Bookmarks (218)

Holidays 8.6: Methods to Deal with Special Days — Days off, vacations, public holidays.. whatever you call them, they’re special days that your app may well need to handle in some way. Holidays makes it possible and covers numerous countries with its YAML-based definitions.

Deploying Rails with Docker and AWS Fargate — AWS Fargate (essentially a serverless-eque approach to running containers) can simplify the convoluted process of deploying Docker on Amazon’s Elastic Container Service (ECS).

How One Team Upgraded Its Apps from Rails 6 to Rails 7 — 6 to 7 wasn’t one of the biggest shifts, thankfully, but there were still some challenges, such as in moving from attr_encrypted to Active Record Encryption.

How to Install (Or Get Rid Of) 'therubyracer' on M1/M2 Macs — therubyracer provides a way to work with the V8 JavaScript runtime from Ruby and has come in very handy over the years, particularly with Rails’ asset pipeline. It doesn’t support modern M1/M2-based Macs though, and.. you no longer probably need it anyway.

A Hybrid Docker and Ruby Development Environment — As well as being a handy way to deploy software, containers can be handy for isolating dependencies at development time, so you run Ruby and Rails on your machine dev-style but MySQL and Redis, say, can be managed by Docker.

Synvert 1.0: A Tool to Rewrite Ruby Code Automatically — It’s been a few years since we mentioned Synvert, but 1.0 is now here. You write 'snippets' that then dynamically rewrite existing Ruby code (see this flash / redirect_to example from 2017. I gave it a try – it’s a little touchy to set up, but did work.

'How Do I Test X' Is Almost Always Answered with 'By Controlling X' — The sort of insight you probably already have but never put into words before. The next question is, well, how do you control X? The author explores the idea with some simple Ruby code and considers the importance of dependencies.

Debug Ruby Apps in Production Without Stopping Them — Rookout provides developers real-time access to code-level data, logs, traces, and metrics to troubleshoot and debug their cloud-native applications in any environment including production. Debug without having to recreate, redeploy, or stop the app.

Proposal: Extending HereDocs to Support Multiple Languages? — To set the scene here, Matz’s initial reaction to this proposal was “There’s still half a year left until April Fool’s Day.” The idea here is to be able to specify a format/language against heredocs (somewhat as with Markdown code blocks) and to then process those documents dynamically in a custom method. Joke or not, when...

ToResult: A dry-monads Wrapper Bringing the Railway Pattern to Ruby — dry-monads is a member of the popular ‘dry’ family of Ruby libraries that brings, unsurprisingly, monads to Ruby. ToResult aims to reduce the amount of boilerplate needed and make Do, Result, and Try easier to use.

Occams Record: An Advanced Query Library to Sit Alongside Active Record — Keep using Active Record but get a little bit extra with Occams Record. It lets you customize SQL, use cursors, use eager loading against raw SQL, and more.

JRuby 9.3.8.0 Released with Virtual Thread Support — On the surface, this Ruby 2.6.x-compatible release of the popular JVM based Ruby implementation seems minor, but it has a bonus feature in the shape of experimental support for using ‘virtual threads’ (a very new, lightweight thread feature in Java 19). This, apparently, makes it possible for JRuby apps to “create thousands of concurrently-executing fibers.”

Tobox: Implementation of the 'Transactional Outbox' Pattern — Simple, data-first events processing based around the transactional outbox pattern. tobox executes your handlers in a worker pool which can be either thread or fiber based.

Bashly: Bash CLI Script Framework and Generator — This is an interesting idea. You declare the basic user-facing elements of a CLI tool (arguments, environment variables, command groups, default values, and more) and Bashly generates the bash code to make it a reality – you can then flesh out the actual functionality from there. There are a lot of examples in the GitHub repo.

Howitzer: An Acceptance Testing Framework for Webapps — Ruby powered but aims to be high level enough to work with webapps built pretty much using anything, whether PHP, Java, or .NET. You can pick from Cucumber, RSpec or Turnip for the BDD side of things. Provides a lot of structure. GitHub repo.

▶  A Chat with Adrian Marin, the Founder of Avo Admin — Avo is the latest in a line of Rails-based boilerplate / starter apps, and a particularly solid one at that. (58 minutes.)

'Why I Don’t Enjoy RSpec All That Much' — I too, am more of a Minitest fan, but RSpec undoubtedly remains the biggest entrant in the fight. Josef reflects on some of RSpec’s warts.

▶  Kuby: Active Deployment for Rails Apps — Want to deploy Rails apps on Kubernetes? Kuby tries to make Docker and Kubernetes more accessible to the average Rails developer. This talk takes it very gently and focuses more on the big picture of Rails deployments before reaching Kuby as an option. Thanks to reader James Childers for specifically recommending this.

Ruby 3.2.0 Preview 2 Released — The countdown to Christmas Day, and therefore a key new version of Ruby, continues. Preview releases in recent years have been quite reliable (it’s not the 1.9 days anymore!) so if you want to play with the new WASI-based WebAssembly support, regular expression timeouts, rest param changes, or YJIT’s support for arm64/aarch64.. now is as good a time as any.

Send Email Directly from Your Ruby App with Courier — Using a marketing tool to email your users? With the Courier gem you can notify your users with a single line of code. We work with Mailgun, Sendgrid and many other email providers.

Using the Timescale Gem with Ruby — TimescaleDB is an extension that turns Postgres into more of a fully-fledged time series database. This thorough walkthrough demonstrates using its hypertables from Ruby and Active Record from creation through to querying.

How to Create a Custom Rubocop 'Cop' — RuboCop is the go-to tool for linting and checking code style, but what if you have a very custom rule to apply? Create your own ‘cop.’

Runno: A Browser-Based Code Runner That Supports Ruby — It has some similarities with things like JSFiddle or CodePen, but can run Ruby (as well as Python, C and C++). It can even act interactively and accept user input (such as with gets). You can then take these sandboxes and use them on your own pages/blog posts, etc.

Rack 3.0 Released: The Modular Ruby Web Server Interface — Rack forms the backbone of a majority of Ruby webapps. There’s not a big roundup of the key changes, but the Rack 3 upgrade guide provides some hints – the changes are mostly technical and aimed at framework creators, but there are a couple of neat features if you operate at the Rack level....

sqlite3-ruby 1.5: Now with Faster, More Reliable Installation — Native precompiled gems are now available for Ruby 2.6, 2.7, 3.0, and 3.1 on the most popular architectures (it took just seconds to install on my M1 Mac). We also get the very latest SQLite version – v3.39.3 – that now supports RIGHT and FULL OUTER joins, among other things.

Rouge 4.0: Pure-Ruby, Pygments-Compatible Code Highlighter — A long standing project that now supports over 200 different languages, including Ruby, of course. v4.0 is focused on improvements but does drop Ruby < 2.7 support. GitHub repo.

JIT Compilers for Ruby and Rails: An Overview — Find out about the different JIT approaches for Ruby — YJIT, MJIT, and TenderJIT — and their benefits.

▶  How to Run Ruby in Your Browser — Several months ago we linked to How I got Ruby snippets to run browser side in less than a day – now its author (the creator of Runno – featured above) speaks about how WebAssembly made it happen.

Cutoff: Timed Deadlines for Ruby — Sounds like a timeout, but is rather different and it's worth looking at the examples in the README if you want to restrict the amount of time that code spends running or waiting.

Gemsmith v18: CLI Tool for Smithing New Ruby Gems — If you want to go a step beyond Bundler’s gem skeleton.

RouteTranslator 13.0: Translate Rails App Routes to Various Languages — Manage the translations of your app routes with a simple dictionary format. Now supports Rails 7.x as well as 5.2 and 6.x.

Trilogy: A New Database Adapter for MySQL from GitHub — GitHub uses Trilogy for connecting its Rails apps to ‘MySQL-compatible’ (e.g. MariaDB) database servers. Why use it over mysql2? It has no dependency on libmysqlclient or similar, so it can be easier to install and deploy, and it boasts improved performance under heavy loads. Compatibility varies, so take care and be sure to test...

Shale 0.8: Object Mapper and Serializer for XML, JSON, TOML and YAML — This latest release reintroduces Ruby 2.6 support (mostly for JRuby’s benefit) and you can now group mappings via a group block.

Ruby Units: A Unit Handling Library — Designed to simplify (and provide a structure around) the handling of units for scientific calculations.

BabySqueel 2.0: An Expressive Query DSL for Active Record — Squeel was a project many years ago that monkeypatched Arel to enable the writing of more expressive queries. BabySqueel brings similar ideas to Active Record but with less monkeypatching. So if you’d rather write Post.where.has { created_at >= 2.weeks.ago } than the longer Arel-based equivalent.. give it a look.

▶  The One About Layoffs — Brittany Martin and Brian Mariani tackle a difficult topic, but one that’s increasingly affecting developers in turbulent times. They share their own personal tales and try to offer some silver linings too.

Integrating Sidekiq with Hanami Apps — Sidekiq and Rails live together like bread and butter, but what about Hanami? It’s pretty straightforward too.

▶  Discussing Postgres with Andrew Atkinson — Ruby-flavored Postgres database discussion covering areas like constraints, catching unsafe migrations, and analyzing query plans.

Stateless Forms with the Rails Attributes API — If you’ve ever used a non-ActiveModel-based form in Rails before, you’ll appreciate this dive into the Attributes API, its use cases, and several examples of how to use it with real-world forms.

Join the Collaboration Community: Network and Do More of What You Love — Collaborate with other professionals on side projects, podcasting, beta-testing, co-founding, and more.

Migrating a Rails App from Webpack to esbuild — Jakub explains how he’s migrated a project with over 300k lines of JavaScript code(!) from Webpack 4 to esbuild and, perhaps unsurprisingly, got far faster builds in the process.

Automate GitHub API Calls with Ruby, Keyboard Maestro, and 1Password CLI — An interesting combination of tools come together here, with Ruby automating things at the heart. There are better but more complex ways to solve Moncef’s problem but it’s a neat bit of ‘flintstoning’ that he’s done here.

The What, the Why, and the How of Bloom Filters — Bloom filters are a very interesting type of data structure that allow you to efficiently determine whether something is definitely not a member of a set or, to a certain level of probability, is a member of a set. They’re not difficult to implement either, as we see here.

Ditching Active Record Callbacks — As useful as they can be, Active Record callbacks are a frequent pain point for Rails developers because they can be easily overlooked when debugging. After ending up in a tangle of callbacks, Jeremy’s team came up with a different approach (that I’m not that keen on myself, but you might!)

GV (Google Ventures) Invests $35m into Ruby Notification Infrastructure — A need for notification management systems has grown rapidly as software companies realize this critical user experience. Customizable channel preferences, and cross-channel audit logging are a necessity in the privacy era.

Heroku’s Next Chapter, Says Bye to Its Free Plans — Heroku has played a huge role in the Ruby and Rails space over the years, but there’s recently been a lot of conjecture around its future. Salesforce (its owner) has responded with a public roadmap.. which sadly includes the discontinuation of its wildly popular free plans by the end of the year, so if...

What Happens in Ruby on Class Instantiation — Did you know you could hack instantiation? I’ve never found a use for the allocate approach myself (though Gregory Brown explains one here) but it’s worth knowing about its existence just in case!

ActiveRecordExtended 3.0: Add Extended Postgres Functionality to Ruby and Rails Apps — Introduces support for things like array value overlaps, network address manipulation, window functions, and some JSON and HSTORE operators into Active Record.

Effective Queries with Rails and Postgres — If you’re not 'into' databases enough to be noodling on optimizing queries and tweaking schemas as a matter of course, this is for you. Pavel gives some tips on index types and basic principles to apply to keep things running quickly.