Rails unveils some official merch

#​731 — December 19, 2024

Read on the Web

🎄 A mixed bag this week as we cover a few news items but then get into a 2024 roundup of Ruby news and the most clicked items of the year, in case you missed them at the time.

We're taking a Christmas break for two weeks and will be back on January 9, 2025, so we hope you have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
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Peter Cooper and the Cooperpress team

Ruby Weekly

A Fresh Getting Started with Rails Tutorial— By way of the Rails Foundation, investments have been made in Rails 8.0 learning materials, starting off with this revamped ‘getting started’ guide, covering building a complete site using all Rails 8 has to offer — including the built-in authentication generator, Solid Queue, Solid Cache, and Kamal. Numerous Rails Guides have also been updated with new Rails 8 features – explained in more detail here.

Chris Oliver et al.

📺 Prefer videos? ▶️ Rails 8 Unpacked with Typecraft is a new, official series of well-produced Rails 8 tutorials by Chris Power and Robert Beene.

WorkOS: Sell to Enterprises with a Few Lines of Code— The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, offering flexible, easy-to-use APIs to integrate SSO, SCIM, and FGA in minutes instead of months.

WorkOS sponsor

Optimizing Ruby’s JSON— The new maintainer of Ruby's json gem decided to focus on performance and shares the tale of how a little profiling led to relatively straightforward tweaks yielding improvements for all of us. (This is a two parter, for now, with part two here.)

Jean Boussier

▶  📺 Ruby Video: A Repository of 5000+ Ruby Talks— We only mentioned this a couple of months ago but Ruby Video has gone from strength to strength! Now with over 5000 talks from almost 3000 speakers. Forget Netflix, your holiday TV viewing is all here.. 😂

Adrien Poly et al.

💡 On the topic of videos, all the talks from RubyConf 2024 are now on YouTube.

IN BRIEF:

• 👕 Ruby on Rails now has its own official merch store. T-shirts, hoodies, caps, mugs and onesies await.

• Rails also has a new documentation landing page. Looks nice.

• Jeffrey Morhous touches on a few nice things coming with Ruby 3.4.

• Ruby Central has a new transitional Executive Director: welcome Chelsea Kaufman.

QUICK RELEASES:

• ⚡ Hotwire Spark– A new live reloading approach for Rails apps.

• Reline 0.6– The modern 'readline'-compatible input library. ▶️ Mari Imaizumi gave a talk at RubyConf 2024 about the library's potential.

• CarrierWave 3.1– Flexible file upload solution for Rack apps. Now supporting AWS S3 FIPS endpoints.

• REXML 3.4– Tree and stream XML document parsing.

• Vernier 1.5– Next generation CRuby profiler.

• Rails 8.0.1, RubyGems 3.6.1, Kamal 2.4, RDoc 6.10

🎄“All I Want for Christmas Is a Boring, Slow, & Steady Rails Upgrade”— Top engineering teams rely on Bonsai for 0-downtime upgrades—making technical debt remediation feel delightfully boring.

Bonsai by FastRuby.io sponsor

📄 Everything You Need to Ace PWAs in Rails– Maybe not everything, but certainly broader than most tutorials on the topic. Edigleysson Silva

📄 A Vanilla Rails Stack is PlentyJorge Manrubia (37Signals)

📄 "Rules" That Terminal Programs FollowJulia Evans

📄 Testing SQL Queries in a Ruby ServiceSally Hall

📄 Top Articles of 2024

Based entirely on reader engagement – no editorial judgment here :-)

1. A Decent VS Code Setup for Ruby and Rails Development— A demonstration, if any were needed, of how popular VS Code is in the Ruby space now. “Setting up VS Code for Ruby on Rails development can be tricky, so I wrote this article to help. In it, I share different VS Code extensions for things like autocomplete, linting, formatting and more.”

Harrison Broadbent

2. 'VSCode + WSL Makes Windows Awesome for Web Development'— Amazingly popular despite being a brief link at the time. In early 2024, DHH was doing all sorts of experimentation with his dev setup and was enjoying a brief Windows phase (before ultimately falling in love with Linux and releasing Omakub.)

David Heinemeier Hansson

3. The Rails Renaissance— Rails 8 got a lot of folks feeling bullish about Rails’ future again. Long-time Ruby firm Hashrocket gave its reasons for getting excited here.

Jack Rosa and Matt Polito (Hashrocket)

4. How Does Sidekiq Work?— Sidekiq remains the most heavily used background job system in the Ruby world (though Active Job is giving it a run for its money in Rails 8) and this post went deep into how it works, its architecture, and what’s going on under the hood.

Mike Perham / Dan Svetlov

5. A Cookbook of Ruby One-Liners— Ruby is fantastic for one-liners, whether in IRB or from the command line. We’ve linked to this cookbook before but it continues to prove very useful and is always a popular item.

Sundeep Agarwal

eBook: Best Practices for Enterprise-Scale DevOps— Learn how to improve software quality, lower support costs, and effectively enable DevOps teams.

Datadog sponsor

🛠 Top Code & Tools of 2024

Again based on reader engagement.

14 Tools and Gems Every Ruby Developer Would Love— Fine, it's a bit of a cheat, but this was the most clicked link relating to code and tools ;-) Joé rounded up his favorite tools and gems as of early 2024, covering areas from email and databases to performance monitoring and analytics. All solid recommendations.

Joé Dupuis

💡 Evil Martians also had a popular list of libraries they use to build Rails apps.

37signals' Open Sourced Thruster— Thruster, first seen as part of the Campfire app, is a minimal HTTP/2 proxy for production Rails deployments – it runs alongside Puma but offers HTTP/2, Caching, SSL via LetsEncrypt, and static file serving with compression, filling a similar role to Traefik or Caddy. It ended up becoming a key part of Rails 8.0.)

37signals

💡 37signals' announcements of Hotwire Native and Turbo 8 were also very popular.

CrystalRuby: Embed Crystal Code Directly in Ruby— Crystal is a Ruby inspired programming language that boasts a lot of great features. One benefit is its performance, and this gem lets you write Crystal code, inlined in Ruby, giving you a potential performance boost without a huge shift in syntax.

Wouter Coppieters

Transformers.rb: State-of-the-Art Transformers for Ruby— It's early days for Ruby in the machine learning space but Andrew has been working hard to change that. Widely known for his work on pgvector, he shipped a way to use Torch.rb to use transformer models from Hugging Face directly from Ruby.

Andrew Kane

Cyperful: An Interactive System Testing UI for Capybara— One developer’s side project to offer a Cypress-like experience, but for Ruby developers. You can visualize assertions/commands as they happen, view all API requests, errors, and logs in the timeline, etc. No updates in months, but maybe this mention will encourage the developer to pick it up again..? 🤞

Stepful

Vernier: A Next Gen CRuby 3.2+ Profiler— A sampling profiler that can track multiple threads, GVL activity, GC pauses, idle time, etc. It’s just reached v1.5 which now records fiber activity too.

John Hawthorn

🎄 And that's a wrap! We wish you a Merry Christmas, if you celebrate, and we'll see you again in full on Thursday, January 9, 2025. We might do a quick 'emergency' issue during the holidays for the Ruby 3.4 release, but watch this space!