The Rails™ Foundation

#​629 — November 17, 2022

Read on the Web🇺🇦

Ruby Weekly

Ruby 3.2.0 Preview 3 Released— Two months on from preview 2 comes an almost identical post for preview 3. I read both posts side by side. The differences:

• An extended explanation of regex improvements to mitigate ReDoS attacks.
• Work on error tolerant parsing (ideal for LSPs) has yielded some new methods for error tolerance on RubyVM::AbstractSyntaxTree
• An update to the PRNG’s rb_random_interface_t

Yui Naruse

Memetria: Secure, Scalable, Full-Featured Redis Hosting— The latest Redis features, instrumented and scaled with the tools teams need as they grow.

Memetria sponsor

🏢  Rails Gets Its Own Foundation— The Rails Foundation’s goal is to improve various educational, marketing, and community outreach efforts in the Rails ecosystem, and it’s been kickstarted (not Kickstarter-ed) with a million dollars from companies like 37signals, Shopify, GitHub, and Cookpad, with a promise of $400k/yr to follow that. The foundation has also got a long-term exclusive license to all the Rails trademarks.

Ruby on Rails Team

An RSpec Story About Disappearing Classes— TLDR: Anonymous classes and modules get garbage collected. A fun writeup though I can’t help but feel uneasy at a need to introduce caching layers for classes in testing.

Maciej Mensfeld

How to Safely Remove a Column from an Active Record Model— ALTER TABLE .. DROP COLUMN right? Whoa, slow down right there – that’s the rm -rf approach to database management. There are ways to do it properly, including first getting Active Record to ignore the column.

Andy Croll

QUICK BITS:

• The NSA (US intelligence agency) has released guidance about using 'memory safe' languages like Ruby instead of C or C++!

• In the aforementioned (PDF) report by the NSA, they refer to Ruby as 'Ruby™' and claim Ruby is an O'Reilly Media trademark. 🤔

• Rails has added a :strict option to the default SQLite database.yml file.

• Did you know you can extend Rails associations?

• The DragonRuby Game Toolkit is on another one of its free periods until this Sunday if you want to try it out.

• Can you run Ruby on the 90s' Sega Genesis / Mega Drive? ▶️ Yes you can.

📅  Register for Unblock 22 - A CI/CD Conference by Buildkite— Experience the 2-day virtual conference with industry experts who are defining the future of how we deliver software.

Buildkite sponsor

A Deep Dive Into Semantic Versioning in Ruby— An introduction to the concepts of semantic versioning, a common approach for applying version numbers to projects. Both an article and nine minute screencast.

Hanami Mastery

Adding Sidekiq Job Context to ActiveRecord Query Log Tags— Rails 7 has a feature called query log tags you can enable to tag SQL queries with runtime info in the logs. This can help you track down just where in your apps slow queries are coming from, say.

Brian John

Quick Tip: Use Private Debugging Aliases— A way to add debugging shortcuts to a project without modifying the codebase for other folks. (TIL how to define a global git ignore file.)

Paweł Urbanek

🛠 Code & Tools

Ciao 1.8: A Rails Webapp for Performing HTTP Checks and Tests— A modern, open source Rails app that provides a clean interface for performing simple, automated checks of HTTP-based services (such as for uptime). There’s a Docker image too for quick deployment. GitHub repo.

Brot and Games

Fixed Price Monthly Code Maintenance and Upgrades for Rails Apps

reinteractive Pty Ltd sponsor

🙂❤️🐙  Gemoji 4.0: Work with Emoji Images and Names— 4.0 adds skin tone support and adds the latest emoji standard characters.

GitHub

Squasher: Squash Down Old Migrations in a Single Command— Long standing apps often have lots of migrations and tidying up all those migration files could be beneficial.

Sergiy Pchelintsev

Aws::Record: A Data Mapping Abstraction for Amazon DynamoDB— v2.9 was just released with support for extending Aws::Record models via standard Ruby inheritance.

Amazon Web Services

LambdaKiq: Use Amazon SQS and AWS Lambda with ActiveJob— Aimed at Rails users running their apps on AWS Lambda (via Lamby) and who want Sidekiq-like functionality but on SQS instead.

Custom Ink

Shortcut Brings Product and Engineering Together. Try It for Free

Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse.io) sponsor

• ruby-nmap 1.0
  ↳ Ruby API for automating nmap

• Forme 2.3
  ↳ No dependency HTML form helper library.

• Config 4.1
  ↳ Multi-environment YAML settings for Ruby apps.

• Sinatra 3.0.3
  ↳ "Fixed ReDoS forRack::Protection::IPSpoofing"

• Textbringer 1.3
  ↳ Emacs-like text editor written in Ruby.

• QuickBooks-Ruby 2.0
  ↳ Work with Quickbooks' REST API V3.

• Ruby Object Mapper 5.3

• Faraday 2.7

🔊 Something to listen to

▶  YAGNI Podcast: A New Podcast on Practices and Tools— Host Matt sold this to me as being a “Ruby-adjacent podcast”– only three episodes so far but they cover writing good commit messages, the use of staging servers, and feature an interview with David Copeland, well known for writing several popular Ruby books.

Matt Swanson podcast