A transpiler for futuristic Ruby, and the RailsConf 2020 videos

#500 — May 7, 2020

Read on the Web

🎉 Welcome to issue 500! A bit of an arbitrary milestone but thanks to you all :-)

Ruby Weekly

Ruby Next: Make All Rubies Quack Alike— Ruby Next is a Ruby-to-Ruby transpiler that allows you to use the latest features of Ruby in previous versions without monkey patching or refinements. Could this be how experimental features are released going forward?

Vladimir Dementyev

Ruby 3 'Guilds' Proposal Now Called Ractor— This documentation is in Japanese (though the source code examples are easy to follow) but the news is that the new, proposed concurrency mechanism for Ruby 3 called Guilds (explained here) has been renamed to Ractor (as in ‘Ruby actors’, Ruby’s take on the actor model).

Koichi Sasada

Don’t Do Auth From Scratch. Focus On Your App— Spend less time on authentication and authorization and more time developing your awesome app. Auth built for <devs>. Download our community edition for free.

FusionAuth sponsor

Take the 2020 Ruby on Rails Survey— This is the sixth outing for Planet Argon’s survey which began in 2009. We try and support it each time as the results always make for interesting reading (see 2018’s results). Participate and become data 😄

Planet Argon Team

Alt::BrightonRuby: A Slightly Odd, Quasi-Conference for Strange Times— Alt::BrightonRuby is not happening in-person this year. Instead, you can buy the recorded talks, get a _why book, and get some podcasts with the speakers.

Alt::BrightonRuby

💻 Jobs

Find a Job Through Vettery— Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

Security Engineer (Remote)— Are you an engineer with experience in Rails and/or Go? Join our team and help secure our apps and cloud infrastructure.

Shogun

📘 Articles & Tutorials

▶  How To Begin Contributing to a Gem— If you’ve been using a library for a while and you want to contribute back, how do you get started? A 12 minute introduction here.

Drifting Ruby

How to Set Up Factory Bot on a Fresh Rails Project— Factory Bot is a library for setting up Ruby objects as test data – an alternative to fixtures, essentially.

Jason Swett

Using Postgres's DISTINCT ON to Avoid an N+1 Query— “Recently I fixed a tricky N+1 query and thought I should write it up..”

John Nunemaker

Need to Upgrade Rails? Don’t Know How Long It Will Take?— Get an action plan for your Rails upgrade and an in-depth report about your technical debt and outdated dependencies 🚀.

FastRuby.io | Rails Upgrade Services sponsor

5 Uses for 'Splats'— 5 different ways to leverage Ruby’s splat (*) operator.

Jason Dinsmore

Running Multiple Instances of Webpacker— If you’re working on multiple Rails apps at once, changing where Rails gets served up is easy by configuring the port, but what about Webpacker? That requires another tweak.

Scott Watermasysk

Performing Asynchronous HTTP requests in Rails— How to update parts an app’s pages with asynchronous HTTP requests. A step-by-step how-to with JavaScript’s fetch() function, and Rails native server-side partial rendering.

Remi Mercier

How to Use AWS SimpleDB from Ruby— If you haven’t heard of AWS SimpleDB, you wouldn’t be alone as it’s not very popular, but it’s a pretty simple and cheap way to store simple documents in the cloud.

Peter Cooper

What's The Difference Between Monitoring Webhooks and Background Jobs

AppSignal sponsor

Ways to Reduce Your Heroku App's Slug Size— You might be surprised Heroku didn’t already do some of this for you.

Rohit Kumar

A Chat with Thibaut Barrère— If you missed our interview with Thibaut Barrere (Rubyist, and creator of the Kiba ETL framework) in last week’s issue, you can catch up here.

Glenn Goodrich

🛠 Code and Tools

Rodauth 2.0: Ruby's 'Most Advanced' Authentication Framework— A authentication framework that can work in any Rack-based webapp. Built using Roda and Sequel, Rodauth can be used with other frameworks and database libraries if you wish. Why’s it so advanced? More info on that here.

Jeremy Evans

RubyGems 3.1.3 Released— Lots of little bug fixes and tweaks.

RubyGems Blog

Business: Business Day Calculations for Ruby— Define your working days and holidays and then you can do ‘business day arithmetic’ (for example, what’s in 5 working days after now taking holidays and weekends into account?)

GoCardless

Lockbox: Modern Encryption for Rails

Andrew Kane

split: The Rack Based A/B 'Split' Testing Framework— A mature framework with robust configuration and multiple options for determining the winning option.

Split

P.S. In last week's issue, one of the links to our sponsors was incorrect and some readers emailed us to say they really wanted to read the promised article, Let’s Explore Big-O Notation with Ruby, so here it is. Apologies for any inconvenience.