Why to add IRB to your Gemfile

#​679 — November 23, 2023

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Ruby Weekly

TestProf III: Guided and Automated Ruby Test Profiling— TestProf is a long standing suite of tools to improve test suite performance, and it’s ‘back’ with lots of new features and enhancements. These include a playbook for getting started with test suite profiling, a new ‘autopilot’ CLI tool to automate the generation and merging of StackProf reports, and MemoryProf, a system that tracks memory usage during test runs.

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Free eBook: Advanced Database Programming with Rails and Postgres— Learn about subqueries, materialized views, and custom data types in Postgres and Rails. We walk through realistic real-life examples, translating first into SQL, and then into Rails code. Every example comes with source code so you can follow along.

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• 💡 Stan Lo explains why you should put IRB in your Gemfile. In short, it's getting better at a faster pace than the Ruby releases it's included with, so it can pay to keep up with it more frequently.

• 📺 If you enjoyed the recent Ruby on Rails documentary, you can go a little deeper with ▶️ a Q&A with the folks in it, including DHH.

• ✍️ Kevin Murphy summarizes his time at RubyConf 2023.

• 🎙 While Kevin was having a great time, the Ruby on Rails Podcast was ▶️ recording live from RubyConf's 'hallway track'.

• 📅 In other event news, the Ruby 'devroom' is coming back to FOSDEM (taking place in Belgium on February 3-4) plus the Ruby Warsaw Community Conference is set to take place just before on February 2.

• 🤑 Chris Oliver of Go Rails is running a Black Friday sale. The folks at Ruby on Mac have also made a list of Black Friday deals for Rubyists. Last, but not least, Humble Bundle has a deal on Ruby books from the Pragmatic Programmers.

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Is Your Rails Version Lagging Behind? Try the Slow & Steady Way… 🐢— Join the waitlist to Bonsai: Our fixed-cost, tech debt remediation service. Let us upgrade Ruby and Rails for you.

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For Clarity When Merging Hashes, Use with_defaults— Note that this is a Rails / Active Support-ism.

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Interactive Debugging Without the Need for Gems— Don’t forget that, with Binding and IRB, you have the ability to set breakpoints and step through code without requiring external gems.
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Split 4.0: Rack Based A/B Split-Testing Framework— A mature framework with robust configuration and multiple options for determining the winning option.

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Got a Problem That Could Use a Rubber Duck Session?— Here’s one better. Request a pairing session with one of our senior devs. We’ll get you moving in the right direction.

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A Script for Renaming a RubyGem— If you start working on a gem and then want to change the name, you might need to do this. But be sure to check your new name is available! Which leads us to..

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Name Checker: Check if a Project Name is Taken— An online tool that checks a bunch of different package registries (npm, GitHub, GitLab, PyPI, Maven, RubyGems, Go packages, Rust crate, etc.) to see if the name is used by another project.

Todd Cooke

• Avo 3– A fantastic CMS / Rails app template (but not exactly a 'starter kit') for building Rails apps more quickly. Open-source but with a commercial version including more features.

• IdentityCache 1.5– Blob level caching solution to plug into Active Record.

• Spyke 7.2– Interact with REST services in an ActiveRecord-like manner.

• Sidekiq::Throttled 1.1– Concurrency & rate-limit throttling for Sidekiq.

• BabySqueel 3.0– Expressive query DSL for Active Record.

• polars-ruby 0.7– Fast DataFrames for Ruby.

• json_schemer 2.1– JSON Schema validator.

• Passenger 6.0.19– The app server.