RIP Chris Seaton

#​632 — December 8, 2022

Read on the Web

Ruby Weekly

In Memory of a Giant: Chris Seaton— It is with much sadness that the Ruby community learnt about the death of Chris Seaton last weekend. Chris worked for Shopify, but was well known as the founder of the TruffleRuby implementation while at Oracle, for being the first(?) Ruby doctor (his PhD thesis about Ruby is here), and generally being an interesting and helpful guy. Justin Searls has posted a tribute post of his own, as has Brandon Weaver.

Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson

If you are feeling bereft or devoid of hope, please seek a friendly ear to speak with.

Ruby 3.2.0 RC 1 Released— If you like your Ruby versions to be fully cooked, you’ll need to wait two more weeks, but RC 1 is looking good. There aren’t many changes since preview 3, though YJIT continues to improve and this post includes new graphs showing the (huge) benefits of 3.2’s improved regexp matching algorithm.

Yui Naruse

How to Scale Ruby on Rails Applications— Check out some ways to scale your Ruby on Rails applications, including caching and background workers.

AppSignal sponsor

QUICK BITS

• As of a recent commit, Enumerable#many? now forwards all block params.

• Talking of commits, Aaron Patterson is excited about this one that speeds up instance variable writes in YJIT (quite substantially too).

• You probably use npm packages somewhere so it's useful that the official npm site now has a built in code explorer for digging around inside packages without having to download them.

• ⭐️ Kevin Newton has continued with his Advent of YARV series tackling topics like frames (no, not the HTML ones), creating objects from the stack, and how calling methods works at the low level.

• Did you know that as of Rails 7.0.4, you can have your own routes starting with /cable?

📕 Articles, Videos, and Opinions

Taking a First Look at Hanami 2— We’ve mentioned Hanami a couple of times over the last few issues, but it’s worth another mention thanks to this article that explains some features in a bit more depth. (Also, Hanami 2.01 is out.)

Paweł Świątkowski (AppSignal)

How I Developed a Faster Ruby Interpreter— Vladimir is the creator of MIR, a JIT compiler used in several languages, and wrote this post to address how YJIT’s success can be used to make a faster compiler. Needless to say, this is a very technical post.

Vladimir Makarov

The Developer’s Guide To Building Notification Systems— So your CTO has just handed you a project to revamp your product’s notification system. What are the best practices?

Courier.com sponsor

Implementing Social Login in Rails with Rodauth— How to add social login to an existing Rails app that’s using Rodauth, and extend the default behaviour with some custom logic.

Janko Marohnić

Percent % Notation in Ruby— If you think you know all the functionality and variations of percent literals (a la %w{a b c}), this might throw up some surprises. %x(echo read this on `date`)

Faranz (DeepSource)

Is Your Rails App Slow? Get a Performance Audit to Speed Up Your App

FastRuby.io - Performance Optimization Services sponsor

What I Learned From Pairing by Default
Eve Ragins

Understanding N+1 Query Problems in Rails
Gavin Morrice

🛠 Code & Tools

ruby-cli-boilerplate: Zero-Dependency Ruby CLI Boilerplate Code— Creating a simple CLI could have you reaching for a CLI framework, but this repository gives you another option complete with specs and zero dependencies.

Postmodern

Semgrep 1.x: Lightweight Static Analysis for Many Languages— Semgrep is a CLI to analyze code locally and has a load of pre-built rules, a community making more, and a playground to give it a quick try. It’s fast and used by the likes of GitHub and Hashicorp. It’s not written in Ruby but Ruby is one of the languages it supports.

r2c

Need to Upgrade Your Rails App but Don't Have the Time or Resources? We Can Help

Reinteractive Pty Ltd sponsor

• Alba 2.1
  ↳ Fast JSON serializer for Ruby.

• sidekiq-cron 1.9
  ↳ Scheduler / cron for Sidekiq jobs.

• EvilSeed 0.4
  ↳ Create partial anonymized dumps of your app's database.

• Pygments.rb 2.3.1
  ↳ Wrapper for the Pygments syntax highlighter.

• RDoc 6.5
  ↳ Documentation generator for Ruby.

• Hanami 2.0.1

• Rack 3.0.2

• Rubocop 1.40

• Meilisearch Rails 0.8

🔠 Well That's Useful

Coding Font: A 'Game' to Find Your New Favorite Code Font— This is a fun idea. It throws a bunch of popular developer-oriented fonts into a knockout ‘tournament’ format. You then pick your favorites until you’re left with a winner, World Cup style. (It was Cousine for me this time.)

Typogram