Rails 6.0, Pong in 160 lines of Ruby, and a new Sinatra release

#464 — August 22, 2019

Read on the Web

Ruby Weekly

Rails 6.0: Yes, It's a Big One!— Rails 6 is out! At this point, you’ve probably heard of all the big, new features so just take it out for a spin and thank the core team. Alternatively, if you need a quick reminder:

• Action Mailbox makes routing incoming emails as easy as routing HTTP requests.
• Action Text brings the tried and tested Trix rich text editor into Rails.
• Multiple database support will make a lot of previously tricky data patterns a lot easier to set up.
• Parallel testing will help you get the most out of all those CPU cores and make testing faster.
• Webpacker is now the default JavaScript bundler.
• Zeitwerk is the new automatic code loader used in Rails.
• And a, lot, more, besides.

Official Rails Blog

strongDM Makes Managing DB Access a Breeze— See why Splunk's CISO says "strongDM gives you what you can’t get any other way - the ability to see what happens, replay and analyze incidents, discriminate customer access from user access."

strongDM sponsor

rest-client and Other Gems Yanked Due to Malicious Code— The problem is now resolved, but the rest-client maintainer’s Rubygems.org account was hacked and versions 1.6.10-1.6.13 contained a malicious backdoor. Ensure you are not using it, and set up multi-factor authentication on your own Rubygems.org account to help avoid similar issues. A variety of other, less popular gems have also been affected, all with relatively (thankfully) fewer downloads.

REST-Client Maintainers

Jekyll 4.0.0 Released— Breaking changes (dropping support for things like RedCarpet), Ruby 2.4.0 or higher required, and some new caching optimizations are all in this release of the popular Ruby-based static site generator.

Matt Rogers

Sinatra 2.0.6 Released— It’s not a big release (changelog) but any release for the popular web development library/DSL is worth checking out. Jordan Owens has also joined the core team and is focusing on v3.0 work.

Kunpei Sakai

Highlights from Git 2.23: New Alternatives for git checkout— Yes, there’s a new version of git. The biggest tweak comes via two new commands, git switch and git restore which aim to break down the git checkout experience into something more controllable.

The GitHub Blog

💻 Jobs

Backend Ruby Developer in Portland, OR— 🏕 Campground review and bookings site seeks a talented Ruby developer to work on our core API and data integrations.

The Dyrt

Ruby developers are in demand on Vettery— Make a free profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers.

Vettery

📘 Articles & Tutorials

A Ruby Gem Debugging Strategy— The subtitle for this post could be “using Pry to debug gems” as it’s a nice recap of the utility of Pry, the powerful Ruby REPL.

Jared Norman

▶  A Quick Look At ActiveRecord Connection Pool Debugging— “A few weeks ago I ran into a Rails bug that caused our database pool setting to be ignored (fixed in Rails 6). In this video I step through the debugging process I used to find the cause.”

Adam McCrea

Getting Started with the InfluxDB Ruby Client

InfluxData sponsor

Fail Fast and Fail Often: Handling API Errors at Scale

Akshay Nathan

Active Storage File Upload Behind The Scenes— Active Storage is a framework, now built into Rails 6, that makes it easy to upload, process and reference files within your apps.

Liroy Leshed

Methods vs Constants for Static Values— The takeaway is that how you define static values depends on who (or where) your callers live. Do you agree?

Kir Shatrov

🛠 Code and Tools

Pong Written in 160 Lines of Ruby— An example of using the DragonRuby Game Toolkit, as well as the online code playground for it. Other examples include this Ruby port of GORILLA.BAS and a Flappy Bird clone.

Amir Rajan

RailsAdmin 2.0: An Engine That Provides a Backend Admin Interface— A Rails engine that gives you an easy interface for basic CRUD manipulation of data of your choice. Check out the live demo.

Erik Berlin

Monitor and Analyze Ruby App Performance in Real-Time. Try Datadog APM Free

Datadog APM sponsor

minitest-rails 6.0: Minitest Integration for Rails— Now updated with support for Rails 6.0.

Mike Moore

Rocketman: Event-Based/Pub-Sub Code in Ruby— Rocketman aims to be a lighter ‘stepping stone’ on the event-driven architecture continuum.

Edison Yap

nonschema_migrations: Separate Schema From Data Migrations in Your Rails Apps— "Splitting your data migrations from your schema migrations has a particular benefit of achieving the most consistent zero-downtime deploys you can."

Jason Fleetwood-Boldt