Bookmarks (206)

Rails is Better 'Low Code' Than 'Low Code' — Radan plays out parallel story arcs for a ‘simple’ CRUD app that evolves new features and ultimately hits the low code ceiling. This thought piece provoked a rather lively Hacker News discussion.

▶  An Interview with Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto — Ruby’s creator Matz was interviewed at the recent Baltic Ruby event about Ruby as well as his work-life balance, hobbies, and experiences being a father. It’s not super technical, but a good interview if you want to get a more rounded view of Matz and how he’s thinking about Ruby’s future.

Speeding Up Ruby by Rewriting C.. in Ruby? — A fascinating look at Ruby performance and how actually writing more of Ruby’s core implementation in Ruby itself can yield surprisingly large speedups thanks to how YJIT works (I seem to recall Rubinius had a similar thesis years ago). A lot of fun and a must read, IMO.

Ruby Evolution: New Ruby Features Added in 2.0 → 3.3 — First launched a couple of years ago covering up to Ruby 3.1, Victor’s handy resource covering the key changes to the Ruby language over the years now goes up to Ruby 3.3. A fantastic way to check your knowledge of modern Ruby features.

Awesome Nested Set: The Nested Set Pattern for ActiveRecord Models — Billed as a replacement for acts_as_nested_set and BetterNestedSet, this now supports Rails 8.

Oniguruma-to-ES: Convert Patterns from the Oniguruma Regex Engine to Native JS — Oniguruma is a powerful regex engine used by Ruby, TextMate, and other projects. This could be useful if you need to share regexes between Ruby, TextMate grammars, and JavaScript, say. There’s a demo.

pg_query 6.0: Parse, Deparse and Normalize SQL Queries with Postgres' Own Parser — Uses the actual Postgres server source to parse SQL queries and return their internal Postgres parse tree. v6.0 upgrades to using the Postgres 17 parser and the new features it supports (e.g. new JSON functions).

Building a Better Ruby ORM for Time Series and Analytics — TimescaleDB is a popular extension for adding high performance time series data functions to Postgres and the Timescale team has been working on a way to bring its enhanced time series features into Active Record.

Mission Control Jobs 1.0 Released — A dashboard and set of extensions that improve the operation and monitoring of background jobs running through Active Job and Solid Queue (or Resque).

What You Need to Know About SQLite — Lessons on what the SQLite database engine can and cannot do, how Rails helps you work with SQLite, and why it may, or may not, be a good choice to back your Rails 8 app.

Overriding Methods in Rails: A No-Code-Editing Approach — How to override a class or instance method without editing its source file in Rails.

Sinatra 4.1: The Popular Ruby Webapp DSL — Now includes host authorization, rackup no longer depends on WEBrick though it's still supported (Puma is recommended instead), and fixes some Ruby 3.4 and Rack 3.1 compatibility issues. Full changelog.

Pry 0.15: The IRB Alternative / Runtime Developer Console — Despite the many improvements made to IRB in recent years, Pry remains a popular alternative. v0.15.0 adds support for Ruby 3.3 and Reline.

Nokolexbor: A Faster Drop-in Replacement for Nokogiri — A Lexbor-based HTML5 parser that claims to be “5.2x faster at parsing HTML and up to 997x faster at CSS selectors.”

Automate Embedding Creation and Syncing in Postgres with pgai Vectorizer — 🚀 pgai Vectorizer automates embedding creation and syncing in Postgres with one SQL command—keeps embeddings updated, no tools needed.

Mittsu 0.5: A 3D Graphics Library for Ruby — A Three.js-inspired Ruby abstraction over OpenGL. Now with the ability to load STL models.

TTY::Links 0.2: Hyperlinks in Your Terminal — Test to see if a terminal supports hyperlinks and outputs them correctly if so.

▶  Rails 8: The Demo — Whether you love or loathe Rails, DHH’s 2005 ▶️ ‘build a blog in 15 minutes’ screencast introduced many of us to Ruby and Rails’ potential. Here’s DHH’s take for the Rails 8 generation. The usual scaffolding is there, but 20 years later we get a serving of JavaScript, deployment, and authentication too. (30 minutes.)

|> An Attempt at Elixir-like Pipes in Ruby — Numerous attempts have been made to bring a pipeline operator to Ruby. A newly added operator in Python inspired Victor to take another shot at it using a little AST transformation. It probably still won’t make core, but this is the sort of Ruby experimentation we all love to see.

RubyGems Adds New Maintainer Role — Previously, you either ‘owned’ a gem and could publish new versions or you did not and could not. The new “maintainer” role lands in the middle, letting people publish new versions of a gem without necessarily owning it. A good way to improve security on larger projects with numerous maintainers.

Securing Ruby’s Future: How Ruby Central is Strengthening Security — Ruby Central runs RubyGems.org, so often sits between developers and nefarious entities looking to trick us. It takes a village of sponsors (thank you!) and Rubyists (thank you!), and they’ve been busy improving MFA and building a roadmap to more secure and verifiable gems.

WorkOS: Sell to Enterprises with a Few Lines of Code — The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, offering flexible, easy-to-use APIs to integrate SSO, SCIM, and FGA in minutes instead of months.

Rails Form Builder: A Copy & Paste Library of Form Building Helpers — “Since there is so much value in having this form builder be a part of your code base, we didn’t want to hide the code away in a gem.” GitHub repo.

A New Chapter for RubyGems: How Ruby Central is Building a Sustainable Future — Ruby Central sits at the heart of the Ruby community, maintaining things like RubyGems and Bundler and running RubyConf. Here they tell the full story of RubyGems, its management, and how the new Ruby Central OSS Committee is pushing it forward.

🚂 Rails 8.0 Released (No PaaS Required) — Rails 8 has been with us for so long now, the final release almost felt like an anti-climax last week, but it’s a fantastic milestone nonetheless. Kamal steps in to improve deployment, Solid Queue lets you drop Redis and running a separate background job framework (if you wish), Propshaft replaces Sprockets, SQLite steps up to being a...

How We Made a Ruby Method 200x Faster — If you like digging into performance issues and seeing strong end results, this is for you. rack-mini-profiler and flame graphs are used to pinpoint a problem and refactor around it.

Streaming Rack with Falcon — Rack 3 adds input and output streaming to the web server interface, and here, Samuel runs through all the variations with Ruby and Rack, including how to use it with Rails. Ruby continues to shine as a solid choice for real-time, interactive, performant webapps.

▶  DragonRuby Game Toolkit: Lessons Learned — DragonRuby is a fantastic Ruby-based game engine (though it’s not CRuby) that’s no mere toy but used in hundreds of games on multiple platforms. Its creator tells the full story here, including its design, how it differs from standard Ruby, and shows off some examples.

Transformation Is Hard, but These CIOs Shared Lessons Learned 🧠 — Tips from CIOs on change, community, iteration, challenges, leadership, collaboration, and human-centered innovation.

wxRuby3: A Cross Platform GUI Library — Based on the mature wxWidgets GUI toolkit which aims to provide a native look on Windows, macOS, and Linux/GTK. Note the licensing – wxRuby3 is MIT licensed, wxWidgets is LGPL.

Literal: Runtime Type-Checking for Ruby — Provides types, structured objects, properties, and enums. The built-in types include generic structures that enable some neat use cases (e.g. check that an array is all integers, and other constraints.) It integrates nicely with Rails too. Literally, check it out.

Point-and-Click Observability in Honeybadger — Gleaning insights from your logs has never been easier with Honeybadger’s new point-and-click query mode for BadgerQL. Click to learn more!

Redmine 6.0: Ruby's OG Project Management App — A blast from the past! Redmine is a very long-standing Ruby app (now in its third decade..) that you’re sure to have used at some point, if only on Ruby’s issue tracker. It now supports Ruby 3.3 and uses Rails 7.2.

Help Needed: Shoryuken: Amazon SQS Thread Based Message Processor for Ruby — A popular library that's just gone into ‘maintenance mode’ and is actively seeking a new maintainer, so do reach out to them if you’re interested.

Stringer: A Self-Hosted, 'Anti-Social' RSS Reader — A Rails app that sticks to the feed reading basics, boasting no social features or ‘fancy machine learning’ at all! It does look pretty nice though.

json v2.8: Ruby's JSON Implementation Gets Faster — Ruby’s json is depended on by (almost) everything so updates like this have far reaching implications. v2.8 includes significant performance improvements (up to 1.7x faster on real world documents) and support for optionally parsing trailing commas.

❄️ Festive Errors: Add Some Year-Round Holiday Cheer to the Rails Error Page — Spice up your Rails error pages with fun holiday themes. Tis the season?

ValidEmail2 6.0: ActiveModel Validation for Email — Check the legitimacy of email addresses including MX lookup and checking against a rather extensive list of disposable email services.

Argon2id: Ruby Bindings to the Argon2 Password-Hashing Function — The goal is to be a drop-in replacement for bcrypt-ruby’s BCrypt::Password but using Argon2 instead. Precompiled for all major platforms and with no runtime dependencies.

🚨Running Unsupported Rails? Need to Catch Up Little by Little? — Rails 6.1 reached EOL! Avoid vulnerabilities & upgrade with 🌳 Bonsai, our fixed-cost monthly maintenance service.

JRuby 9.4.9.0 Released — An update to the Ruby 3.1 compatible line of the popular JVM-based Ruby implementation with a security fix and some compatibility and Java integration fixes.

Pagy 9.2: The Popular Pagination Gem — It’s been around for years and still claims to be “the best pagination gem” – who are we to argue? v9.2.0 makes v9’s keyset pagination approach even more ‘wicked fast’ and adds more apps to its playground to play with and get started fast. GitHub repo.

When it Comes to Weird Lexical Syntax, Ruby Wins? — When an experienced programmer goes on a tour of 42 languages while building a syntax highlighter, some fun insights pop up with, amusingly, Ruby getting a special mention: “Now here’s a language whose syntax evades all attempts at understanding.”

🌸 Hanami 2.2: Persistence Pays Off — A major release for the popular, alternative framework for building Ruby webapps. v2.2 adds a new and improved database layer, shown off well in this post. The new version represents the team’s complete vision for Hanami, so give it a test drive.

What is Rack? — An in-depth journey through Rack, the protocol that makes Sinatra sing and Rails run, starting from scratch by creating a Rack-compliant app before using the conveniences of the Rack gem. A good look under the hood.

Memetria K/V: High-Performance Key-Value Hosting — Boost your Ruby apps with Memetria K/V, providing portable, easy-to-use hosting for Redis OSS and Valkey. Scale your applications with ease and achieve high performance. Includes detailed analytics and large key memory tracking.

Ruby 3.3.6 Released — Don’t get too excited, it’s a scheduled minor bug fix release and removes some default gem warnings. Nonetheless, it’s a straightforward upgrade for Ruby 3.3 and the last one of 2024 as v3.3.7 is expected on January 7.

Ruby Video: An Index of ~4000 Ruby Talks — Over the past year, Ruby Video has brought together almost 4000 videos from over 2000 speakers and you’re encouraged to contribute your own too (though I'd be surprised if many talks remain to be found with these numbers!)

How to Compare Postgres EXPLAIN Plans & Tune Slow Queries — Are slow Postgres queries impacting your Ruby app performance? Join this webinar to learn how to diagnose and tune them effectively. We'll use pganalyze to walk through how to compare plans & debug common scenarios like inefficient nested loops & missing indexes.

Benchmarking Ruby Parsers — Prism is (almost certainly going to be) the new default parser in Ruby 3.4, but is it the best-performing option? Benoit looks at several candidates, including Ripper and ruby_parser, and gives us the good news that yes, Prism is fast!