Rubyland

Problem Statement

If you work in a large organization, you might have faced this problem. The backlog of pull requests (PRs) pending review keeps increasing. This can lead to delays in shipping features, fixes, and improvements. This also means that valuable changes are stalled, and contributors may lose momentum or motivation to drive those PRs to completion.

In this blog, we will discuss some of the best practices that can help you reduce the number of pending pull requests, improve the efficiency of reviews, and ensure that changes are consistently delivered with high quality.

Following are some of the best practices that you can implement:

1. PR Ownership

The responsibility for moving a…

What do we want out of this?

I am basically trying to find an optimal setting for LLMs to be able to read technical architecture diagrams correctly and consistently.

Setting up eval

There is almost no point in experimenting with LLMs if you dont have any kind of eval setup. Even the most rudimentry, basic stuff will work. But you need something.

I have always been meaning to try out Promptfoos eval library, as it has been made with a very similar thought process…

We helped Doximity, an online platform for medical professionals get maximum productivity for user calls. That involved keeping their investment in Rails but adding the real-time performance benefits of Go.

The very real challenge: doctors losing valuable time to automated systems while trying to reach colleagues or pharmacies. In this post, we explore how we leveraged Go for real-time processing in a Ruby on Rails monolith—with the help of the Martian-built AnyCable!

Building, packaging and publishing an app with the default Electron npm packagescan be quite challenging. It involves multiple packages and offers limitedcustomization. Additionally, setting up auto-updates requires significantadditional effort, often involving separate tools or services.

electron-builder is a complete solution forbuilding, packaging and distributing Electronapplications for macOS, Windows and Linux. It is a highly configurablealternative to the default Electron packaging process and supports auto-updateout of the box.

In this blog, we look into how we can build, package and distribute Electronapplications using electron-builder.

Electron processes

Electron has two types of…

Welcome to the RubyGems monthly update! As part of our efforts at Ruby Central, we publish a recap of the work that we’ve done the previous month. Read on to find out what updates were made to RubyGems and RubyGems.org in September.

RubyGems News

In September, we released RubyGems 3.5.19 and 3.5.20 along with Bundler 2.5.19 and 2.5.20. These releases bring a series of enhancements and bug fixes designed to improve the overall developer experience with RubyGems. Notable improvements include the removal of temporary .lock files unintentionally left behind by the gem installer, the rejection of unknown platforms when running bundle lock --add-platform, and a performance fix that addresses…

Some other important accomplishments from the…

Any significant update to the UI and UX of a professional tool is likely to pose challenges for its users. We recognize that the new UI of JetBrains IDEs represents a major change and understand how unsettling it can be when the software you rely on for productivity is significantly reworked. However, in order for us to evolve and innovate in line with global trends and emerging insights, change is essential.

In this post, we will tell you more about the motivation behind the new UI and how it was developed. We’ll also provide some useful tips for configuring it if you are used to the classic one.

Evolution of the UI and UX

In version 2024.2, the new UI became the default in…

Get your headphones ready! Here are the top 10 tech podcasts of 2024, chosen by the Ruby on Rails community, featuring insights from developers, industry leaders, and entrepreneurs.

Continue Reading

In Rails, adapters allow us to connect to different databases, while foreign keys are constraints that ensure the values in one table match valid records in another table. This helps to maintain data integrity.

If there is a need to disallow foreign keys temporarily, such as during data imports, we have to write migrations to drop foreign keys from each table individually.

This process is cumbersome and time consuming, especially in applications with multiple tables and relationships.

Before

We need to manually create migrations to drop foreign keys for each table, making it a labor-intensive task.

Once data import completes, we have to write additional migrations to re-add the…

One of the most bizarre and frustrating things about life in Florida is that the state government has decided to eschew official .gov domains in favor of a random smattering of .com domains, for seemingly no other reason than appearing pro-business. Or maybe anti-government? Regardless, it definitely doesn't make it easier to help constituents avoid scams.

Here's what I had to do to figure out whether this text was legitimate::

1. Go to fl.gov which redirects to www.myflorida.com
2. Click to see the list of state agencies, which takes you back to dos.fl.gov and lists the Department of Financial Services' homepage as www.myfloridacfo.com
3. That homepage indicates Florida really has a "Chief…

Turbo Streams allows you to update specific parts of your app upon a web request (controller action), referred to as just Turbo Streams. Or as a Turbo Stream Broadcasts when fired by your back end (on model create, update or destroy or manually from any object) over websockets, typically through ActionCable.

While the source is different, the response (HTML) for both are the same. I want to quickly explain how Turbo Streams work, so you understand that there is, just like with Rails, no magic involved 🎩🐰. Just Plain Old JavaScript!

To broadcast a Turbo Stream you do something like this:

class Resource < ApplicationRecord
  after_create_commit -> { broadcast_append_to "resources" }
end

…

Rails comes with a built-in support for SSL in form of config.force_ssl. But what does it exactly do?

SSL middleware

The force_ssl directive adds the ActionDispatch::SSL middleware layer which is a Rack middleware for HTTPS requests:

# rails/railties/lib/rails/application/default_middleware_stack.rb
...
      def build_stack
        ActionDispatch::MiddlewareStack.new.tap do |middleware|
          if config.force_ssl
            middleware.use ::ActionDispatch::SSL, config.ssl_options
          end
...

This middleware does two main things:

• SSL/TLS redirect: Redirecting http requests to https with the same URL host and path. Both from the Rails server and the browser by…

• Secur…

What Ruby’s top-level methods actually are, who they belong to and how they are namespaced.

A few days ago, a curious question was asked on /r/ruby, which can be boiled down to this: How are the methods of the Kernel module available in the top-level scope?

The question was dedicated to rand method, but (as the author correctly suggests) it also applies to many seemingly “top-level” methods documented as belonging to the Kernel module, even as base as puts (print a string), require (load code from another file), or raise (an exception).

We know that in Ruby, all methods belong to some objects and are defined in their classes or modules. The documentation suggests that all of those…

Aaron's reaction to my reading and ranking of his pun submission for the latest version of the Breaking Change podcast

Direct link to podcast audio file

Welcome to this podcast which, by now, you have probably decided you either listen to or don't listen to! And if you don't listen to it, one wonders why you are reading this.

Remember to write in at podcast@searls.co with suggestions for news stories and whatever you'd like me to talk about. Please keep it PG-rated or NC-17 rated. I want nothing in between.

Family-friendly and/or sexually explicit links follow:

• I returned this razor
• How I fixed Photo Shuffle
• I made an unfortunate comment about birds and hands in my newsletter
• Koala Nap is not currently working for me, but I appreciate their responsiveness in trying to fix it
• Aaron's puns, ranked
• 🚨 …

“Meteors are not needed less than mountains”
— Robinson Jeffers, “Shine, Perishing Republic”

I recently kicked off a new outside project to build on my experience building GetCalFresh, a digital welfare assister that’s helped millions of Californian’s successfully apply for billions of dollars of food assistance from CalFresh/SNAP. While going through my contemporaneous notes from that time, I realized I had never written about another project I was deeply involved with: Disaster Relief Assistance for Immigrants (DRAI) during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Code for America published a little bit about DRAI in “Dismantling the Invisible Wall”:

DRAI was a modest but crucial lifeline for…

Welcome to Hotwire Weekly!

Welcome to another issue of Hotwire Weekly! Thank you for the feedback in the 1-year anniversay edition last week! I'm trying to incorporate the feedback into the next editions! Thank you!

Happy reading! 🚀✨

📚 Articles, Tutorials, and Videos

Changing CSS as You Scroll with Stimulus - Rails Designer's article explains how to change CSS based on scroll events using a Stimulus controller. The guide demonstrates how to add or remove CSS classes dynamically as specific elements interact with one another during scrolling.

Announcing JavaScript for Rails Developers - The article on Rails Designer introduces the "JavaScript for Rails" book, a guide tailored for Rails…

Initializers are an important concept in Rails, but I couldn't find much information about them online, other than the official Rails guides. Recently, I did a deep dive into the Rails initialization process, and what follows is everything I learned about initializers.

What we'll learn:

• What are Initializers?
• Why use an initializer?
• How Rails loads the initializers?
• How Rails executes an initializer?

By the end of the article, I hope you'll have a much better understanding of initializers and an appreciation of all the things that Rails does behind the scenes to not only make it work, but also make it look like magic!

Let's begin...

What are Initializers?

An initializer is simply a piece of Ruby…

Ruby Central is proud to announce our support of the Open Source Pledge, spearheaded by our OSS sponsor Sentry, which asks companies to pay open source maintainers fairly and make the open source ecosystem more sustainable.  

As a member company, Ruby Central has committed to paying for the use of open source software (directly or through a funding organization) and compensating maintainers for the important work they do. 

We join many of the most prominent open source organizations across the world in supporting the Pledge, which reflects our deeply felt values and our commitment to maintainers and Rubyists who rely on our open source work (such as RubyGems and Bundler).

As businesses and…

Hey everyone, Happy Friday!

Vipul here with the latest updates for This Week in Rails. Let’s dive in!

Rails World talks are out!
Check out the recap of these talks in this blog post, or head over to Rails’ YouTube for the full playlist.

New Rails maintenance policy and end of maintenance announcements
These changes are designed to provide clarity on support timelines and help to plan Rails upgrades effectively. Full details of the new policy can be found on the Rails website.

Rails Versions 6.1.7.9, 7.0.8.5, 7.1.4.1, and 7.2.1.1 have been released!
These are security patches addressing 4 possible ReDoS (Regular expression Denial of Service) attacks. All of these only affect Ruby…

Welcome to Once a Maintainer, where we interview open source maintainers and tell their story.

This week we’re talking to André Luis Cardoso Jr., maintainer of the runtime developer console and IRB alternative Pry. André Luis is a Principal Software Engineer at RD Station, and he spoke with us from Brazil.

Once a Maintainer is written by the team at Infield, a platform for managing open source upgrades.

How did you get into software development?

I think when I was 14 or so I got my first PC, and I discovered that there were things like programming languages, operating systems, and I just felt like that was what I wanted to do. I remember reading tutorials and books on programming, C, C++,…

In this episode of Remote Ruby, Jason, Chris, and Andrew discuss their experiences at Rails World 2024 in Toronto. They share humorous anecdotes about their travels, encounters, and keynote speeches, including topics like renting a smoke-filled car, meeting their boss at Niagara Falls, and attending the Sting concert. They delve into technical discussions about deploying Rails applications, the importance of Dev containers, Kamal, and the latest updates on Rails 8.1. The conversation includes lighter moments such as playing duck calls, high chip prices, and navigating Toronto traffic. Hit download now to hear more!

Ruby is known for its flexibility and powerful metaprogramming capabilities. One such method that often comes up in Ruby development, particularly in Ruby on Rails applications, is instance_exec. It allows developers to execute a block of code within the context of an object’s instance, making it extremely useful for dynamically executing code within objects without exposing unnecessary details or methods.

What is instance_exec?

instance_exec is a Ruby method that belongs to the Object class, which means every Ruby object has access to it. Its primary role is to evaluate a given block in the context of an object’s instance. It takes a block and optional arguments, allowing the block to…

You may have heard Rails 8 will extract a new framework for delivering Web Push notifications from your web app. Web Push notifications are powerful because they allow you to engage with your users even when they're not on your site.

Webkit announcment https://webkit.org/blog/13878/web-push-for-web-apps-on-ios-and-ipados/?

that will likely be called Action Notifier.

Though we don’t have Action Notifier yet, it is already possible to implement

I'm going to share how to I got a working demo of the Web Push API for Joy of Rails to push notifications through supporting browsers - currently Chrome and Firefox at the time of this writing.

We'll cover the basics of implementing Push yourself with Rails.

Quality Assurance (QA) is a team of two at 37signals: Michael, who created the department 12 years ago, and Gabriel, who joined the team in 2022. Together, we have a hand in projects across all of our products, from kickoff to release. Our goal is to help designers and programmers ship their best work. Our process revolves around manual testing and has been tuned to match the rhythm of Shape Up. Here, we’ll share the ins and outs of our methods and touch on a few of the tools we use along the way.

Kicking things off

At 37signals we run projects in six-week cycles informed by Shape Up. At the beginning of each cycle, Brian, our Head of Product, posts a kick-off message detailing what we…

Hi there graceful devs! Here’s what’s new in the garden…

Content Updates

I love when I get a chance to make an episode about the guiding light of Graceful.Dev: making the iterative feedback loops of software development more sustainable, robust, and, well, graceful at every level of the process. That’s why I’m happy to deliver a video on the concept of progressive automation: the idea that software solutions don’t have to be all-or-nothing, but can instead loop-in humans for the bits that aren’t automated (yet). Check it out as part of The Full-Circle Developer.

Site Improvements

The episode I mentioned above was actually inspired by some improvements I’ve been making…

Hello! Welcome to the October newsletter. Read on for announcements from Ruby Central and a report of the OSS work we’ve done from the previous month.

In September, Ruby Central's open source work was supported by Ruby Shield sponsor Shopify, AWS, the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), and Ruby Central memberships from 29 other companies, including Partner-level member Sidekiq. In total, we were supported by 188 members. Thanks to all of our members for making everything that we do possible. <3

Ruby Central News

RubyConf 2024

Get ready for RubyConf in Chicago from November 13-15—only 4 weeks away! Join your #RubyFriends and dive into the Ruby community, whether you're new or experienced. We’ve also…

Tweaking the UI element or component based on the scroll state, can help make it stand out or guide focus to the user.

I recently had to add such a feature where a, potential, long list of items could scroll below the navigation’s leader element. If the list “touched” the leader, extra CSS classes would be added, making sure it would still be eligible with the items scrolled below it. Something like this:

Typically this would a case for JS’ MutationObserver, but since the scrolling is tied to the SidebarNavigationComponent and not the body, it cannot be used and a slight reinventing of the wheel is needed. It will result in a small, but reusable Stimulus controller. Ready to be copied…

Let’s go over…

Turbo Streams provide a real-time, server-driven way to update Rails applications without complex JavaScript. One of the latest enhancements to Turbo Streams is the ability to use the method: :morph option in various actions, allowing more efficient DOM updates. This option can be used with actions like update, replace, and others, providing more control over how updates are applied.

What is Morphing?

Morphing refers to updating only the changed parts of a DOM element rather than fully replacing it. This helps preserve the state of interactive elements—like form inputs, scroll positions, or event listeners—providing a smoother user experience and improving performance.

Using the method:…

I recently had the opportunity to refactor a custom search form on a client project, and wanted to share some highlights through a distilled example.

Our base

We’ll start with all logic placed in the controller and view.

def index
  @posts = sort_posts(Post.all).then { filter_posts(_1) }
end

private

  def sort_posts(scope)
    if (order = params.dig(:query, :sort))
      column, direction = order.split(" ")

      if column.presence_in(%w[title created_at]) && direction.presence_in(%w[asc desc])
        scope.order("#{column} #{direction}")
      else
        []
      end
    else
      scope.order(created_at: :desc)
    end
  end

  def filter_posts(scope)
    filter_by_titl…

My last post detailed one way that CRuby will eliminate some intermediate array allocations when using methods like Array#hash and Array#max. Part of the technique hinges on detecting when someone monkey patches array. Today, I thought we’d dive a little bit in to how CRuby detects and de-optimizes itself when these “important” methods get monkey patched.

Monkey Patching Problem

The optimization in the previous post made the assumption that the implementation Array#max was the original definition (as defined in Ruby itself). But the Ruby language allows us to reopen classes, redefine any methods we want, and that those methods will “just work”.

For example, if someone were to reopen Array…

RubyGems 3.5.22 includes enhancements and bug fixes.

To update to the latest RubyGems you can run:

gem update --system

To install RubyGems by hand see the Download RubyGems page.

## Enhancements:

• Prevent ._* files in packages generated from macOS. Pull request #8150 by deivid-rodriguez
• Fix gem pristine etc resetting gem twice sometimes. Pull request #8117 by deivid-rodriguez
• Allow gem pristine to reset default gems too. Pull request #8118 by deivid-rodriguez
• Update vendored uri and net-http. Pull request #8112 by segiddins
• Installs bundler 2.5.22 as a default gem.

## Bug fixes:

• Fix gem contents for default gems. Pull request #8132 by deivid-rodriguez
• Fix duplicated…

In the week or two before Rails World (two words), I launched UsingRails. It’s a directory of Rails-based organisations and companies.

It’s the culmination of a couple of years of research, a rapidly built Rails application and the world’s largest Apple Note.

Why?

I’ve been a Rails developer for a long time. I’ve built a few Rails applications, and I’ve been involved in the community for a while. The external narrative of Rails is that it was a great platform for building web applications, but somehow it’s no longer a good choice. This is despite the continuing push of the framework to improve and evolve as the best way to (joyfully) build useful web and native applications with small…

Here’s the simplest example to deploy a containerized Next application with Kamal.

What’s Kamal

Kamal is a new tool from 37signals for deploying web applications to bare metal and cloud VMs. It comes with zero-downtime deploys, rolling restarts, asset bridging, remote builds, and more.

Kamal needs SSH configured and Docker installed to run. You also need to create a cloud VM somewhere like Hetzner or Digital Ocean.

SSH configuration

Linux and macOS should come with SSH installed but you’ll need a new key pair for the server:

$ ssh-keygen -t EcDSA -a 100 -b 521 -C "admin@example.com"

This will promt you for the key name and will save the keys to ~/.ssh/ by default.

Add the private…

Learn more about the why, TOC and publish date 👀

Over the past 25 or so years I’ve dabbled with various programming languages. From ASP, to PHP to ActionScript (who remembers this?!). But for well over 10 years my main languages are Ruby and JavaScript. In that order.

I try to write as much Ruby as possible. But if you build modern web/SaaS apps, there is simply no way you can do without writing JavaScript. Even with all the fantastic Hotwire tools.

Over those 10+ years I’ve come to enjoy JavaScript quite a bit. And when I launched Rails Designer I got many a question to help other teams with their JavaScript. And then often, after a successful project, the question (request?): you…

So I’m (pre)…

NOTE: This is an edited transcript of a talk I gave at Rails World 2024. You can watch the full talk on YouTube.

From its beginning, Rails has been famous for being a kind of a rocket engine that could propel your idea to astronomic heights at supersonic speed. But, at least for me, it has lately felt like I needed to be a rocket scientist to then deploy and run my full-featured application.

And that is because just as, over time, rocket engines have grown larger and more complex,

So too has the “standard” web application architecture only grown more complicated with time.

Let’s consider a typical Heroku application architecture from, say, 2008. It would have had some web dynos…

All the talks from Rails World 2024 are now available online! Revisit your favorite sessions or catch up on ones you missed on the Rails World 2024 YouTube playlist.

On to the recap

Just over 1,000 Rails devs from 57 countries gathered in Toronto for two days of technical talks, workshops, networking, evening parties, the Rails 8 beta release…and one glorious neon sign.

We packed a lot into these two days, so here’s a quick run down of the highlights:

• Rails Core launched Rails 8 beta live from the audience during DHH’s keynote.
• We followed 24 technical talks (and a workshop) by 28 great speakers on two tracks hosted by GitHub and AppSignal.
• Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke invited DHH…

Hi everyone!

Rails Versions 6.1.7.9, 7.0.8.5, 7.1.4.1, and 7.2.1.1 have been released!

These are security patches addressing 4 possible ReDoS (Regular expression Denial of Service) attacks. All of these only affect Ruby versions below 3.2 so we urge users on older versions of Ruby to upgrade to these new Rails versions at their earliest convenience.

Additionally we strongly recommend users upgrade to Ruby 3.2 or greater, to take advantage of the improved ReDoS mitigations in newer versions.

Ruby 3.1 is approaching it’s end of life for security support from Ruby upstream and is the only maintained version of Ruby still vulnerable to these attacks. Going forward we plan to continue to…

Explore our software developer William Mena’s key takeaways from Rails World 2024, where he reignited his passion for Rails and learned about the exciting future of Rails 8.

Continue Reading

We are excited to announce the initial release of the new design for RubyGems.org!

The new design is the result of a collaboration with UX designer Ian Taylor and the RubyGems.org core team. Eventually, the full refresh of the site aims to meet our goals of modernizing the design and improving the usability of RubyGems.org for all of our users.

The design will be released incrementally and we’ve chosen the /pages routes to be refreshed first. These pages contain non-critical, mostly static content, allowing us to release the design without risking problems for our users.

As part of the roll-out strategy, we are prioritizing stability over a “big reveal”.

The new design aims to support…

We’re excited to announce updates to our maintenance policy for Ruby on Rails.

These changes are designed to provide clarity on our support timelines and help you plan your Rails upgrades effectively. You can find the full details of our new policy in our site.

New Maintenance Policy Overview

Our support is now divided into three categories:

1. New Features
   • We aim to release a version containing new features every six months.
2. Bug Fixes
   • Minor releases will receive bug fixes for one year after the first release in their series.
   • For example, if version 1.1.0 is released on January 1, 2023, it will receive bug fixes until January 1, 2024.
3. Secu…

Currently Supported Releases

As of now, the following releases are supported:

• 7.…

It’s tempting to want to take the simplistic approach of writing “to the framework” or to the external API directly in the places where you need to interface with those resources, but it’s sometimes a much better approach to create your own abstraction layer. Having this layer which sits between your high-level business logic or request/response handling, and the low-level APIs you need to call, means you’ll be able to define an API which is clean and makes sense for your application…and then you can get messy down in the guts of the layer or even swap out one external API for another one. I explore all this and more in another rousing episode of Fullstack Ruby.

Links & Show Notes:

• …

Make a small program that generates wrapping functions for the given type methods, and use this example as a good starting point for your own Go code generator!

Many languages have support for metaprogramming and code generation, but in Go, it feels like something that requires more effort. For instance, if you Google “How to write a Go code generator” you’ll find very few articles explaining the tools and concepts even for creating a simple code generator. So, in this short post, I’d like to share a small program that generates wrapping functions for the given type methods, and this specific…

Someone asked on Twitter yesterday about the how to add TailwindCSS to a Rails 8 project the easiest way and having hot reload. This is how I believe it is to do so in a few minutes.

In this post, we’ll explore some of the most useful core extensions in Rails that enhance how developers work with modules: delegate, concern, and the deprecated but still important alias_method_chain. These tools simplify method delegation, modularize code, and modify method behavior. While alias_method_chain is no longer in use, understanding its history is helpful for maintaining legacy code. We’ll break down how each of these methods works and why they’re valuable, especially when writing cleaner, more efficient Rails applications.

1. Module#delegate

One of the most widely used extensions in Rails is Module#delegate. This method allows you to delegate method calls from one object to…

In Rails world 2024 DHH unveiled Kamal 2 in hisopening keynote. Now folks wantto give Kamal a try but some people are worried about the data. They want totake one step at a time and they feel more comfortable if their database ismanaged by someone else.

That's where Crunchy Data comes in. They providemanaged Postgres service. Checkout thistweet from DHH about CrunchyData.

In our internal discussion one of the BigBinary engineers brought up the issueof "latency". Since the PostgreSQL server will not be in the same data center,what would be the latency. How much impact will it have on performance.

We didn't know the answer so we thought we would do some benchmarking.

Benchmarking

To do the…

In Rails, we can mark certain attributes of a model as readonly using the attr_readonly method. Once an attribute is marked as readonly, it cannot be changed after the record is created.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_readonly :email
end

Before

If we try to assign a new value to a readonly attribute, the assignment operation would appear to succeed, but the change would not be persisted to the database.

user = User.create!(email: "doe@example.com")
user.email # => "doe@example.com"

user.email = "andy@example.com" # allows assignment
user.email # => "andy@example.com"

user.save! # change to email won't be persisted to database

user.reload.email # =>"doe@example.com" 

After

R…

What’s the difference between solving problems and recognizing patterns, and why does it matter for developers? In this episode, Stephanie and Joël discuss transitioning from collecting solutions to identifying patterns applicable to broader contexts in software development. They explore the role of heuristics, common misconceptions among junior and intermediate developers, and strategies for leveling up from a solution-focused mindset to thinking in patterns. They also discuss their experiences of moving through this transition during their careers and share advice for upcoming software developers to navigate it successfully. They explore how learning abstraction, engaging in code…

New brand of T-shirt (Bella Canvas) for the uniform. Fresh colors to mark the start of what's next.

Rails Designer is the first UI component library built for modern SaaS apps built with ViewComponent, designed with Tailwind CSS and enhanced with Hotwire. Launched earlier in 2024 it has seen, next to a huge amount of components and variants, many great quality of life improvements too.

I want to highlight a few of these features that are more than components, but that surely will help you build your next SaaS app in Rails.

When you install Rails Designer an initializer is created. This holds the most important configuration to make Rails Designer’s components truly yours.

Customize colors

Tailwind CSS comes with a huge color palette. The full rainbow is available among some nice gray…

In this episode, Chris and Andrew welcome David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) to
discuss the release of Rails 8, starting with a recap of the Rails World Toronto conference. DHH shares insights on the growing Rails community, the challenges of planning large-scale conferences, and Rails’ philosophy of staying independent from venture capital. They dive into developer ergonomics in Rails 8, new deployment and notification tools like Kamal, Action Notifier, House (MD), and Propshaft, and upcoming features like ActiveRecord Search. The episode also covers accessibility improvements, Rails' approach to frontend frameworks, and DHH’s long-term vision for the platform. Hit download now to hear more!

So we started to investigate the RDoc template generator, which powers the Ruby documentation, to see how it worked and what we could do with it. We finally made quite a few changes.

Layout and navigation

We updated the layout and structure of the page to make it easier to navigate the documentation.

We added a fixed top bar with the project title and moved the search field there to make it always reachable. The search result benefits from more space than when they were in the sidebar.

On larger screens, we’ve hidden the navigation toggle and made the main navigation always visible. The main navigation content is now always the same on all documentation pages. It lists all the classes…

Our #devs channel is a cross-project, shared space where the entire dev team of SINAPTIA can ask questions, share opinions, and discuss interesting articles or tech they come across. The idea is to post a curated extract of what happens there every week.

Rails data migrations

Fernando shared news regarding Rails 8: new script folder and generator. Rails 8 introduces a new script folder dedicated to holding one-off or general-purpose scripts, such as data migrations, cleanup tasks, or other utility operations. This addition helps organize these scripts neatly, keeping them separate from your main application logic.

This news triggered a conversation about how we handled data migrations in…

As your Ruby on Rails application grows, you‘ll need to add your own bits of configuration.

Where do you put API keys for third-party apps? What if you need different application values depending on the Rails environment? What if you‘re testing a new feature that should be disabled in production for the time-being? Sure, you can add some ENV vars here and there. You could manually load YAML files in different places throughout your app. You might be tempted to reach for another Ruby gem to help manage all this behind a common interface.

But there‘s no need for all that. Rails.configuration has your back. It‘s got features to support your custom configuration, not to mention the built-in…

The…

Interacting with third-party APIs is common practice in applications. You might need to convert addresses into geographic coordinates, fetch subscription information from marketplaces, prompt an LLM, etc.

Coding with Ruby, you’ll often find gems providing a first abstraction over third-party APIs: the client layer. The client layer is usually responsible for accessing the features of the external API.

One could use the client as is and sprinkle calls to the external API across their codebase. By doing so, teams will often duplicate logic, reinvent the wheel, and create multiple change points.

One way to DRY this is to create an authoritative representation of the external API that’ll…

Celebrating 1 Year of Hotwire Weekly! 🎉

Welcome to the 1-year anniversary issue of Hotwire Weekly! It’s been one year since we launched Hotwire Weekly! With 52 editions, we’ve delivered the latest Hotwire content every week for the last year.

While the concept hasn’t changed much, now feels like the perfect time to reflect on how the newsletter is going and what could improve.

We Want Your Feedback!

We’d love to hear your overall thoughts on Hotwire Weekly! Is the newsletter useful for you? Are the sections too long, too short, or just right? Should anything change, or stay the same?

Is there anything you’d like to see more of, less of, or done differently? Feel free to share any…

2 weeks ago, at the last day of Rails World, Sahil, the founder of Gumroad made a tweet, stating that Rails is a legacy framework, and announced that their are rewriting Gumroad in TypeScript for a few reasons. One was to get rid of the technical debt. It is a very weird take, because you will end up with the same technical debt after a while with whatever language or framework you use. Another reason he stated was that LLMs can generate TypeScript code better than Ruby code, so he will be able to move faster. I don’t agree with that statement either, I think Ruby and Rails offers all the tools to move fast.

Building in 3D 🔗

I make a lot of things. Most commonly code. I blog (maybe you’re aware, given you’re here). I build conference talks. Sometimes manifestos. Most of these live on the computer. Sometimes I need to step away and not look at a screen.

On occasion, I’ll build some piece of furniture we need in the house. Or some small accessory out of wood that I’ll use on my desk. This is one such time, and I decided to document it.

Similar to my recent posts on music I’m listening to, this isn’t directly related to software development. If you want to bail because of that, no judgement.

The Problem 🔗

There wasn’t really so much a problem. I recently built an end table for my office. I had extra…

One of the ways the Californian Ideology won in tech is to make everyone a US Republican in their relationship with governance. So obsessed with decentralization (we’ll get it right this time!) that when centralization inevitably builds up no one knows how to manage it healthily, or even that it needs to be managed. And then a Matt Mullenweg happens and everyone is like “oh no, I have learned nothing from this other than that centralization is bad, we’ll get it right this time!”. Rinse, repeat.

It’s a perpetual motion machine of suck: ignore the role of governance, let it devolve to the worse people in the worst emergent structures, complain about how bad it is, try to get rid of it,…

ActionMailer previews provide a way to see how our emails look in the browser by visiting a special URL that renders them without actually sending the emails.

It is particularly useful for testing and developing email templates.

class UserInvitationPreview < ActionMailer::Preview
  def send_invitation_email
    UserInvitationMailer.with(invitation: Invitation.last).invitation_email
  end
end

Before

By default, Rails looks for mailer previews in the test/mailers/previews directory.

If we want to customize the location of our mailer previews, we can only specify a single path using the preview_path configuration, as ActionMailer is limited to one preview path.

For example, if we want…

Last, but not least for this week, I was on Founder Quest. I'm doing my best third wheel impression over there and appreciate that Ben and Josh haven't kicked me off yet. We talked about a lot of things but mostly focused on the fireside acquisition.

FounderQuest | Acquiring Fireside with John Nunemaker

Josh and Ben talk with John about his recent acquisition of Fireside, covering the finances, pitfalls avoided, and more acquisition tips.https://www.johnnunemaker.com/acquiring-fireside/https://www…

FounderQuest

If you missed the other podcasts this week, here you go:

• Code and the Coding Coders who Code it
• Changelog: The moneyball approach

Hi, Wojtek here still feeling the good vibe of the Rails World. Cheers to all the attendees and see you in Amsterdam!

Fireside Chat with DHH, Matz and Tobi
The video from the Rails World is now ready to watch, followed by the Eileen keynote. All the videos will be available soon!

Don’t execute i18n watcher on boot
It shouldn’t catch any file changes initially which unnecessarily slowed down boot of applications with lots of translations.

Support method names for :block in browser blocking
Prior to this commit, :block options only supported callables. This commit aims to bring browser blocking closer in parity to callbacks declarations like before_action and after_action by supporting…

Add :except_on option for validations
Grants the…

In the latest version of Ruby on Rails (Rails 8), developers have been given a handy new shortcut for adding a NOT NULL constraint to database columns. This small but powerful enhancement simplifies the process of generating migrations, making them cleaner and more intuitive.

In this blog post, I’ll show how this new feature works and how it can help you create migrations faster.

What Is a NOT NULL Constraint?

Before diving into the new shortcut, let’s quickly revisit what a NOT NULL constraint is and why it’s important.

In a relational database, a column marked as NOT NULL ensures that no row can have a NULL value for that column. This constraint enforces data integrity by ensuring…

In my earlier blog post we saw how using redis connection pools can help us improve performance in a multi-threaded/multi-process application like Rails. Now we will see another typical scenario where Redis is a bottleneck and how we can optimize it.

I was designing a caching system and ran into a problem where I wanted to delete a bunch of keys on some event and it turned out to be much slower than I expected.

Intuitively I assumed Redis would be fast enough to handle it with sub-millisecond response times. Turns out Redis uses client-server model and each command waits for response. So if you are sending each delete separately, the latency can add up quickly, more so if you are running…

In this episode, Jason, Chris, and Andrew discuss their upcoming plans for the Rails World conference, sharing stories about travel arrangements, hotels, and Andrew's first time flying first class. The conversation delves into the technical side, with updates on Rails 8.1, Ruby’s new release schedule, and challenges related to Docker on Apple Silicon. Chris introduces his latest project, SellRepo, which allows users to sell digital products through GitHub. The episode also covers frustrations with JavaScript package management, GitHub CI caching, and API integration issues. They wrap up the episode with a  humorous conversation about nostalgic sodas like Surge and fast-food soda machines.…

I had the privilege of opening SquiggleConf 2024 at the New England Aquarium, sharing the story of Oh My Zsh. Highlights included inspiring talks on Excalidraw, Chrome DevTools, and web animations, plus a fun Duck Boat tour where I got to drive on the Charles River.

Continue Reading

I joined Adam and Jerod to share my new thesis for acquiring Rails based SaaS apps. The conversation was great! This new moneyball approach (dubbed so by Jess) has been swimming around in my head for a few months now. So it's great to talk about it in public finally.

Changelog Interviews 612: The Moneyball approach – Listen on Changelog.com

If you like the episode, give 5 Businesses Acquired with a Long-Term Hold Model a listen too. Great stuff by someone with a lot more experience than me.

If you missed the other podcasts this week, here you go:

• Code and the Coding Coders who Code it
• Founder Quest: Acquiring Fireside

Postgres provides two ways to store a timestamp: TIMESTAMP and TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE (or timestamptz). I’ve always recommended using the later, as it alleviates all confusion about time zones. Let’s see why.

What is a “time stamp”?

The terms “date”, “time”, “datetime”, “calendar”, and “timestamp” can feel interchangeable but the are not. A “timestamp” is a specific point in time, as measured from a reference time. Right now it is Oct 10, 2024 18:00 in the UK, which is the same timestamp as Oct 10 2024 14:00 in Washington, DC.

To be able to compare two timestamps, you have to include some sort of reference time. Thus, “Oct 10, 2025 18:00” is not a timestamp, since you don’t know…

The debugger you didn't know you needed. Ruby comes with an official debugger called Debug, which is now included in new Rails applications. Surprisingly, many Rails developers are still unaware of just how powerful this tool is. In this episode, Stan and I dive into its capabilities, exploring how it enhances the debugging process and makes troubleshooting more efficient.

Debug
The Startup of You 

With Turbo Streams you can update specific parts of your app. Inject a chat message, update a profile picture or insert a Report is being created alert.

The preciseness Turbo Streams offers is great. But often the abruptness of it, its not too appealing to me. The new component is just there (or isn’t, if you remove it).

I’d like to add a bit more joy to my apps and this technique is something that does just that. I previously explored multiple techniques to add some kind of transition or animation when an element was inserted or removed. I fine-tuned it over the years while using it in production. And I can say I’m happy with how the technique works I am outlining today.

First, this…

Moving from my usual niche interests to a niche so small that I have only seen two people on the internet who care about this: I have some really great news if you still want to manage metadata tags like it’s 2010 and you’re ripping CDs into iTunes. I’ve updated the most useful iTunes track naming script to ever exist, so you can use it in Music.app on macOS 15.1 Sequoia in the year 2024.

The scripts are named Track Parser (Clipboard) and Track Parser (Song name), and they were written by Dan Vanderkam in 2004. He maintained them until 2009, put them into a public Google Code project, and eventually moved on with his life. I used both scripts hundreds or maybe even thousands of times…

Ruby Central has been a foundational part of the Ruby community since 2003. They organize Ruby Conf and Rails Conf and maintain critical Ruby infrastructure like rubygems.org. With Ruby Conf Chicago just around the corner and new initiatives at Ruby Central, we thought it would be a good time to catch up with our friends at Ruby Central. Marty Haught joins the show to tell us more about Ruby Central's open source initiatives.

Show Notes
https://rubyconf.org/
https://rubycentral.org/news/

Last week Drew invited me on his podcast. I loved the format (what are you working on, what are your blockers, what have you learned recently) and suspect I'll become a regular listener.

The episode summary pretty much sums it up...

Ever wondered why a seasoned entrepreneur would choose acquisition over starting from scratch? Join us as veteran Rubyist John Nunemaker unravels the secrets behind his strategic purchase of Fireside FM. You’ll discover the ins and outs of transitioning ownership and handling infrastructure while gaining insights into why stepping into an existing company can be a game-changer for entrepreneurs.

John's journey doesn't stop at Fireside FM. He shares his…

Last week, I came across a few small improvements that I could make to the Ruby docs. In the past, I’ve found the idea of contributing to the Ruby repo quite daunting, but I found that it’s actually pretty straightforward.

I made some notes about the steps to get things set up locally, and I’m sharing these here in the hope that I can convince someone else how easy it is to contribute!

Getting set up to make changes to docs

First, I forked the ruby repo, and cloned my fork:

git clone git@github.com:nithinbekal/ruby.git

Before I could run the configure scripts, I had to install autoconf:

brew install autoconf

Next, you generate the configure script:

./autogen.sh

And then run the…

eBike eXcitement 🔗

This evening, on the way home from gymnastics, with my daughter in the rear cargo seat, my eBike’s odometer ticked over 1,000 miles. I was riding at the time, so you’ll need to settle for the obligatory picture of it at 1,001 miles.

And you’ll have to trust me that by getting to 1,001 I first rode 1,000 miles.

We’ve had the eBike for almost 14 months, and it’s been the primary way my daughter and I get around town. I ride her into school every day on the bike, no matter how cold it is. We ride to the playground. We go to the library. We ride in to drop her off at summer camp in the morning. Maybe we’ll go to get ice cream. We go to her activities. Stop to run an errand.

It’s…

Encypting TOTP secrets in the Keycloak library

Overview

At Gusto, our team is building a new authentication service using the open source authentication library called Keycloak. Keycloak offers a comprehensive range of security features and customizations but some components of the Keycloak library require enhanced security hardening to meet the security needs of Gusto. As part of our authentication service, it is crucial to support various Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) methods — SMS, TOTP, WebAuthn, etc. to strengthen our security posture and prevent unauthorized access.

Problem

Keycloak currently stores TOTP secret (seed) in plain text within its database. This secret…

NeetoCourse allows anyone to buildinteractive courses where they can add codeblocks and assessments. This allowsthe user to run their code, see the output and check if their solution iscorrect or not. Check outBigbinary Academy's JavaScript courseto see this in action.

Let's see how we evaluate JavaScript code and check if the output matches thecorresponding solution.

Synchronous code

For a simple synchronous code, first thing we need to check is if everythinglogged by the user is same as that of the solution code. What we do here isaggregate all the logs to an array and then compare that array with the arraygenerated by the solution code. This is done by transforming the code using anAST…

I am writing some code that does some smoke tests with capybara in a browser of some Javascript code. Frustratingly, it was failing when run in CI on Github Actions, in ways that I could not reproduce locally. (Of course it ended up being a configuration problem on CI, which you’d expect in this case). But this fact especially made me really want to see browser console output — especially errors, for failed tests, so I could get a hint of what was going wrong beyond “Well, the JS code didn’t load”.

I have some memory of being able to configure a setting in some past capybara setup, to make error output in browser console automatically fail a test and output? But I can’t find any…

This is just a post for myself since otherwise, every half a year or so, I'm running into this.

At some point, I start to get an error like the one from the title when running my apps in the RubyMine debugger.

Typically, my first reaction is to leave that in peace and let it resolve itself. Then, after I'm annoyed with all the other debugging tools, I make myself search for it on Google. Usually, I hit this StackOverflow post and skim it for any answers or comments I upvoted:

By the way, I tried some ChatGPT incantations, but it doesn't seem to pick up the comment.

So here we go ChatGPT, you just need to do this in your terminal:

$ bundle clean --force

And then run the RubyMine debugger again.

So…

Im aware of kamal and its also a great piece of software especially since its a first class rails citizen, however as always competition cant hurt. (I also didnt like how kamal is full of configuration) I mean, rails at its core is convention over configuration and kamal in its current state is the opposite of that, which I totally understand its only on version 2 and writing software takes a lot of work.

Getting Caprover

Back to this…

Kamal 2 was released recently and it brings a few singnificant changes. Traefik is replaced by kamal-proxy, Kamal runs all containers in a custom Docker network and secrets are passed differently to new containers. All these changes mean that the upgrade is not simple, but in this article I will walk you through an example to help with the process.

Learning from other developers is an important ingredient to your success. During this episode, Joël Quenneville is joined by Stefanni Brasil, Senior Developer at Thoughtbot, and core maintainer of faker-ruby. To open our conversation, she shares the details of her experience at the Rails World conference in Toronto and the projects she enjoyed seeing most. Next, we explore the challenge of Mac versus Windows and how these programs interact with Ruby on Rails and dive into Stefanni’s involvement in Open Source for Thoughtbot and beyond; what she loves about it, and how she is working to educate others and expand the current limitations that people experience. This episode is also…

Building in 3D 🔗

I make a lot of things. Most commonly code. I blog (maybe you’re aware, given you’re here). I build conference talks. Sometimes manifestos. Most of these live on the computer. Sometimes I need to step away and not look at a screen.

On occasion, I’ll build some piece of furniture we need in the house. Or some small accessory out of wood that I’ll use on my desk. This is one such time, and I decided to document it.

Similar to my recent posts on music I’m listening to, this isn’t directly related to software development. If you want to bail because of that, no judgement.

The Problem 🔗

In my office, I have a couch. Right now there’s a metal filing cabinet next to the couch that I’m…

Warning: this is a post about very boring yakshaving, probably only of interest to people who are trying to upgrade Hugo from a very old version to a new version. But what are blogs for if not documenting one’s very boring yakshaves from time to time?

So yesterday I decided to try to upgrade Hugo. There’s no real reason to do this – I’ve been using Hugo version 0.40 to generate this blog since 2018, it works fine, and I don’t have any problems with it. But I thought – maybe it won’t be as hard as I think, and I kind of like a tedious computer task sometimes!

I thought I’d document what I learned along the way in case it’s useful to anyone else doing this very specific migration. I upgraded…

If you're on the latest (8) version of Ruby on Rails, there's a nice shortcut to add the not null modifier to your database columns. Just add an exclamation mark after the type, and Rails will mark that column as not null.

For example, consider the following generator command.

$ bin/rails generate migration CreateUsers email_address:string!:uniq password_digest:string!

It will produce the following migration.

class CreateUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration[8.0]
  def change
    create_table :users do |t|
      t.string :email_address, null: false
      t.string :password_digest, null: false

      t.timestamps
    end
    
    add_index :users, :email_address, unique: true
  end
end

Pretty handy!

P.…

The ecosystem of Ruby gems is rich with libraries to enable all sorts of useful functionality you’ll need as you write your web applications. However, at times it can be a challenge when you’re working within a broader Ruby context (aka not using Rails) to find gems which integrate well into all sorts of Ruby applications.

Occasionally you’ll come across a gem which doesn’t clearly label itself as Rails-only. In other cases, the manner in which you can use the gem outside of Rails isn’t clearly documented or there are odd limitations.

But thankfully, there are plenty of gems which are quite solid to use no matter what architecture you choose, and a few you might come across may even…

In this…

The first Rails 8 beta has officially been released, bringing an exciting set of features, bug fixes, and improvements. This version builds on the foundation of Rails 7.2, while introducing new features and optimizations to make Rails development even more productive and enjoyable.

Key highlights include an integration with Kamal 2 for hassle-free deployments, the introduction of Propshaft as the new default asset pipeline, and extensive ActiveRecord enhancements. Rails 8 also brings several SQLite integration upgrades that make it a viable option for production use.

Let's dive in and explore everything that Rails 8 has to offer!

Effortless Deployments with Kamal 2 and Thruster

Rails 8…

We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 3.4.0-preview2.

Prism

Switch the default parser from parse.y to Prism. [Feature #20564]

Language changes

• String literals in files without a frozen_string_literal comment now emit a deprecation warning when they are mutated. These warnings can be enabled with -W:deprecated or by setting Warning[:deprecated] = true. To disable this change, you can run Ruby with the --disable-frozen-string-literal command line argument. [Feature #20205]

• it is added to reference a block parameter. [Feature #18980]

• Keyword splatting nil when calling methods is now supported. **nil is treated similarly to **{}, passing no…

Core classes updates

Note: We’re only listing outstanding class updates.

• Exception

  • Exception#set_backtrace now accepts an array of Thread::Backtrace::Location. Kernel#raise, Thread#raise and Fiber#r…

• Range

  …

Kamal 2 finally brings the most requested feature to reality and allows people to run multiple applications simultaneously on a single server. Here’s how.

The Kamal way

Kamal is an application-centric deploy tool rather than a small PaaS. And this hasn’t changed with the new version 2. But what does it even mean?

Let’s look at a typical config/deploy.yml to run a generic application:

# config/deploy.yml
service: [APP_NAME]

image: [DOCKER_REGISTRY]/[APP_NAME]

servers:
  web:
    - 165.22.71.211
  job:
    hosts:
      - 165.22.71.211
    cmd: bin/jobs

proxy:
  ssl: true
  host: [APP_DOMAIN]

registry:
  username: [DOCKER_REGISTRY]

  # Always use an access token rather than real…

As you can notice the configuration describes only one particular service. And this hasn’t changed. Applications still have…

Active Record Store is a powerful feature in Ruby on Rails that allows you to store structured data in a flexible way. Instead of creating separate tables for every piece of information, you can store data as a hash directly in your model. This is especially useful for scenarios where the structure of the data may change over time or is not strictly defined.

Example Scenario: Managing Book Preferences

Let’s imagine you are building a book review application where users can save their reading preferences. Instead of creating separate columns for each preference (like favorite genres, preferred authors, and reading status), you can use Active Record Store to simplify the model.

Step 1:…

ActiveStorage is a Rails framework that simplifies file uploads and attachments to cloud storage services. It provides a unified interface for handling file uploads, transformations, and storage across various cloud providers.

It’s beautifully simple and easy to set up. Adding an user avatar is just one line of code:

class User < ApplicationRecord
  has_one_attached :avatar
end

Love Rails! ❤️

Being one of the first to market, Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service), has been the default storage provider for your ActiveStorage attachments. But the last few years more options have appeared. This is great for companies and customers alike!

For my next big thing, I have explored other…