~rubyweekly | Bookmarks (248)

form_props: The Power of Rails Forms, Now for React Too — If you want the convenience of form_with but when building forms in React apps, this is for you. GitHub repo.

🇯🇵  Matz on Static vs Dynamic Typing — This article is in Japanese, so get your browser’s translation feature ready. It’s a transcript of thoughts by Ruby’s creator (in a talk given in 2022) on the pros and cons of static and dynamic typing, and why Ruby hasn’t adopted type declarations so far (complexity and potential bad feelings in the broader Ruby community).

A Docs-First Approach to Rails API Development? — Writing documentation for APIs is rarely an exciting job and often gets left till last, but what if you wrote it first? This article looks at how this can work in practice, and introduces Skooma, a new Ruby library for validating API implementations against OpenAPI documents.

▶  Setting up Ruby and Rails on Windows and WSL — If you’re considering 'doing a DHH' and giving Windows a try for Ruby development, this quick look at setting up a fresh Windows 11 environment for Rails development could be very handy.

Using Lambdas and Callables for Deferred Evaluation, Control Flow, and New Language Patterns — When might you write a block vs a “stabby lambda?” Procs and blocks and lambdas (oh my!) are fantastic and while Ruby has conventions and patterns to follow, there’s a lot you can do with the basics, as Jared shows here.

How Our Amazon ECS Autoscaler Works — Building an autoscaler for ECS was a bit more complex than a Heroku add-on, so here’s a taste of our secret sauce.

Abstract Methods and NotImplementedError — Learn what the NotImplementedError exception is actually for and some other approaches for handling situations where abstract classes don’t provide methods meant to be implemented in their subclasses.

Creating a Flappy Bird Clone with Ruby — How has it been ten years since Flappy Bird was the hit game of the moment?

How PlanetScale Makes Schema Changes — Did you know Rails powers the popular MySQL platform’s main API? Here’s a look at how they approach handling schema changes at scale by separating migrations from deploys, along with some GitHub Actions and PlanetScale’s own magic.

Maybe MOAR Is Not the Answer 🫠 — Turns out a relentless push for MOAR features and developers was wrong. Leaders could do with some reflection on less.

Synvert: Write Code Snippets to Transform Existing Source Code — Supporting Ruby, JavaScript, and TypeScript, this is essentially a scripted, AST-powered form of 'find and replace' for code, letting you implement code transformations in a structured way. It can even be given input and output code and write a potential transformation for you to tweak. Full Ruby docs here and a bunch of example...

Phlex 1.10.0: Build Object Oriented View in Ruby — A minor release by number, a pretty big release by features! Phlex lets you treat everything in a view as a distinct component and manage them as plain old Ruby objects. v1.10 unveils some exciting experimental features including selective rendering, component kits, and CSV view rendering – all explained in detail here.

CrystalRuby: Embed Crystal Code Directly in Ruby — Crystal is a Ruby inspired programming language that boasts a lot of great features and is well worth a try IMHO. One benefit is performance, and this gem lets you write Crystal code, inlined in Ruby, giving you a potential performance boost without a huge shift in syntax. New and YMMV!

RubyGems Not Vulnerable to the xz/liblzma Backdoor — If you follow tech news more broadly, you’ll have seen news about a backdoor in the xz/liblzma project. While the vulnerability has far reaching implications, the RubyGems team has done an audit of its effect on RubyGems (including every gem) and found no issues.

▶  Frontend Ruby with Glimmer DSL for Web — A talk from last month’s Montreal.rb meetup by Andy Maleh, best known for his work on Glimmer, about taking Ruby into the browser to create frontend apps.

▶  🤡 How to Make Your Rails App 'Fart' — Clearly intended as an April Fools’ joke, but with a nonetheless practical angle that you could hopefully use for something more edifying than fart noises.. 😅

Rails 8 Adding Rate Limiting to Action Controller via Kredis Limiter Type — Rails 8 will provide a rate_limit method to define rate limiting rules within controllers.

Introducing Ruzzy: A Coverage-Guided Ruby Fuzzer — Fuzzing is a form of dynamic testing that feeds random inputs to a test subject and Ruzzy is the latest gem to offer fuzzing Ruby code. After a quick usage example, there’s a lot of information here about implementation details.

Gemsmith 21.5: CLI Tool for Smithing New Ruby Gems — An ideal tool if you want to go a step beyond Bundler’s gem skeletons. The homepage does a good job showing off the main features, but there’s also its GitHub repo.

📋 Clipboard: Cross-Platform Access to the Clipboard — A library of over 10 years’ vintage, but still maintained, supporting modern versions of Ruby (including JRuby), and clipboard access on Linux, macOS, Windows, WSL, and more.

PermanentRecords: Soft-Delete for Your ActiveRecord Records — A way to prevent Active Record objects being destroyed, as long as their model has a deleted_at column available. An alternative to ActsAsParanoid.

React on Rails 14: Bringing React, Webpack, and Rails Together — A major release because Ruby 2.7 support is dropped, but otherwise broadly stays the same and still worth a look if you want to integrate more closely with React in a Rails app – here’s how it works.

ActiveRecordCursorPaginate: Cursor-Based Pagination for Active Record — Paginate through an AR relation using cursor pagination. It also supports ordering by any column on the relation.

Kamal: Hot Deployment Tool to Watch — or a Game Changer? — First published about what was then called MRSK, the Evil Martians have updated their take on DHH’s container-based deployment tool from a 2024 perspective. If you’re not yet using Kamal or want to understand when/why you should/shouldn’t use it, this is for you.