Notebook-style Ruby coding with Jupyter Notebooks

#​739 — February 20, 2025

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Ruby Weekly

Ruby 3.4.2 Released— It’s not just Christmas Day when we get new Ruby releases, it seems to have extended to Valentine’s Day too 😍 This is one of the scheduled routine updates to meet the goal of releasing a new stable Ruby update every two months and solely fixes some bugs this time.

Takashi Kokubun

The State of Security in Rails 8— Greg gave ▶️ a talk about Rails security at Rails World and while you could just watch it, maybe you’d prefer his writeup here.

Greg Molnar

Seamless Rails Upgrades: Fixed Price Maintenance— Upgrading RoR can be daunting. Outdated gems, breaking changes, & limited resources often hinder smooth transitions. We offer expert Rails maintenance at a fixed monthly price, your application remains secure, performant, minimal business disruptions.

reinteractive / CodeCare sponsor

IN BRIEF:

• Gift Egwuenu shares the latest monthly RubyGems update. Ruby Central also has its own monthly update.

• 🇺🇸 The Sin City Ruby conference takes place this April in Las Vegas for the last time ever, but even if you can't make it, they're hosting a virtual event called Sinful Sunday on March 2nd where you can hang out with Sin City Ruby's speakers online in a moderated conversation.

• 🎤 Jean Boussier went on the Rails Changelog podcast to ▶️ talk about performance optimization and tuning Rails app performance.

Boosting JRuby Startup with AppCDS and AOT Caching— JRuby’s maintainer shares the results of an ahead-of-time caching feature being previewed in JDK 24 and how it can benefit JRuby startup times. “A huge improvement you’ll get for free”, he says.

Charles Oliver Nutter

▶  Why to Use Jupyter Notebooks with Ruby— There have been a few attempts at bringing ‘notebook’ style programming, commonly associated with Python, to Ruby (such as with IRuby) but Landon does a good job of explaining the why and the benefits here.

Landon Gray

Camera Access with Hotwire Native— Hotwire Native is 37signals’ Rails-aligned (but not Rails exclusive) framework for building native mobile apps from webapps.

Leon Vogt

Honeybadger Keeps Getting Better— Honeybadger delivers real-time insights with performance and uptime monitoring, log management, and support for 10+ languages. Your favorite error tracker just leveled up. →

Honeybadger sponsor

📄 How I Implemented a Game Boy Emulator in Ruby– We linked to the emulator last week, but just noticed they also wrote up how they did it. Sacckey

📄 Upgrading a Rails App to Tailwind CSS v4– Tailwind CSS v4.0 landed in January and is a major update to the popular styling framework. Jeremy Smith

📄 Deep Dive Into Action Controller's Strong ParametersPrasanth Chaduvula

📄 How a Ruby Upgrade Broke MS Edge Support in a Rails AppDaniela Baron

📄 How Write Barriers Help Ruby's Garbage CollectorPat Shaughnessy

📄 Instrumenting Thread Stalling in Ruby AppsJean Boussier

📄 How Ruby Shaped DNSimple’s GrowthRuby Central

🛠 Code & Tools

Phlex 2.0: Component-Oriented Server-Side Rendered Views Library— A way to build HTML, SVG and CSV views directly in Ruby in an object-oriented fashion with components that are simple Ruby classes. It’s pure Ruby and can be used with any Ruby framework, though phlex-rails makes it particularly easy for Rails apps. The docs are good and communicate the idea well.

Joel Drapper

🤖 Basic Rails 8 Techniques Boiled Down for AI / LLMs— I’ve been indulging in some AI powered development, largely with Aider (think Cursor, but at the terminal), and have found LLMs do poorly with Rails 8-isms due to a lack of training on Rails 8 docs and content. These boiled down docs can be passed to LLMs as context (or ‘rules’ in Cursor) to steer them more in the right direction.

Peter Cooper

🚀 FastRuby.io Makes Your Rails Upgrade Delightfully Boring with Bonsai— The team behind RailsBump.org offers gradual, 0-downtime upgrades — transform your engineering culture with our experts.

Bonsai | Upgrade Experts sponsor

FaviconFactory: Generate Favicons from an SVG

Riccardo Odone

• RuboCop Performance 1.24– Official RuboCop extension focused on code performance checks.

• Rdkafka 0.21– Fast Kafka client library based on librdkafka.

• Tailwind CSS for Rails 4.1

• RubyGems 3.6.4

• Passenger 6.0.26

• redis-rb 5.4

📢  Elsewhere

A quick roundup of some of other interesting updates or useful resources in the broader developer landscape:

• The main browser vendors have a program for aligning on implementing new Web platform features in concert called Interop.The priorities for Interop 2025 have been revealed, giving us a glimpse of what most mainstream browsers will (hopefully) support in a year's time, including anchor positioning, Core Web Vitals, view transitions, and even more WebAssembly support.

• 🐍 Python and Ruby are roughly in the same class performance-wise but a new interpreter in Python 3.14, coming later this year, promises to deliver up to a 30% speed boost with no code changes required.

• The XOR operator, and logic gate, explained. (You can use XOR yourself in Ruby with the ^ operator.)

• Nping is an interesting new ping tool that supports pinging multiple addresses concurrently and shows latency in a visual chart display at the terminal.

• Most of them don't apply to Ruby, but I found this walkthrough of NASA's "10 rules for software development" quite interesting. The closest Ruby parallel I can think of is the spaceship <=> operator!