A look at back at Ruby in 2018

#430 — December 19, 2018

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Ruby Weekly

This week we're taking a break from the usual roundup to look back over the top Ruby news and links of 2018 (in which Ruby turned 25 years old!)

We'll be back in the new year (hopefully with big Ruby 2.6 news!) but before we go just want to take this opportunity to thank you for reading, and wish you a Merry Christmas and a great 2019.

— 🔻 Peter Cooper and Glenn Goodrich

🗞 Ruby developments in 2018

• The Ruby Toolbox came back to life. It remains a great way to find Ruby libraries grouped by category.
• Many developers began to say goodbye to Sprockets and hello to Webpacker.
• The first preview of Ruby 2.6 came out. The final is due next week.
• We all got a little excited about Ruby 2.6's JIT compilation feature.
• Sidekiq, the background jobs scheduler, turned six years old.
• Rails 5.2 was released.

Modeling Time Series with Redis 5.0— An overview of using the new streams data type to model time series data in Redis.

RedisGreen sponsor

• RailsConf 2018 happened and lots of great videos were released. DHH gave a really good keynote at RailsConf 2018. As did Tenderlove, of course.
• JRuby, the popular JVM-based Ruby implementation, became Ruby 2.5 compatible.
• Stripe revealed their Ruby type checker.
• Matz pair programmed and reflected on Ruby's past, present and future.
• Support ended for Ruby 2.2. I hope you're not still using it in production!
• Julia Evans gave us rbspy, a new powerful profiler for Ruby.
• GitHub upgraded from Rails 3.2 to 5.2. It took a lot of work, but it's OK because Microsoft are footing the bill now.
• We got an update on Bundler 2.0 and also learnt it's going to be bundled, itself, as part of Ruby 2.6.
• AWS Lambda (Amazon's serverless platform) added native support for Ruby 2.5— we're serverless now!
• Phusion released Passenger 6.0.
• mruby 2.0.0 (an official lightweight/embeddable Ruby interpreter that follows Ruby's ISO spec) came out.

💻 Jobs

Backend Ruby Engineer (x 15) - Remote— GitLab is hiring Ruby on Rails engineers for the different product teams in the backend.

GitLab

Love to Pair Program?— BackerKit is hiring developers who LOVE pairing to join our agile team. Join us! Learn more about our team values here

BackerKit

Join Our Career Marketplace & Get Matched With A Job You Love— Through Hired, software engineers have transparency into salary offers, competing opportunities, and job details.

Hired

📘 Articles & Tutorials

Bringing Proper Pattern Matching to Ruby?— You're clearly interested in Ruby continuing to add new features as our second most popular link this year followed a presentation at RubyKaigi in proposing a way to add pattern matching to Ruby. Matz's conclusion was that he liked the idea but not the syntax and further suggestions are sought.

Victor Shepelev, Brandon Weaver, et al.

Top 10 Errors From 1000+ Rails Projects (and How to Avoid Them)— Analysis of the ten most common errors from over 1000 Rails projects monitored by Rollbar, along with advice on avoiding such errors yourself.

Phil Nash

How Fast is Ruby 2.5?— 2018 was the year of Ruby 2.5 and it's been one of the most stable and impressive major Ruby releases I can remember while offering relatively modest performance improvements.

Noah Gibbs

Yo Dawg, I Heard You Like Newsletters, So I Made You Another Newsletter— Join other kick-ass developers and learn about engineering, DevOps, cloud architecture, played out memes💀, and more.

Honeybadger sponsor

Using Lambdas to Simplify Varying Behaviors in Your Code— An excellent article on how lambdas are used to remove conditionals and apply design patterns including specific, real-world use cases - and the second most popular tutorial we linked this year.

Keith R. Bennett

What’s New in Ruby 2.6?— The final release is just over a week away (hopefully) so here’s a look at what’s in it for you as a Ruby developer.

Guy Maliar

Ruby Optimization with One Magic Comment— Mike Perham of Sidekiq fame explains how freezing your strings can help performance quite a bit and how Ruby 2.3+ can help make this easier.

Mike Perham

An Overview of Ruby GUI Development in 2018— It’s not often written about but building graphical apps in Ruby is a thing, and here’s a comparison of the most popular approaches.

Saverio Miroddi

Actionable Tips to Improve Web Performance with Rails— Based on a talk from Wroclove.rb, the tools and tricks listed here will result in better Rails and general Web performance.

Radek Markiewicz

🔧 Code & Tools

Introducing Action Text for Rails 6— The most popular link in 2018 was about Action Text, a new framework coming to Rails 6 to make it easier to edit and display rich text content. It leans upon Basecamp’s Trix editor and DHH recorded a screencast showing how it works.

David Heinemeier Hansson

Yabeda: A Modular Framework for Instrumenting Ruby Apps— “Adopt metrics-driven development with an extendable framework that supports Rails, Sidekiq, and Prometheus out of the box.” There (remains) a lot to dig into here.

Evil Martians

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Segment sponsor

rb: Turn Ruby Into a Versatile Command Line Utility— Weighing in at a mere 10 lines, rb is a clever approach to making Ruby an even handier pipeable command line tool for manipulating and extracting data. Be sure to check the examples.

redka

Stimulus: A JS Framework for the HTML You Already Have— An interesting framework from Basecamp - full origin story here. Over the year it’s gained new reference documentation.

Basecamp

An Epic Collection of Ruby One Liners— Ruby isn’t just for building webapps, y’know. It’s an amazing swiss army knife for anyone at the command line and these examples could help you out with a lot of menial tasks.

Sundeep Agarwal