Understanding Webpacker in Rails 6

#465 — August 29, 2019

Read on the Web

Ruby Weekly

Faker 2 Released: A Library for Generating Fake Data— A very long standing and popular library has taken some neat steps forward lately and v2’s API has introduced some breaking changes. If you want to create ‘fake’ or dummy data, however, this remains the gold standard.

Faker

Ruby 2.6.4, 2.5.6, and 2.4.7 Released— Not feature releases, these releases are all about fixing a jQuery vulnerability in RDoc. (You’d do well to disable RDoc and RI generation when installing gems anyway.) Link is to 2.6.4, here’s 2.5.6 and 2.4.7.

ruby-lang.org

eBook: Best Practices for Optimizing Postgres Query Performance— Learn how to get a 3x performance improvement on your Postgres database and 500x reduced data loaded from disk in this free pganalyze eBook.

pganalyze sponsor

Understanding Webpacker in Rails 6— If you’re still using Sprockets then this guide will help you wrap your brain around the future that is Webpacker. If not, it’s still a good reference.

Prathamesh Sonpatki

▶  Discussing Sorbet, the Ruby Type Checker, with Paul Tarjan— David Kimura, Andrew Mason, and Stripe’s Paul Tarjan, discuss Sorbet, the recently open sourced type checker for Ruby.

Ruby Rogues podcast

💻 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 Double Splat (**) Operator Cheatsheet— Less a cheatsheet and more a collection of neat examples. The merge functionality for hashes is pretty neato, as well as being a bit faster than Hash#merge

Ilia Kriachkov

How to Store Large JSON Documents in Postgres with the Rails Attributes API— An interesting example of working with your own datatype in Rails.

Dmitry Voronov

Heroku on Easy Mode— Effortlessly autoscale your web and worker dynos. Cut your Heroku bill in half and make timeouts disappear.

Rails Autoscale sponsor

What is Module Autoloading in Ruby?— Autoloading is the concept of letting Ruby automatically load other code files in your project when they’re first needed rather than all up front.

Jesus Castello

Exercises for curl Users— Less a tutorial and more a guide to practicing how to use curl, the popular command line HTTP client. Not exactly Ruby, but I use curl a ton in my Ruby development.

Julia Evans

Faster Heroku Deploys with Rails and Webpacker— With a new default asset bundler (webpack) we are back to old problems, like rebuilding it’s not needed and not caching build assets. Don’t worry, it’s easy enough to fix.

Wiktor Mociun

Emoji Driven Development in Ruby— This is more for amusement than for your production code(!) But, yes, you can use emojis in your Ruby code.

Tom Lord

Permitting Nested Arrays using Strong Params in Rails— Nested arrays, like nice folks, finish last.

PJ Frias

Ruby 2.7 Adds Time#ceil and Time#floor Methods

Romil Mehta

🛠 Code and Tools

Rein: Postgres Database Constraints Made Easy for ActiveRecord— Validations are great at the application level, but what if you want some database-level data integrity? Now supports Rails 6.

Joshua Bassett

InvoicePrinter 2.0 Released: A Way to Quickly Create PDF Invoices— The project has been split into multiple gems so you can use the library and the server independently.

Josef Strzibny

Founders/CTOs: We Upgrade Rails So That Your Team Doesn’t Have To

Upgrade Rails sponsor

Bundler-Leak: Find Known Memory Leaks in Your Dependencies— Inspired by bundler-audit, bundler-leak checks a moderated database of known, leaky gems.

Luis Sagastume

A Ruby Wrapper Around the Google Places API— The Places API is a service that returns information about geographic locations or points of interest.

Quinten Powell

Stripe Ruby Library 5: Use Stripe from Ruby— v5 came out last week and introduced a variety of changes (some breaking) - luckily there’s a migration guide.

Stripe

Moving: A Clean and Minimalist Theme for Jekyll— I really love clean this theme for the popular Jekyll Ruby-based static site generator is (which recently got a major new version).

Yizheng Huang

XGBoost and LightGBM Come to Ruby— These two libraries bring “gradient boosting” to the machine learning story in Ruby, which is an algorithm that performs well on large datasets.

Andrew Kane