taken over by the owners of similarly named gems. It’s now been fixed and while the author says you might want to audit your Gemfile.lock files… you might want to see the following item first ;-)

Impact Analysis of the CVE-2022-29176 Unauthorized Package Takeover Vulnerability — This directly relates to the item above and goes into more depth analyzing the extent of the problem, why it occurred, and how WhiteSource analyzed the gems ecosystem and concludes no gems were compromised.

How to Make Ruby Run a Program Written in a 'Natural Language' — A start-from-scratch effort creating a new DSL with its own “virtual machine” so this is the kind of post you spend some time with as a thought experiment and you become a better Rubyist.

Ruby Memoization — Memoization is an optimization technique where the results of operations are cached based upon their arguments. It’s easy to pull off in Ruby but there are some points to keep in mind.

A Hybrid Development Docker Compose Setup for Rails — Josef looks at getting 80% of the benefits for 20% of the effort by not Dockerizing everything but focusing on where it makes most sense.

How to Use Import Maps without Rails — DHH has talked about a ‘bundler-less’ reality for Rails by way of import maps numerous times, but if you appreciate a bare bones example to understand what’s happening, Tomas is here for you.

How to Sell a One-Time Purchase in Rails with Stripe — We’re Stripe customers ourselves and it really is easy to use them for taking payments as Jeffrey demonstrates here.

▶  Discussing GraphQL with David Sanchez — GraphQL is a flexible, strongly-typed query language and this episode digs into its use in and from Rails apps. (47 minutes.)

Searchjoy 1.0: Search Analytics Made Easy — Slips into your Rails app and plugs into things like Elasticsearch, Sphinx and Solr and lets you track searches, mark conversions, then keep an eye on what users are doing.

rbenv for Windows: Manage Your App's Ruby Environment on Windows — The topic of Ruby’s support for Windows has been discussed for many years and while Windows and Ruby aren’t the best of friends, the tooling exists if you need it.

Sniffer 0.5: Log and Analyze Outgoing HTTP Requests — Hooks into numerous Ruby HTTP libraries and logs outgoing requests in JSON format which can be sent elsewhere.

What Do You Think of 'Scoped Gems'? — Here’s an interesting proposal whose author wants more eyes on. The basic idea is that gems can be scoped to specific users – for example s3@aws-sdk rather than aws-sdk-s3 – so that separate RubyGems users can use whatever names they like (within their scope) and also to give end users reassurance that a gem is associated...

Bootstrapping with Rails Generators and Templates — Rails is famed for its ‘batteries included’ approach of having most things you need ready to use, but what about going a step further with more of your app defined in advance? Hans-Jörg shows off generators and templates and how they can help.

Breaking the Monolith at Twitch — Twitch is one of a large group of successful companies that began life running as a monolithic Rails app (a la GitHub or Twitter) but they’ve written about where they went from there, how Go entered the picture, and their current practices which are, sadly, mostly Ruby free. (Note there’s a part two.)

▶  Active Record Tricks — Tips and tricks videos are always popular, and this one covers a lot in just 12 minutes including read only attributes, inserting and upserting, toggling booleans, and single table inheritance.

Couchbase Capella DBaaS: Store in JSON, Access with SQL — Build faster with in-memory performance, automatic replication and scaling. Try it now for free and be live in under 3 minutes.

On Ruby 3.1’s Incompatible Changes to Its YAML Module (Psych 4) — Ruby 3.1 introduced Psych (Ruby’s core YAML parser) 4.0, a major upgrade that breaks compatibility in how it loads files by default and how it handles arguments (dropping support for legacy positional arguments).

How to Run a Virtual Retreat — Something more companies have surely been doing in the last year or two.

SuperDiff 0.9: View Differences Between Complex Data Structures in RSpec — When you’ve got something that’s expected and what actually came back, distinguishing the difference between them can be a pain. This attempts to make it easier.

Sequel 5.56.0: The Database Toolkit for Ruby. — alter_table / add_column / add_foreign_key now support an :index option to create indexes on new columns. You can also now create STRICT tables on SQLite 3.37.0+ (basically strict typing in SQLite).

U Up? Let People Know with Beautiful Status Pages from Honeybadger 😘 — We've added support for custom domains and branding on our public status pages - free on all current plans.

N1Loader: A Loader to Solve N+1 Issues with Active Record 'for Good' — I think the author’s enthusiasm speaks for itself: “This gem has proved itself stable in production and deserves a chance to help many engineers around the world. It’s especially great as it fits amazingly with GraphQL and makes it so easy to fix any kind of N+1 issues!”

How to Avoid Race Conditions in Rails — There are many ways to avoid race conditions, and Rails/ActiveRecord has a solution for each one so knowing the benefits of each approach makes sure you grab the right tool for the job.

Improve Your Specs' Quality with Branch Coverage — Enable branch coverage in SimpleCov (the code coverage tool) to make sure you aren’t lulled to sleep with line coverage and end up leaving bugs in your code.

Hosting Ruby Apps (for Free) on Oracle Cloud with Dokku — It’s interesting to see a different cloud offering getting mentioned once in a while. Oracle Cloud has a rather curious free tier with a lot of potential, though the ideas in this post could apply to almost any VPS.

Sorbet + 100% Coverage Makes (Safe) Ruby Refactoring Possible — A quick explanation of how Crunchy Data seamlessly deployed a large (178 file) change to their Ruby codebase which the author (who is far from Ruby’s biggest fan) suggests would not have been possible without their strict dedication to Sorbet and typing.

Ransack 3.1: Object-Based Searching for Rails Apps — Want to add a search feature to a Rails app but without introducing dependencies like ElasticSearch or Algolia? The project has a new docs site now too.

Modern Treasury Is Hiring to Build a Universal Banking API — Modern Treasury is a platform used by high growth fintech companies and marketplaces like Gusto, Pipe, Marqeta, BlockFi, and ClassPass to help them move and manage money at scale. Our team is remote-first, with offices in SF and NY.

🤔  Are Ruby and Rails Still Relevant? — If you’ve been a Rubyist for a while, you’ll have seen this discussion come up over and over. The answer is, of course, yes, but I’m always interested to pick up on the gamut of opinions and the replies here are mostly positive.

Mess with DNS: A Playground to Learn About DNS Concepts — Not Ruby specific, but DNS management is one of those skills I think it’s great for everyone to pick up.