Rubyland

After wrapping up about the encoder optimizations in the previous post, we can now start talking about the parser side.

It certainly won’t be as long, because the parser didn’t need as much work, but also because some optimizations, particularly around setup costs were the same as the one applied to the encoder, so I will simply reference them quickly.

Efficient Hash Operations

When I took over the gem, there was a pull request by Luke Gruber that had been sitting there for almost a year, with multiple parser initialization speedups.

I mentioned the first one in part two, the parser’s #initialize method was doing hash lookups in a very inefficient way by using rb_funcall to check if…

#define option_given_p(opts,…

Welcome to Hotwire Weekly!

Welcome to another issue of Hotwire Weekly! Happy reading! 🚀✨

📚 Articles, Tutorials, and Videos

Auto-saving Rails forms with Turbo Streams - Josef Strzibny demonstrates how to implement an autosave feature for inline input fields using Turbo and Stimulus.

A Simple Fix for Dynamicly Added External Widgets in Turbo-Enabled Sites - Maciej Litwiniuk addresses the issue of external widgets, such as Chatwoot, disappearing or reloading during page transitions in Turbo Drive-enabled sites.

Image Uploads with Uppy & ActiveStorage in Rails - Ken Greeff integrates the Uppy package with ActiveStorage in a Rails application to add image upload functionality for listings and…

A few years ago, I wrote this test double library for Ruby called Mocktail. Its README provides a choose-your-own-adventure interface as well as full API documentation, but it doesn't really offer a way to see a test at a glance—and certainly not a realistic one.

Since I just wrote my first test with Mocktail in a while, I figured I'd share it here for anyone who might have bounced off Mocktail's overly cute README or would otherwise be interested in seeing what an isolated unit test with Mocktail looks like.

The goal

Today I'm writing a class that fetches an Atom feed. It has three jobs:

1. Respect caching and bail out if the feed hasn't been updated
2. Parse the feed
3. Persist the feed…

There is an unspoken fourth job here:…

Hello! Recently I ran a terminal survey and I asked people what frustrated them. One person commented:

There are so many pieces to having a modern terminal experience. I wish it all came out of the box.

My immediate reaction was “oh, getting a modern terminal experience isn’t that hard, you just need to….”, but the more I thought about it, the longer the “you just need to…” list got, and I kept thinking about more and more caveats.

So I thought I would write down some notes about what it means to me personally to have a “modern” terminal experience and what I think can make it hard for people to get there.

what is a “modern terminal experience”?

Here are a few things that are important to…

This post may appear to be about new functionality in Ruby. However, it may instead be an attempt to write an article with the worst possible SEO.

Anyway, hit it.

What Is It? 🔗

As of Ruby 3.4, it is another way to refer to the first parameter in a block. This may be more obvious by way of an example.

["What is it?"].map { it + " It's it" } * 4=>[  "What is it? It's it",  "What is it? It's it",  "What is it? It's it",  "What is it? It's it",]

The block we pass to map does not define a name for the parameter to represent the variable we’re manipulating in each iteration. Instead, Ruby knows it refers to that variable.

Starting in Ruby 2.7, we had access to numbered parameters in a block with an…

Can you catch COVID from 2020 wine?

Hey everyone, Happy Friday!

Vipul here with the latest updates for This Week in Rails.

Before we start, a small update - I am happy to share that my team at Saeloun is joining the Rails Foundation as a contributing member. Read more about the reasons why we decided to join here, and why you should too!

Colorize console prompt on non standard environments
Currently, the Rails console prompt is colored according to the following rules: blue for dev and test, red of prod. On non-standard environments (like staging), the prompt is not colored. With this change, it will now be set to Magenta, for these environments.

Fix running individual app:update commands
This change fixes a regression,…

Happy new year everyone! The Rails Foundation is kicking off the year with great news: Saeloun has joined the Rails Foundation as its newest Contributing member!

Saeloun is a Ruby on Rails consulting agency, based out of Boston, MA, and Pune, India. The team helps lead and grow startups and large corporations such as HaulHub and Methodology, helping with full stack Rails development, Rails upgrades, maintenance, scaling and performance, and helping companies implement AI solutions with their Rails apps.

Saeloun is joining the Rails Foundation after years of actively making contributions to both the framework and the community.

In fact, you might recognize two Saeloun names - CEO Vipul…

It’s 2025, and this year again, the YJIT team brings you a new version of YJIT that is even faster, more stable, and more memory-efficient.

A new baseline

Last year’s YJIT release delivered an impressive performance boost which earned us multiple shoutouts on social media. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that many large businesses running Rails in production had upgraded to the latest version of Ruby, in part because they were excited to get better performance. I distinctly remember, when I started at Shopify, before YJIT was a thing, that most Ruby deployments were several versions behind. Seeing many people deploying the latest Ruby with YJIT enabled left me with a warm fuzzy feeling…

• Chernoff Faces
• dmikhr/DudeGL - "Anthropomorphic UML": visualization of code and OOP concepts in a form of human body.
• dmikhr/Dudity - Analyze Rails code with stick dudes
• dmikhr/DudesHub - Visualize code diffs in GitHub

• Dave - Drifting Ruby - Discount Code - learnfromhome
• Dave - troessner/reek: Code smell detector for Ruby
• Dave - Kubernetes
• John - Pushups…

47 books. 21,000 pages. That’s 17 more than my target this year. One big factor that caused this is that I’ve been listening to audiobooks far more than reading books (40 out of the 47 were audiobooks), so it was easier to get through more books.

Non fiction

Guns, Germs and Steel (Jared Diamond)

Brilliant exploration of why different societies developed at different rates, and the geographical and environmental factors that affected them. If you liked books like Sapiens or The Ascent of Man, you’ll like this one.

The Innovators (Walter Isaacson)

Isaacson traces the evolution of computing technology from the days of Babbage and Lovelace, all the way to the likes of Jobs, Torvalds, and…

Hey all,

As the recent pattern has established itself: It's been a while! But here we are, knee-deep into 2025, and we have almost made it through the incredible first halves of the 2020s.

On a fun note, I was commanded to share more again! I've been cheap recently, keeping all the good insight and experience nuggets for myself, like the little Gollum. I figured, before I disappeared into the dark caves below the Misty Mountains, I better get to what I've always enjoyed: Delivering value in writing, drawing and speaking to my fellow devs.

And while this post won't be a value bomb, it will give you an overview of my current doings and give you a chance to unsubscribe while you still can, before…

It's out and it's stout. Actually, I don't know if it's stout or not. I just like to rhyme (all the time).

My 3 Fav Quotes

“What if instead of discounts, we focused on lowering the risk for customers to try podcasting?” – Garrett

“You don't have to go crazy and work a ton. You can you can achieve great success by turning a few levers. But sometimes it just takes a lot of work to figure out what those levers are.” – John

"I'm just thinking about swag, but that's a discussion from another day." – Kris

Sometimes I feel that AWS is the master of unexpected costs. I was recently surprised by the cost of the NAT gateway - $0.045 per GB?! on top of $0.045/h? Obviously you’ll need it if you want instances on private subnets to access the Internet. For network-intensive applications such as web crawlers, a NAT gateway can be more expensive than instances. Fortunately, there is a simple way to reduce the cost - enable IPv6 and use an Egress-only Internet gateway.

Egress-only Internet Gateway vs NAT Gateway

NAT Gateway allows instances on private subnets to access the Internet over IPv4. Located on a public subnet, it connects instances to the Internet Gateway.

Source -…

RubyConf 2024 will be remembered not just for its amazing talks and social events but for a moment when the community came together to resolve an issue that has frustrated Ruby developers for years. 

This issue was raised by Nadia Odunayo (CEO and developer of The StoryGraph) in her closing keynote and centers around Ruby’s handling of new hashes. Thanks to Nadia’s talk and the efforts of the Ruby community, a solution has emerged that both solves the problem and demonstrates the power of open source collaboration.

Nadia’s Keynote

In her keynote, Nadia revisited her alter ego, Dee Bug — a Ruby private investigator. As Dee Bug, she dug into this issue. She explained that Ruby’s default argument…

Here’s how to implement autosaving for inline input fields the Hotwire way.

Autosaved forms

What’s autosave? Autosaving is saving a user input automatically on changes, lost focus or after an interval of no interactivity without any specific user action. Typically in inline forms.

To make things straigtforward let’s say we want to save a post’s title while reusing an existing update action that can save the title or perhaps all the post’s attributes.

They are couple options to go around it, but here’s how I do it. You just need Turbo and Stimulus installed.

Stimulus autosave

Since we’ll remove the usual ‘Save’ button from the form, we’ll need an auto-submission done in a different…

Turbo emits various Custom events before, during and after certain actions. Knowing this helps you write cleaner and more maintainable code, without reinventing the wheel.

I want to give a few ideas and suggestions on how you could use them. Let me know if you have other suggestions I should add. ✌️

Loading state on frame load

When the content to be loaded in a frame takes some time, you can show some loading state, eg. a spinner.

You can add some loading state or Skeleton UI for the first load by simply adding it within the turbo-frame, but if you are reloading that frame, this won’t work.

But using the events turbo:before-frame-render and turbo:frame-render->frames it’s pretty doable!

We shipped a fun feature at Better with Becky industries last week that offers a new way to follow Becky's work: getting each Beckygram delivered via e-mail!

From Becky's announcement:

That's why we built Beckygram—a space outside the noise of social media, where I can share real fitness insights, mindset shifts, and everyday wins without the distractions of ads, comparison traps, or influencer gimmicks. Frankly, I know that if I mentally benefit from being off the app, others will too!

You can sign up by clicking the Follow button on her Beckygram bio and entering your e-mail address at the bottom of any page. I hope you'll consider it, because Instagram does indeed suck.

So that brings…

Most paying customers expect a certain level of (paid) support. One opens a ticket, gets a response, and any issue can be resolved.

How does “support” work in open-source? My rule of thumb is to meet users where they are.

GitHub projects have issues, but opening an issue to ask a question is generally frowned upon. Therefore, in JNA, we have a mailing list, and in OpenSearch, we have a forum and Slack. StackOverflow is quite popular, too.

For a small project I choose GitHub issues as the preferred and only channel. It keeps things well organized and is the least amount of overhead for both users and maintainers. Most questions can be turned into either an issue (e.g. “I have tried this,…

Introduction

Ruby garbage collection has always been a frequently discussed topic in the community. With recommendations on tuning strategies for better performance, and even entire sets of patches designed to optimize it, going back at least as far as 2008 and Ruby 1.8.

I spoke at RubyKaigi in 2023 about the history of the Ruby garbage collector, and its evolution since the origins of the language. In that talk I mentioned some of the changes that we were working on at Shopify, to make the Ruby GC easier to modify, and ensure that we’re able to evolve it to more closely follow the cutting edge of memory management research.

I’m pleased to say that we’ve made significant progress on…

In this article, we'll explore a simple visual trick to help understand how lazy enumeration works in Ruby.

Lazy enumeration may seem like an abstract concept at first. It might be difficult to conceptualize. But taking a moment to get familiar with the lazy enumerator pays dividends. Enumerator::Lazy is extremely useful in scenarios where you want to build complex pipelines of data transformations or when working with large datasets.

Let’s see how.

Enumerable is eager by default

Consider an Enumerable method chain.

7.times.map { |n| n + 1 }.select(&:even?).take(3)
# => [2, 4, 6]

At each step of the chain, method calls are evaluated eagerly. Each element from the previous step must be…

With AI, in my context we’re talking about LLMs (Large Language Models), which I simplify down to “text generator”: they take text as input, and they output text.

I wrote this to share with some folks I’m collaborating with on building AI-augmented workflows. I’ve struggled to find something that is both condensed and whose opinionations match my own. So I wrote it myself.

The following explanation is intended to be accurate, but not particularly precise. For example, there is ChatGPT the product, there is an LLM at the bottom, and then in the middle there are other functions and capabilities. Or Claude or AWS Nova or Llama. These things are more than *just* LLMs,…

I recently migrated this blog from Jekyll to Ben Pickles’s Parklife and Ruby on Rails, still hosted as a static website on GitHub Pages. I’m pretty happy with the experience.

I’m writing this not because I feel any sense of advocacy (do what you want!) but to write down the reasons for myself. Maybe they’ll rhyme for you.

Here’s this blog’s repo if you want to see: https://github.com/bensheldon/island94.org

Background

I’ve been blogging here for 20 years and this blog has been through it all: Drupal, Wordpress, Middleman, Jekyll, and now Parklife+Rails.

For the past decade the blog has largely been in markdown files, which I don’t intend to change. Over the past 2…

Building a developer-facing product and eyeing a fundraise in 2025? Here are the current active investors and VCs. We analyze the top 16, who might be the best fit for your product, and how to effectively make connections with them.

Building a developer-facing product and eyeing a fundraise in 2025? Then, straight to the point: let's share what you need to know about the active investors in this space as we review our research in this space and turn the page on 2024.

It was probably easy to miss this one, but v27 of my Breaking Change podcast was a holiday special that featured our friend Aaron "tenderlove" Patterson and which we released as a video on YouTube.

In this video, we sweat the small stuff to review this year in puns, re-ranking all 26 that he'd written this year for the show and ultimately arriving at something of a Grand Unifying Theory of what makes for a good pun.

(One programming note that's kind of interesting: while we recorded locally, we conducted the actual session via a FaceTime Video call and… I'll be damned if it doesn't seem extremely low latency compared to most remote-cohost podcasts and videos you see out there. We were able…

On making the Ruby Changes, and some consequences of this work

Every year since 2013, on December 25, a new Ruby version is released. (Before that, the version schedule was much unpredictable.)

Every year since 2018 (Ruby 2.6), I spend several weeks in December working on updating my Ruby Changes site to prepare an annotated changelog of the language, focused on changes in syntax, semantics, and core APIs. You can see the 2024 installment, dedicated to Ruby 3.4, here: 7k words, 30+ sections, and some ~60 hours of work.

I have already written a series of articles about how and why I am doing it in 2022 (1, 2, 3), along with some philosophical and personal implications of this work. Last…

The order of attributes on HTML elements may seem like a thing you have never thought or cared about. But having a guideline helps keep your code consistent and have yet one other thing you don’t have to think about.

Below is the order I am using. Share it with your team and use it as a guideline. I won’t say this is the only right way, but it’s the one I’ve been using successfully with numerous projects over the last decade (👨‍🦳).

I use the following grouping order:

1. identifier
2. functional
3. styles

In terms of the actual attributes per group:

Identifier

This is only the id-attribute. I always put it first. By definition it has to be unique, making it important enough. Using Turbo…

Frequently Played 🔗

I tend to listen to the same songs or albums on repeat that are evocative of how I’m feeling or what’s going on with me. Here is what I’m currently listening to over, and over, and over, and over, again.

Zero 🔗

These riffs are super fun to play. My maybe toxic 90’s music take is that Jimmy Chamberlin is the best drummer of the bunch. Sorry Danny Carey, Josh Freese, and others.

Full Lyrics

I never let on
That I was on a sinkin’ ship
I never let on that I was down
You blame yourself
For what you can’t ignore
You blame yourself for wanting more

We’re In This Together 🔗

Rather than the original, I’ve specifically been listening to the version from Allie Goertz’s Peeled Back album of…

I recently migrated this blog from Jekyll to Ben Pickles’s Parklife and Ruby on Rails, still hosted as a static website on GitHub Pages. I’m pretty happy with the experience.

I’m writing this not because I feel any sense of advocacy (do what you want!) but to write down the reasons for myself. Maybe they’ll rhyme for you.

Here’s this blog’s repo if you want to see: https://github.com/bensheldon/island94.org

Background

I’ve been blogging here for 20 years and this blog has been through it all: Drupal, Wordpress, Middleman, Jekyll, and now Parklife+Rails.

For the past decade the blog has largely been in markdown files, which I don’t intend to change. Over the past 2…

With AI, in my context we’re talking about LLMs (Large Language Models), which I simplify down to “text generator”: they take text as input, and they output text.

I wrote this to share with some folks I’m collaborating with on building AI-augmented workflows. I’ve struggled to find something that is both condensed and whose opinionations match my own. So I wrote it myself.

The following explanation is intended to be accurate, but not particularly precise. For example, there is ChatGPT the product, there is an LLM at the bottom, and then in the middle there are other functions and capabilities. Or Claude or AWS Nova or Llama. These things are more than *just* LLMs,…

Welcome to Hotwire Weekly!

Happy New Year, and welcome to the first edition of Hotwire Weekly for 2025! 🎉

We’re excited to kick off another year of sharing the best articles, tutorials, and updates from the Hotwire and Rails community. Wishing you a successful and inspiring year ahead. Happy reading! 🚀✨

📚 Articles, Tutorials, and Videos

Up and Running with Hotwire Native Android Part 2 - Path Configuration - William Kennedy explains how to configure paths in Hotwire Native Android to enable features like modals, session resets, and native navigation. The guide provides a straightforward setup process to enhance the native feel of your Hotwire apps.

Drifting Ruby Episode #489 - Hotwire…

I’ve been toying with a side project's POC and for one the moving pieces, I needed a Git server I could self-host.

One option I considered was using something like Gitea, but I eventually preferred something that was easier to customize and maintain by myself, so I needed a lighter solution. It turns out that Git itself already includes git-http-backend, a CGI program that allows to interact with a Git repository through the http[s] protocol.

Recently, I came across Let Me Speak Freely? A Study on the Impact of Format Restrictions on Performance of Large Language Models and a rebuttal blog Say What You Mean: A Response to 'Let Me Speak Freely' and another blog Structured outputs can hurt the performance of LLMs addressing the approach and questioning few things from both the paper and blog. These papers and blogs sparked a lot of discussions across the board and I found quite a bit of insightful comments on how folks deal…

While it does seem logically obvious, that if you allow the LLMs to reason before they…

Introduction: A Fragile Trust

The Ruby ecosystem relies heavily on RubyGems.org as the central platform for distributing and managing gems. We all depend on it to provide reliable, untampered gems that are the foundation for our projects. This trust in the system is a cornerstone of Ruby and Rails software development and undoubtedly part of what makes it so successful.

In 2022, two critical incidents involving RubyGems' backend highlighted cracks in this trust. Although no damage occurred, the event raised concerns about the potential for malicious actors to replace widely used gems, like Rails, with compromised versions.

These incidents once again emphasized the need for additional…

Over-active side-projects.

January—March

Welcomed Ella to the team at CoverageBook, another Le Wagon graduate who moved to Brighton and emailed me for a coffee in late 2023. Initially joining for a short paid contract to give her some experience and us some extra bugsmashing firepower… come the end of the year Ella was still with us, still shipping and an asset to the team.

We also launched CoverageImpact, a fun little tool to encourage marketing and PR folks to look at the realistic results of their work. It’s been a good project for us to talk about trying to move the industry’s conversation about value rather than shrug and make spurious, unexamined , claims about “reach”.

At its…

Direct link to podcast audio file

I don't normally do this, but content warning, this episode talks at length about death and funerals and, while I continue to approach everything with an inappropriate degree of levity, if that's something you're not game to listen to right now, go ahead and skip the first hour of this one.

Recommend me your favorite show or video game at podcast@searls.co and I will either play/watch it or lie and say I did. Thanks!

Now: links and transcript:

• Kirkland Signature, Organic Non-Dairy Oat Beverage
• Die with Zero book
• The "Prefer tabs when opening documents" setting
• Aaron's puns, ranked
• Amazon hoped more people would quit
• BoldVoice Accent Oracle
• Cab…

In the previous post, we showed how we eliminated two malloc/free pairs of calls when generating small JSON documents, and how that put us ahead of Oj when reusing the JSON::State object.

But that API isn’t the one people use, so if we wanted to come out ahead in the micro-benchmarks users might perform themselves, we had to find a way to get rid of that JSON::State allocation too, or to somehow make it faster.

Typed Data

Because that JSON::State allocation, isn’t just about any allocation. In Ruby, everything is an object, but not all objects are created equal. In previous parts I touched on how some objects aren’t actually allocated, and called “immediates”, I also touched on how core…

• GitHub's Online Schema Migrations for MySQL
• Gh-ost benchmark against pt-online-schema-change performance

• Matt - Danger JS
• Luke - From jQuery to ES6 | Drifting Ruby
• Dave  - Titan Security Key
• Dave - Teach, Learn, and Make with Raspberry Pi

The year is 2025 and, astoundingly, a blog post is advocating for the lost art of Extreme Programming ("XP"). From Benji Weber:

In my experience teams following Extreme Programming (XP) values and practices have had some of the most joy in their work: fulfilment from meaningful results, continually discovering better ways of working, and having fun while doing so. As a manager, I wish everyone could experience joy in their work.

I've had the privilege to work in, build, and support many teams; some have used XP from the get go, some have re-discovered XP from first principles, and some have been wholly opposed to XP practices.

XP Teams are not only fun, they take control of how they work,…

For what it's worth, I wrote about my favorite experience on a team striving to practice (and even iterate on) Extreme Programming in the August edition of Searls of Wisdom, for anyone wanting my take on it.

RSpec brings Ruby's readability to testing. Custom matchers take it to the next level 🚀.

Hi, Wojtek here. Let’s explore the first changes of the new year in the Rails codebase.

Introduce versions formatter for the schema dumper
It is now possible to override how schema dumper formats versions information inside the structure.sql file. Currently, the versions are simply sorted in the decreasing order. Within large teams, this can potentially cause many merge conflicts near the top of the list.

Now, the custom formatter can be provided with a custom sorting logic (e.g. by hash values of the versions), which can greatly reduce the number of conflicts.

Replace SyntaxTree with Prism in rail_inspector
Now that Prism has been stable for a while and is the default parser in Ruby…

Handle path_params…

As the final part of our move out of the cloud, we are working on moving 10 petabytes of data out of AWS Simple Storage Service (S3). After exploring different alternatives, we decided to go with Pure Storage FlashBlade solution.

We store different kinds of information on S3, from the attachments customers upload to Basecamp to the Prometheus long-term metrics. On top of that, Pure’s system also provides filesystem-based capabilities, enabling other relevant usages, such as database backup storage. This makes the system a top priority for observability.

Although the system has great reliability, out-of-the-box internal…

For those that haven't subscribed to the fireside blog or the podcast, I figured I'd update here as well. We released episode #3 on Mastering Prioritization in SaaS last week. Give it a listen and subscribe in your favorite podcast app. At some point I'll get too lazy to post here too. 😄

One of my favorite parts was the segment on time tracking, something that I've found useful of late.

Direct link to podcast audio file

HEADS UP: This one has a video version in case you'd prefer to watch that!

HEADS UP SEVEN UP: Here's a spoiler-free link to this year's puns as they existed prior to this recording.

Welcome to a very special Holiday Edition of Breaking Change: our first annual Breaking Change Punsort! Today, we're joined by a surprise guest! Want to know who it is? You'll just have to listen and find out. Yes, it's Aaron.

As always, you can e-mail the show at podcast@searls.co. If you enjoyed this episode and want to see a second annual edition next year, let me know! If you don't write in, I'll stop—because editing multiple speakers plus video is a massive pain in…

No links…

2024 was an amazing year for the Rails community and I’d like to share a summary of what changed in the framework. As a TLDR, there were more than 4000 commits from 562 contributors and 55 releases, including Rails 8!

Happy New Year from The Bike Shed!

Tune in to the one wrapped edition that really matters this holiday season, The Bike Shed Wrapped! Recap the year with Joël and Stephanie as they reminisce over their favourite moments of 2024.

The pair discuss ways they’ve stepped outside their comfort zone to gain a different perspective on their work, the growth they’ve each achieved as a result, and their ambitions for 2025 and beyond.

Discover Joël and Stephanie’s favourite episodes from the year as well as Joël’s favourite blog post of 2024.

—

Re-listen to Joël and Stephanie’s top four episodes of 2024
432: The Semantics and Meaning of Nil
435: Cohesive Code with Jared Norman
421: The…

I found it annoyingly non-trivial to add a spell checker to this blog.

For now, I settled on GitHub Spellcheck Action that uses PySpelling on files changed in the commit or pull request as described in this blog post.

name: Check Spelling
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
  check:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: tj-actions/changed-files@v45
        id: changed_files
        with:
          files: |
            **/**.md
            **/**.markdown
      - name: Check Spelling
        uses: rojopolis/spellcheck-github-actions@0.45.0
        with:
          task_name: Markdown
          config_path: .pyspelling.yml
          source_files: ${{…

To run PySpelling locally ensure you have a working version of Python, install PySpelling with pip install pyspelling, and aspell with brew install aspell on a Mac. In my configuration I also use pymdownx from pymdown-extensions which is installed with pip install…

You need a .pyspelling.yml and you can run it as follows.

pyspelling …

Too many are racing to integrate AI the same way: bolting on a chat and calling it a day. We partner with founders to go beyond these conventional implementations. In this post, principles and lessons about a better approach to integrate proactive AI.

Going into 2025, too many products are racing to integrate AI the same way: slapping on a chat interface and calling it a day. At Evil Martians, we partner with founders to go beyond these conventional implementations and find ways to make AI truly enhance user workflows. In this post, I'll focus on a…

The Ruby on Rails template Business Class gets a whole new edition. Rails 8, new licencing, and improved CRUD generator.

Business Class 2.0

The new Business Class is built on top of Rails 8, Pay 8, Solid Trifecta libraries, and Kamal 2. Solid Trifecta is now the default and Redis dependency was removed, simplifyng everything. Also, Action Policy got added to finally refactor authorization. An overall update of dependencies but that’s not all!

CRUD Generator

The CRUD generator got much better. It will now give you bulk actions both for team views (as grid) and admin views (as table). All destructive actions load a confirmation HTML dialog view with Hotwire.

I was also able to fix the…

In the previous post, we established that as long as ruby/json wasn’t competitive on micro-benchmarks, public perception wouldn’t change. Since what made ruby/json appear so bad on micro-benchmarks was its setup cost, we had to find ways to reduce it further.

Spot the Seven Differences

So I decided to file this performance discrepancy as a bug, and investigate it as such and started profiling Stephen’s micro-benchmark with both ruby/json and oj:

benchmark_encoding "small mixed", [1, "string", { a: 1, b: 2 }, [3, 4, 5]]

As mentioned in previous parts, I expected the extra allocation would be the main issue, and that re-using the JSON::State object would put us on par with Oj, but it’s…

Welcome to Hotwire Weekly!

We hope you had a wonderful holiday season and are looking forward to a successful and exciting New Year in 2025! 🎉

As we wrap up the year, it’s been a quieter week in the Hotwire world, but we still wanted to bring you this edition to wrap up the year and keep you connected with the latest updates. Wishing you all the best for the year ahead. Happy reading! 🚀✨

📚 Articles, Tutorials, and Videos

Remote Ruby: Christmas Eve X7 And Hotwire Spark - In this episode of Remote Ruby, Jason Charnes, Chris Oliver, and Andrew Mason discuss the latest developments in Hotwire, focusing on "Hotwire Spark". They explore how Spark introduces live reloading capabilities to Rails…

In the previous post, I covered how I reimplemented JSON::Generator::State#configure in Ruby and some other changes. Unfortunately, it didn’t go as well as I initially thought.

Mistakes Were Made

The default gems that ship with Ruby are automatically copied inside ruby/ruby’s repo. In short, there’s a bot aptly named matzbot, that replicates all the commits from the various ruby/* gems, inside ruby/ruby, and that’s what it did with my State#configure patch.

The reason is that Ruby runs on many different platforms and its CI tests many different compilers, in different versions, and also test builds with various compilation flags enabled to hopefully catch some subtle bugs, these gems…

Rails 8 comes with a built-in authentication generator. However, it doesn’t yet come with registrations. Here’s how to add them.

Rails auth generator

To generate authentication scaffold, run:

$ rails generate authentication

This will create User and Session models as well as sign-in forms. But there is little to do without registrations.

Registrations

To add registrations, we’ll add a new RegistrationsController, route, and view.

The registration controller can look like this:

# app/controllers/registrations_controller.rb
class RegistrationsController < ApplicationController
  # Include Authentication module unless it's already in ApplicationController
  include Authentication
  al…

This is Greg, Vipul, Wojciech, and Zzak, bringing you the summary of what happened with Rails in the past year. It was a busy year with close to 4000 commits from 555 contributors and 50 releases, including Rails 8!

For this year end issue, as a team we each hand-picked some of our favorite pull requests from the year.

2024 Wrap Up from the Rails Foundation
Amanda wrote a summary of what the Rails Foundation has been up to this year and what she is plannning for next year.

Add default PWA manifest and service worker file
Progressive Web Apps got a lot of support in Rails this year starting with freshly generated Rails apps now include a manifest and service worker file to become…

Add…

In this episode, Jason, Chris, and Andrew discuss a variety of topics leading up to
Christmas. They talk about the number of ‘Eves’ until Christmas, share opinions about Jason’s dog named after a Pokémon, and delve into several technical discussions. These include new Rails Guide updates, Ruby's latest release notes, and the pros and cons of various tech gadgets like the Samsung 32 inch Odyssey Neo G8 monitor and the HP Thunderbolt monitors. They also discuss new features in Hotwire, including the "Spark" update, and reminisce about older technologies such as jQuery UI. The conversation also touches on the challenges of monitor setups and docking solutions for MacBooks. Hit download now!

In the previous post, I covered how I reimplemented JSON::Generator::State#configure in Ruby and some other changes. Unfortunately, it didn’t go as well as I initially thought.

Mistakes Were Made

The default gems that ship with Ruby are automatically copied inside ruby/ruby’s repo. In short, there’s a bot aptly named matzbot, that replicates all the commits from the various ruby/* gems, inside ruby/ruby, and that’s what it did with my State#configure patch.

The reason is that Ruby runs on many different platforms and its CI tests many different compilers, in different versions, and also test builds with various compilation flags enabled to hopefully catch some subtle bugs, these gems…

Content Warning: Death of a Ruby community member

I woke up this morning to receive the news, among others, that Noah Gibbs had passed away. It was a sudden and unexpected loss, and one that I feel deeply. Let me tell you about the man who was Noah Gibbs, and what he meant not only to me, but to an entire generation of Ruby developers.

You Are Welcome Here

I grew up in a world where I was often told to be quiet, to keep to myself, to not bother others and to just be normal. I lived a life of silence and isolation that took years to escape from, even with the help of several friends I met in the Ruby community.

I was alone.

When I was first invited to speak at Southeast Ruby I…

A few years ago, I bought a leather Apple MagSafe Wallet with its hobbled Find My integration (wherein your phone merely tracks the location at which it was last disconnected from the wallet, as opposed to tracking the wallet itself). And that was a couple years before they made the product even worse by switching to the vegan FineWoven MagSafe Wallet.

Well, this wallet I never really liked is falling apart, and so I went searching for something better. All I want is a leather wallet that has a strong magnet and can reliably fit 3 or 4 cards without eventually stretching to the point that a mild shake will cause your cards to slide out.

After hearing the hosts of ATP talk up the company Bu…

In less than a week it’s a new year. 2024 was the year I launched Rails Designer. I helped many teams improve their existing Rails UI (four teams I’ve been pushing pixels for, for over six months! ❤️) and kickstarted a SaaS for three people! 🚀🌕

Oh, and I also published some OSS work (and more coming!). 🧑‍💻

But besides a really successful Rails UI Components Library with a few dozen developers/teams getting access every(!) week, it also became a pretty successful resource for Rails product engineers (or any Rails developer who wanted to improve their product/front-end skills) reaching monthly visitors in the 5 digits.

So today I wanted to look at what articles drew the most visitors.…

Becky and I circled the Costco three fucking times looking for eggs before independently realizing that OF COURSE they're in the room labeled "Dairy".

Why, American people?

Ruby 3.4.1 has been released.

This fixes the version description.

See the GitHub releases for further details.

Download

• https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/3.4/ruby-3.4.1.tar.gz

  SIZE: 23152739
  SHA1: dc42fe22bcdfbd30f63cd93296d893c53b1dadcc
  SHA256: 3d385e5d22d368b064c817a13ed8e3cc3f71a7705d7ed1bae78013c33aa7c87f
  SHA512: 93acc262e3b7cf86aeddebdad5b8938c187b9c44a73b0c252b6f873745964001459ae45ece7376745916e317c24895596a42b4544e836670fc6e90058e6f0de4
  

• https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/3.4/ruby-3.4.1.tar.xz

  SIZE: 17222800
  SHA1: 61783f85c57da9f05201e491029889d71742a83f
  SHA256: 018d59ffb52be3c0a6d847e22d3fd7a2c52d0ddfee249d3517a0c8c6dbfa70af
  SHA512:…

We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 3.4.0. Ruby 3.4 adds it block parameter reference, change Prism as default parser, adds Happy Eyeballs Version 2 support to socket library, improves YJIT, adds Modular GC, and so on.

it is introduced

it is added to reference a block parameter with no variable name. [Feature #18980]

ary = ["foo", "bar", "baz"]

p ary.map { it.upcase } #=> ["FOO", "BAR", "BAZ"]

it very much behaves the same as _1. When the intention is to only use _1 in a block, the potential for other numbered parameters such as _2 to also appear imposes an extra cognitive load onto readers. So it was introduced as a handy alias. Use it in simple cases where it speaks for…

Some good practices when building a robust cache for backend web applications.

Stephanie is joined by follow thoughtbot-er Steve Polito as they discuss his latest GitHub resource, Botcasts.

Find out why Steve was so keen to make the app, what he learnt about Hotwire in the process and why he thinks you should stop listening to the show in your current pod-catcher and pick it up in Botcasts instead!

--

Try building Botcasts for yourself over on Github!

Your host for this episode has been thoughtbot’s own Stephanie Minn, and was accompanied by Steve Polito.

You can find more of Steve’s work over on GitHub, or read what he has to say about his work on thoughtbot’s blogs. If you want to connect with Steve you can do so through LinkedIn.

Interested in…

RubyGems 3.6.2 includes security, 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.

## Security:

• Fix Gem::SafeMarshal buffer overrun when given lengths larger than fit into a byte. Pull request #8305 by segiddins
• Improve type checking in marshal_load methods. Pull request #8306 by segiddins

## Enhancements:

• Skip rdoc hooks and their tests on newer rdoc versions. Pull request #8340 by deivid-rodriguez
• Installs bundler 2.6.2 as a default gem.

## Bug fixes:

• Fix serialized metadata including an empty @original_platform attribute. Pull request #8355 by deivid-rodriguez

For developers, segmentation faults can feel like a sudden nightmare—cryptic errors that crash your application out of nowhere. This frustration is amplified when they show up in high-level languages like Ruby, where memory management is typically handled behind the scenes. Recently, while running my Ruby application, I experienced a segmentation fault caused by a gem. The crash not only halted my program but also left me facing a daunting debugging challenge. In this post, I’ll talk about how I identified the issue, debugged it, and eventually found a solution.

What is a Segmentation Fault?

Ruby gems are great for adding functionality and speeding up development, but their native…

• https://github.com/anycable/anycable
• https://graphql-ruby.org/
• https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/persisted-queries-in-graphql-slim-down-apollo-requests-to-your-ruby-application
• https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/graphql-on-rails-1-from-zero-to-the-first-query
• https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/graphql-on-rails-2-updating-the-data
• https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/graphql-on-rails-3-on-the-way-to-perfectionGraphql-ruby benchmark
• https://gist.github.com/DmitryTsepelev/36e290cf64b4ec0b18294d0a5…

• Luke - https://blog.phusion.nl/2018/11/28/stopping-slow-client-dos-attacks-with-puma-on-passenger-6/
• Charles - The Black Prism
• John - https://www.stickermule.com/
• Dave - StarTech.com Under Desk CPU Mount – Adjustable – Heavy-Duty Computer Tower Mount – 360° Swivel – Computer Mounting…

Welcome to Hotwire Weekly!

Season's greetings and welcome to a festive edition of Hotwire Weekly!

Wishing you a joyful (and/or productive) holiday season. Happy reading! 🎄✨

📚 Articles, Tutorials, and Videos

Hotwire Native 1.1 released - Joe Masilotti highlights updates in Hotwire Native 1.1, including unified global path configuration, improved setup, customizable user agents, and new modal styles for iPad.

New E-Book: Master Hotwire: Build Modern Web Apps with Rails Simplicity - Radan Skorić has released the beta version of "Master Hotwire", an e-book for Rails developers to quickly get up to speed with Hotwire through building a collaborative Kanban board application. As a bonus for…

As I outlined in my previous post, I am currently using Fedora Silverblue on my personal notebook to try out an immutable Linux distribution. The most significant difference to my previous setup is how the command line experience changes. A huge part of my work is happening in terminals, so this is important to me.

Installing Toolbx and Ptyxis

Fedora Silverblue ships with Podman and Toolbx (both part of the containers project) pre-installed: After I tried out the combination of Toolbx and Ptyxis on my personal laptop, I’m now also using it on my work machine, which is running Debian 12.

I installed them like this:

sudo apt install podman-toolbox
flatpak install flathub…

Toolbx

I’ve…

In this episode of Remote Ruby, Chris and Andrew dive into the Ruby 3.4.0 rc1 release, covering new features, modular garbage collector, language changes, and YJIT improvements. Chris shares updates on the Rails “Getting Started Guide” and improvements in deploying Rails apps. They also delve into humorous anecdotes about their personal lives and work experiences, like dealing with flaky tests in Selenium and switching to Playwright for more stable and faster system tests. The conversation wraps up with excitement over new features in Tailwind CSS v4.0 and its potential benefits for their projects. Hit download now to hear more!

Hi, it’s zzak. Let’s explore this week’s changes in the Rails codebase.

Fix “#to_query” to not include setter for nil values
To keep the behavior consistent with Rack::Utils.parse_nested_query.

# Before
nil.to_query("key") #=> key=
# After
nil.to_query("key") #=> key

Raise “ActiveRecordError” when “#increment!” called on new records
Similar to the behavior of #update_columns, an exception will be raised on records that haven’t been saved yet or were destroyed.

Revert “ActiveModel::Attributes::Normalization”
In the last episode, we announced that ActiveRecord::Normalization was moved to Active Model.
That PR was reverted because the API wasn’t ready and is still being worked on.

Add…

Since my first day in AWS 5 1/2 years ago, I’ve been experimenting with keeping a CHANGELOG of everything I do, available for everyone at the company to see. I wrote about it here. If you work at AWS, use the URL in the screenshot below to find it.

I wrote a little script to try and classify where I spent my time. Here are some quick, very unscientific results.

I participated in 2882 meetings, 75% were probably technical discussions and 25% were not, including business reviews. I made 1013 code contributions, reviewed or read 364 documents, mostly technical designs. I did 192 1:1s with my colleagues, 130 interviews, and helped with 80 promos. I debugged or otherwise dealt with 175…

When you first discover Ruby on Rails, some things might strike you right away: namely the large number of enumerable methods and the blocks to run code in the middle of another method. Those features helped me translate my thoughts directly into code — and quickly made Ruby my favorite programming…

Enumerables are…

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

Ruby Central Updates

RailsConf 2025 is official! 🎉

We are excited to officially announce that RailsConf 2025 will take place from Tuesday, July 8th to Thursday, July 10th, 2025, in Philadelphia, PA.

After nearly 20 years, RailsConf 2025 will be the final gathering of its kind — a tribute to the incredible legacy of Rails and the community members who have been on this journey with us.

As part of a strategic shift, RailsConf 2025 will be the only conference hosted by Ruby Central in 2025. This means there will be no RubyConf in 2025, but we are…

We are excited to officially announce that the final RailsConf will be taking place from Tuesday, July 8th to Thursday, July 10th, 2025, in Philadelphia, PA. 🎉

After nearly 20 years, RailsConf 2025 will be the last gathering of its kind — a tribute to the incredible legacy of Rails and the community members who have been on this journey with us.

As part of a strategic shift, RailsConf 2025 will be the only conference hosted by Ruby Central in 2025. This means there will be no RubyConf in 2025, but we are looking forward to RubyConf 2026, which will take place in the spring and become our flagship event. 

By concentrating on one conference per year, we can create a truly best-in-class…

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 November.

RubyGems News

In November, we released RubyGems 3.5.23 and Bundler 2.5.23. These releases bring a series of enhancements and bug fixes designed to improve the overall developer experience with RubyGems. Notable improvements include validating the user input encoding for gem CLI arguments and ensuring the--enable-load-relative binstubs prolog works correctly when Ruby is not installed in the same directory as the binstub. Additionally, we updated the --ext=rust…

Some other…

At Ruby Central, we’re proud to support projects that make open source more accessible to developers around the globe. One such initiative is RubyInstaller, an essential tool for building Ruby applications on Windows machines. 

RubyInstaller provides developers with a simple and seamless way to install Ruby on Windows, bundling the Ruby language, libraries, and development tools into a single package. RubyInstaller also includes RubyGems and the DevKit, ensuring that developers have everything they need without the complex setup that would otherwise be required on Windows.

During RubyConf in November, we learned that Lars Kanis, the maintainer of RubyInstaller, had launched a GoFundMe…

We’re happy to announce Bundler 2.6, featuring gem checksum verification, right in the Gemfile.lock file.

This feature has actually been implemented for more than a year. However, it was merged very close to the Bundler 2.5 release and we did not yet have a good plan for enabling the feature in a graceful manner, so we’ve kept it hidden until now.

Bundler 2.6 finally officially allows to opt-in into this beta feature.

What’s this feature for?

A lockfile is an easy way to ensure all environments will use a consistent version of every dependency. However, Bundler lockfiles did not protect from potential tampering of the sources of that specific version. This is what the this feature does.…

Every active open-source project grows a lot of low hanging fruit. Encouraging project users to harvest some of the yield can be a great way to engage and retain new contributors. Here are some ideas, mostly borrowed from Barani, for low-hanging work items that you can propose to anyone engaging in your project.

Help Wanted, Good First Issue and Summer of Code

Identify and tag issues that have an easy solution to attract first time contributors.

Good first issues, or issues that are part of programs such as Summer of Code, provide an entry point for new contributors who want to get involved with the project, but are intimidated or unsure where to start. These issues are typically…

Have you watched The IT Crowd? It’s a hilarious British television sitcom from around 2006 that cast a bunch of IT geniuses at the Reynholm Industries tech support department in London. One of the signature laughs is that every time the phone rang, Roy would pick it up and without waiting say “Have you turned it off and on again?”, then hang up. I often feel like Roy when engaging with users reporting bugs in open-source projects I maintain.

Here’s my structured approach for any bug being reported in my open-source projects.

1. Do not fix the bug. Because this is open source, and we are not selling software, maintainers may have some social responsibility, but are under no obligation to…

It’s official, Ruby 3.4 first release is available, bringing a wave of excitement to the Ruby community.

In this blog, we will go through the latest features, enhancements, and bugfixes introduced in the Ruby 3.4

Prism is the new default parser

Ruby 3.4 switches the default parser from parse.y to Prism, which was introduced in Ruby 3.3 as a new parser designed for better maintainability, error tolerance, and performance.

To use the conventional parser, use the command-line argument --parser=parse.y. Feature #20564.

Garbage Collection

Ruby 3.4 introduced several notable features and enhancements related to its garbage collection (GC) system, aimed at improving performance and…

Rails’ Form Builder gives a great interface to easily build extensive forms. But a common issue many Rails developers using Tailwind CSS stumble upon, is styling their text_field’s, text_area’s and check_boxes’. There are multiple solutions:

1. copy all Tailwind’s classes around;
2. using Tailwind’s @apply directive and add a (vanilla) class, eg. input to the form field;
3. create custom components (using ViewComponent) for each field type.

Option 2 was my go-to solution for a long time. Reusable, easy to make changes and simple enough to apply. But when I was working on my next SaaS, I started to explore a new option: a custom form builder.

What is a Form Builder?

Rails Form Builder…

When it comes to choosing the best low-code or no-code tool for building your MVP (Minimum Viable Product), the decision really depends on your specific use case. The best approach is to map out the features you need and determine the “screens” your app is likely to have.

Choosing a no-code tool for building an MVP isn’t quite the same as selecting a platform for building a website. Each tool has its own strengths and limitations, and the key is to pick the one that provides the components you’re most likely to need.

While platforms like Bubble and Adalo are popular, it’s important to note that if you’re new to development (whether low-code or high-code), the learning curve may be steep.…

Switching from Docker Desktop to OrbStack and stuck at Docker daemon error? Here’s how to fix it

When Kamal cannot connect

$ kamal build
ERROR: Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///Users/[user]/.docker/run/docker.sock

Luckily the fix is simple. We can recreate Kamal builder setting:

$ kamal build create

And that’s it!

It’s amazing how quickly a year flies by.

It’s a total cliché, but it feels like only a few days ago that I sat by my Christmas tree and wrote last year’s final reflection post.

Back then, I was excited for all of the plans the Rails Foundation had in the works for 2024. Rails 7.1 was just released and already Rails 8 was on the horizon. There was so much to do! Documentation! Tutorial! Videos! Toronto! Merch store! Case studies! I couldn’t wait to hit the ground running and start assembling the teams to make all this happen.

…Then the motherboard in my new laptop died and I was forced to take the next week off until Apple provided a new one. I’m sure there was a ‘blessing in disguise’…

My dad, Fred Searls, passed away suddenly on Sunday night. Fortunately, my wife Becky, my brother Jeremy, and I were able to get on a flight to Detroit Monday to be with our mother Deanna and start making arrangements.

We worked together to draft this obituary, and it just went live on the funeral home's website (which is how people do it these days, apparently).

Here's the middle part that's actually about the person:

After earning his D.D.S. from Northwestern University Dental School, Fred practiced dentistry in Trenton, where he served patients with care and compassion for over forty-five years. In 1997, he and his family moved to Saline, where Fred’s warmth and generosity quickly made…

This is a right humdinger of an episode of Fullstack Ruby! I got the chance to talk with Karl Oscar Weber all about the Camping web framework, as well as his Grilled Cheese livestream, working as a freelancer, and how to criticize by creating as a programmer in a world fraught with political upheaval. Great craic, as the Irish say.

Links & Show Notes:

• Sign up for the Fullstack Ruby newsletter
• Get bonus issues and support this content as an Intuitive+ member!
• Guest: Karl Oscar Weber (Kowfm@ruby.social)
• Capsule Graphics
• Camping
• Grilled Cheese (Twitch)
• Kona

Become a part of the Fullstack Ruby community and learn how to put your Ruby skills to work on the backend AND the…

This post is part of the Zero-downtime with Rails credentials series.

In the first post we talked about the reasons that moved us towards making a codewide change and adopt Rails credentials rather than using environment variables to manage our secrets.

In this article we are going to look at the consequences, and the impact that these have on you as a developer, and your codebase.

What impact does this change have on you?

Credential files for each environment

It is important to conceptually consider all the environments we run the application in. In our case, these are:

• development
• test
• staging
• production

Not all of these environments may deploy to a server,…