Rubyland

Stop using DateTime in 2026 (unless you work for UNESCO)

DateTime has been considered deprecated in Ruby since 3.0. It’s 2026. Why are people still using it?

During a recent code review, we found this:

whatever.starts_at = DateTime.now

When asked why DateTime instead of Time, the response was: “DateTime handles a wider range of dates.”

That was partially true. In 2008. On 32-bit systems.

DateTime’s range advantage died in Ruby 1.9.2

Before Ruby 1.9.2 (released in 2010), Time was limited by the system’s time_t type — typically 32-bit signed integer covering 1901-2038. DateTime had a much wider range.

Ruby 1.9.2 changed this. Time started using a signed 63-bit integer representing…

Recently I had to build a form builder again. You know the one: update some attributes for the form and then a customizable set of form fields, like text fields, email fields and text areas. All with their own validations, settings and so on. It turned out like this:

Initially I thought of building it using Rails’ accepts_nested_attributes_for (like I wrote about here), but I quickly opted out of that and instead had a simpler idea for it. Some ideas are so simple that I feel almost embarrassed to publish about it. But over the years I’ve found that the most simple ideas will still delight plenty of people.

So here is a way to have “nested forms” in Rails without accepts_nested_attribut…

RubyGems 4.0.4 includes enhancements and bug fixes and Bundler 4.0.4 includes enhancements and bug fixes.

To update to the latest RubyGems you can run:

gem update --system [--pre]

To update to the latest Bundler you can run:

gem install bundler [--pre]
bundle update --bundler=4.0.4

RubyGems Release Notes

Enhancements:

• Remove date require from rebuild command. Pull request #9232 by jeremyevans
• Installs bundler 4.0.4 as a default gem.

Bug fixes:

• Add a missing “require ‘etc’” statement:. Pull request #9242 by Edouard-chin

Bundler Release Notes

Enhancements:

• Validate more options for add sub-command #5905
• Support Ruby 4.1 #9219

Bug fixes:

• Fix dependency source…

You’ve built an AI-powered feature into your Rails application using LLMs. You’ve built an evaluation set to test different prompts and model combinations, compared them, and improved them¹ so you could get the best bang for the buck out of your LLM usage. You aimed for the highest accuracy at the lowest possible cost. You deployed it to production. And now?

Unlike most APIs, LLM APIs calls have variable costs. They are usage-based, so the price depends on input and output tokens consumed. So, how do you know how your users are using it? Or, how much will it cost you monthly? Is it what you estimated, and are the usage limits you designed ok? Are they needed at all?

Why monitoring LLM…

Here's claude-on-incus (or coi for short) - a tool for running Claude Code freely in isolated Incus containers.

If it's useful to you, a star helps.

Note: I'm also working on "code-on-incus" - a generalized version for running any AI coding assistant in isolated containers.

Why?

Three reasons: security, a clean host, and full contextual environments.

Security

Claude Code inherits your entire shell environment. Your SSH keys, git credentials, .env files with API tokens - everything. You either click "Allow" hundreds of times per session, or use --dangerously-skip-permissions and hope nothing goes wrong.

With coi, Claude runs in complete isolation. Your host credentials stay on the host.…

Ruby 3.2.10 has been released.

Please see the GitHub releases for further details.

Download

• https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/3.2/ruby-3.2.10.tar.gz

  SIZE: 19983731
  SHA1: 6d7afca27627fbbcc7b933ac4e1a8a58c7a9be0e
  SHA256: 880acb05e08da8c559c56a13e512bae1b472da67c72ebb750c765f9c2134e689
  SHA512: 0f23dbc9b49b1c7c6256ba961c652a4f3659e6127a4c333624fca4e4f6a873cc06b01992b10aa7970a52e99b654fc655a25348a47de73cc786f3e33e8b702295
  

• https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/3.2/ruby-3.2.10.tar.xz

  SIZE: 14696548
  SHA1: 2cc431a4c64c222b2f13574ec034226cd4fa2580
  SHA256: a64a8a910ac2f28834b2170dedea688f06cbc6431fcd65eb18cc49ddbf3826ae
  SHA512:…

Ruby 4 just dropped! Here’s a rundown of the new features, as well as a basic upgrade plan you can use to get to 4.0 greatness.

Continue Reading

Rails 8.1.0 introduces the except_on option for validations and validation callbacks, making it easier to skip them in specific contexts.

In Rails, we can conditionally run validations. For example, we can run validations in certain contexts by using the on option.

Validations

Before

There was no direct way to exclude validations based on context (e.g., skipping validations during an update). We had to rely on custom conditional logic.

• The on: option had limited scope, allowing validations only during create or update.

class Client < ApplicationRecord
  validates :name, presence: true, on: [:create]
end

Client.create!(name: "")
`<main>': Validation failed: Name can't be blank…

Joël and Sally tidy up the place as they discuss the different ways a new codebase and team can feel welcoming to them.

Together they break down the things that help them ingrate into a new project more easily, explain why the lore of a project can be sacred to some, what you can do in the present to make things easier for a developer down the road, and why communication is crucial for keeping everyone on the same page even long after you’ve moved on.

—

Check out these resources for a deeper dive into some of the topics mentioned in this week’s episode - Fixtures - Hierarchy of Documentation - Domain Modelling 1 - Domain Modelling 2

Thanks to our sponsor for this episode Scou…

Ruby 4.0.1 has been released.

This release includes a bugfix for spurious wakeup from Kernel#sleep when subprocess exits in another thread, along with other bugfixes. Please see the GitHub releases for further details.

Release Schedule

We intend to release the latest stable Ruby version (currently Ruby 4.0) every two months following the most recent release. Ruby 4.0.2 will be released in March, 4.0.3 in May, 4.0.4 in July, 4.0.5 in September, and 4.0.6 in November.

If a change arises that significantly affects users, a release may occur earlier than planned, and the subsequent schedule may shift accordingly.

Download

• https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/4.0/ruby-4.0.1.tar.gz

  …

We’ve all been there. You type a question into your favorite AI chatbot, excited for a smart, helpful response, and… you get something generic, off-topic, or just plain wrong. It feels like a lottery, right? One day you get Shakespeare, and the next, you get a robot struggling to understand basic instructions.

The problem isn’t the AI’s talent; it’s your direction.

Think of an LLM, a Large Language Model, as an incredibly talented, but slightly unfocused, actor. If you walk onto the set and simply say, “Do something good,” you’ll get chaos. But if you step into the role of a director and give clear, structured…

January 12, 2026 Real-world cartography in pure Ruby RubyStackNews — January 2026 From geometry to cities Until recently, libgd-gis could render raw GeoJSON. Now it renders cities. Over the last development cycle, libgd-gis evolved from a low-level geometry renderer into a style-aware, layered GIS engine capable of producing publication-quality maps — directly from Ruby. With … Continue reading libgd-gis continues to grow — now with styles and more →

Ruby 4.0 landed during Christmas 2025 with a bunch of new features. One small but useful addition is Array#rfind, which finds the last element in an array that matches a condition.

Instead of…

…reversing the array or using reverse_each to find from the end:

numbers = [2, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8]

numbers.reverse.find(&:odd?)
#=> 7

# or
numbers.reverse_each.find(&:even?)
#=> 8

Use…

…Ruby 4.0’s rfind method:

numbers = [2, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8]

numbers.rfind(&:odd?)
#=> 7

# with a block
numbers.rfind { it.even? }
#=> 8

Why?

The rfind method iterates backwards from the last element, returning the first element that matches the given condition. It’s the reverse of find, which starts from the…

When you’re working with an agent like Claude Code, working in a solid TDD cycle will help prevent downsides that AI-assisted development can lead to, including:

• So many changes all at once that you can’t tell what to commit
• Code that does nothing
• Code that doesn’t do what you think it does
• Insidious bugs that will haunt your dreams in three months
• The end of the world

But first, we need a credo

Before we go down this path, we need a statement of belief. My statement is this:

Own your commits.

This is the single most important thing that you must do as a person working with an AI agent. The code is not Claude’s. The tests are not Claude’s. The responsibility is…

…

One of the many subtle frustrations I have with the Airpods Pro 3 is that the redesigned case actually results in a slightly-askew magnet alignment, which results in several (official!) MagSafe chargers failing to charge the case. Well, while the iPhone Air MagSafe Battery may not fit any other model iPhone particularly well, it's actually a super handy way to recharge your AirPods! Just plop the fucker on the back and twist until you hear that familiar ding and see the light turn on.

Might come in handy on a long flight.

Secondary PSA: engraving is free and AirPods are disposable: put your e-mail address on your AirPods.

Direct link to podcast audio file

I'm about to get on a plane and will be gone for a couple weeks, but didn't want to leave you Breaking Changeless so I did the thing where I stand up in front of a microphone and talked at you. Again. Like I do.

Fun fact: this is the first and only time I've taken a phone call live, on-air! I was just too lazy to edit that out gracefully.

Whenever I go to Japan solo, I experience moments of loneliness, so I'd really appreciate it if you sent me some praise or complaints or ideas to podcast@searls.co and I'll feel comforted by the knowledge that you exist. Your engagement sustains me.

Lotta weird and dumb links this go-round:

• Eric Doggett is a great…

January 9, 2026 How I built a pure-Ruby GIS engine that renders Paris, Tokyo, New York, and more Most people don’t think of Ruby when they think about maps, GIS, or visual computing. If you want to draw a real city, the standard stack usually looks like: QGIS PostGIS Mapnik Mapbox or a heavy JavaScript … Continue reading Ruby Can Draw Cities Now →

In this episode of RECORDABLES, we talk through the final and most nerve-racking part of our cloud exit — moving massive amounts of data out of Amazon S3. Principal Programmer Jeremy Daer shares how we moved billions of files with no downtime. He covers everything from dealing with bandwidth limits and AWS constraints to building custom tooling when off-the-shelf options won’t work.

The conversation gets into the human side of a project like this, including verification, anxiety, and the moment you finally hit delete. You’ll also hear how long it actually takes to move that much data and the tools we used to make it happen seamlessly.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube.

Timestam…

Hello! This past fall, I decided to take some time to work on Git’s documentation. I’ve been thinking about working on open source docs for a long time – usually if I think the documentation for something could be improved, I’ll write a blog post or a zine or something. But this time I wondered: could I instead make a few improvements to the official documentation?

So Marie and I made a few changes to the Git documentation!

a data model for Git

After a while working on the documentation, we noticed that Git uses the terms “object”, “reference”, or “index” in its documentation a lot, but that it didn’t have a great explanation of what those terms mean or how they relate to other core…

Becky and I are wrapping up a rewatch of Mad Men this week, and throughout the first several seasons, she'd point out the artwork hanging near the entrance of Peter Campbell's apartment, a screenshot of which I shall now hotlink from Blogger's CDN like it's 1959:

(Of course, Pete Campbell is so classless that in my head canon, Trudy must have picked this out.)

Anyway, every time the giraffes would show up, Becky would snap her fingers and point at the TV like Leo in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood before commenting on how much she loved the piece. We are not art people, and I can take a hint, so I ordered a recreation made by this guy on Etsy and hid it in a closet for a few…

Well, I finally got…

When we design websites for consultancies, one question always comes up: where do most people actually view the site? The answer is clear. Most visitors are on their phones. Whether it’s a potential client checking services between meetings or a business partner reviewing your work on the go, mobile is where that first impression happens. That’s why mobile first design has become essential, not optional.

What Mobile First Design Means

Mobile first design means creating a website for smaller screens before adapting it for larger ones. Instead of shrinking a desktop site down, we start by designing what users truly need on their phones. The goal is to make everything simple, readable, and…

Building modals and sliders previously meant reaching for a Stimulus controller. But what if you could create them without writing any JavaScript at all? Like none, zip, nada, nothing. Something that looks like this:

This article shows how to use the native <dialog> element combined with Attractive.js (a JS-free JS library I published recently) to build modals and sliders that work together with Turbo Frames. No custom JavaScript required. 🤯

As always the code can be found on GitHub.

The basics

The foundation is a single <dialog> element in your layout. Start by adding it to your application.html.erb:

<dialog
  id="overlay"
  closedby="any"
  class="
    px-3 py-4 max-w-md w-full
   …

After we’ve addressed all the deprecation warnings and successfully dual-booted an application, the next step in a Rails upgrade is often the most challenging: fixing the broken build.

At this point, the test suite is red, and our job is to bring it back to green. This phase can feel chaotic, but over the years at FastRuby.io, we’ve developed a process that makes it systematic and (relatively) predictable.

In this post, I’ll break down how we approach this step, what patterns we’ve noticed, and how we debug the trickiest failures.

Our “Fix Broken Build” Process

Attack errors before failures

When a test suite runs, errors (exceptions, missing methods, or crashes) block progress. They…

I've been very interested lately in how I can use AI to take care of tasks for me. Here is one use case we've found that has been successful so far.

New post over on the PlanetScale blog.

Read here: Automating our changelog with Cursor commands

A flashy homepage means nothing without clear goals. Here’s how to make the right things matter first.

Continue Reading

The curse of productivity is that it's self-perpetuating. Respond to e-mails with lightning speed and you just get more replies. Demonstrate your reliability to others long enough, and they'll just bring you more shit to do. Develop productive routines and habits and—before you know it—your natural disposition will shift towards being done with things and away from actually doing things.

Left unconstrained, optimizing for a productive life can diminish the joys of living. Many of us who opt into the lifestyle of "staying on top of shit" do so, ostensibly, to maximize time for creative work, or for leisure, or for family. That's the spirit with which I first discovered Getting Things Done…

I spent the year in San Francisco, having face-to-face conversations with founders you already follow. Here are the top pieces of advice to take into 2026.

I spent 2025 sitting across from the founders of Sentry, WorkOS, Resend, PlanetScale, Chroma and Mastra in San Francisco. Face-to-face. They've built unicorns, category-defining devtools, and they told me what actually works.

January 7, 2026 How libgd-gis turns Ruby into a real GIS engine For many years, Ruby quietly missed something important. Yes, Ruby is amazing at APIs, data processing, background jobs, and web platforms — but when it came to maps, graphics, and spatial data, Ruby was forced to step aside and let other languages do … Continue reading Ruby Can Now Draw Maps — And I Started With Ice Cream →

Typing every prompt with your fingers feels backwards in 2026. We can speak faster than we can type, and it feels more natural. Hold a hotkey, speak, and your OS types it for you. If you care about flow, dictation is the most underrated AI upgrade you can make.

In the Omarchy world, Hyprwhspr is getting a lot of attention after a recent DHH tweet:

He’s right: local dictation is shockingly good now. The catch is Hyprwhspr uses Python virtual…

You might have heard about Prism, the new Ruby parser. Perhaps you've heard it's faster, more reliable, and more powerful than what we had before. Or maybe you never took a compilers class and aren't sure about what this actually means.

I'm here to tell you all about it, and how it's changing our lives as Ruby developers. Today, I want to take you from square one to writing your first transpiler.

Interpreters 101

Before we begin our journey, let's start with the basics of how an interpreter works, so we're all on the same page. Interpreting a programming language usually involves three main steps:

1. Tokenizing input (a.k.a. lexing): Breaking the input text into a list of meaningful tokens.…

ActiveRecord excels at providing methods that balance convenience and performance. Among the most powerful are delete_all and update_all, which execute bulk operations directly in SQL. However, until recently, they behaved inconsistently when used with certain query methods like limit or distinct.

With the introduction of PR #54231, Rails has unified how these methods validate queries before execution, putting an end to this long-standing inconsistency.

The Problem: Different Rules for Similar Operations

Even though both methods operate on Relations, Rails used to impose different restrictions on each.

For instance, if you tried to use update_all on a query containing a limit or an offs…

current_user is a daily companion in Controllers and Views. However, the moment you need that information inside a Model to validate a business rule, things get tricky. Many developers end up passing the user as a parameter everywhere. But did you know Rails has a native solution for this?

CurrentAttributes is the official bridge to carry context from the Controller to the Model cleanly and safely.

The Problem: Argument Pollution

Imagine a method in your model that checks if a user can edit a record. Currently, it likely needs to receive the user as an argument:

1
2
3

def editable_by?(user)
  self.author == user || user.admin?
end

While this works, if you have a call chain (Controller …

Originally posted on the Spinel blog.

As part of our quest to build a fast Ruby project tool, we’ve been hard at work on the next step of project management: installing gems. As we’ve learned over the last 15 years of working on Bundler and RubyGems, package managers are really complicated! It’s too much to try to copy all of rbenv, and ruby-build, and RubyGems, and Bundler, all at the same time.

Since we can’t ship everything at once, we spent some time discussing the first project management feature we should add after Ruby versions. Inspired by npm and orogene, we decided to build clean-install. Today, we’re releasing the rv clean-install command as part of rv version 0.4.

So, what is a…

Recently I put some finishing touches on the exreg gem, a pure-Ruby implementation of a Unicode regular expression engine. It supports nearly all of the same functionality as Onigmo, the Ruby regular expression engine, with caveats listed in the README. Importantly however, it uses a Thompson-style NFA virtual machine, meaning it is immune to ReDoS caused by catastrophic backtracking.

Background

Most of the technical background for this can be found in Russ Cox’s excellent series of blog posts entitled Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast. In short, traditional backtracking regular expression engines (like Onigmo) can be tricked into taking exponential time on certain…

We have a Ruby on Rails project that we are sunsetting and we want to tell Dependabot to only update minor versions of Gems as we don’t want to introduce any potential breaking changes to the project.

We can specify this in the Dependabot configuration file like so:

.github/dependabot.yml

version: 2

updates:
  - package-ecosystem: bundler
    directory: "/"
    schedule:
      interval: weekly
    open-pull-requests-limit: 10
    groups:
      security-updates:
        applies-to: security-updates
        patterns:
          - '*'
        update-types:
          - 'minor'
          - 'patch'
      version-updates:
        applies-to: version-updates
        patterns:
          - '*'
   …

This will sit within the groups section.

• security-updates: tells Dependabot the type of update
• version-updates: tells Dependabot the type of update
• patterns: specifies what Gems to apply this to, I have put '…

Developers don’t need more tools—they need fewer, higher-quality ones. This piece distills research and field evidence into six principles for faster, calmer, trustworthy devtools in 2026.

When it comes to developer tools, the same six principles come up time after time. This post is our field-tested playbook for implementing them in the tools you’ll ship in 2026.

This blog started as how DNS works in Neeto. However wecovered a lot of ground about how DNS actually works.

The Basics of DNS Records

A Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and decentralized naming system forcomputers and servers connected to the Internet. It essentially translateshuman-readable domain names into machine-readable IP addresses.

What is a Domain Name?

A Domain Name is a unique, human-friendly label used to identify one or more IPaddresses. It's what people type into a web browser to visit a website. Forexample google.com and wikipedia.org are domain names.

Purchasing a New Domain Name

You don't buy a domain name outright. Technically you register the right to useit for a…

Aji and Joël talk all things hackerthons and why taking the time to have a little having fun with your work every now and then is important for developers.

Our hosts reflect on their shared experience at a previous RailsConf where they entered a mini hackerthon, why playing around in a creative sandbox is crucial to honing your skills as a dev, and how programming on the fly can teach you a lot about your own strengths and weaknesses.

—

Read more about Joël’s entry in Rails Rumble, as well as their participation in the RailsConf 2022 mini Hackerthon.

Thanks to our sponsors for this episode Judoscale - Autoscale the Right Way (check the link for your free gift!), and Scout…

Your hosts for this…

I got back into a regular reading habit after few years. Here are the books I read:

Happy New Year to the Ruby Community and wishing you all a safe and gentler 2026.

December 2025 README

In case it was missed, we released our December 2025 README Newsletter at the end of the year. It includes highlights from our 2022–2024 Annual Report, Ruby 4.0’s launch (and a lovely message from Matz), new local regionals, and more. You can view the newsletter here.

Annual Report

Included in the latest README, we've included information about our Annual Report release.

This Annual Report covers 2022–2024 and has been in the works since early 2024. Our goal is straightforward: put three years of work, funding, and decisions in one place so the community can see what Ruby Central has actually…

January 5, 2026 How ruby-libgd brings a real raster engine back to Ruby For many years, Ruby quietly lost something fundamental: The ability to generate images natively, fast, and with full control. Yes, RMagick and MiniMagick exist. But they depend on external binaries, are slow, fragile in production, and unsuitable for things like: map tile … Continue reading Ruby Can Create Images Again →

Modern Node.js apps often need to perform background jobs. Offloading to a job queue is a great way to preserve web performance when faced with sections of code that are too slow or resource-intensive to handle during an HTTP request. If your app needs to send emails, generate PDFs, process images, or aggregate data, you probably need background jobs.

Offloading these jobs (sometimes called tasks) to a job queue ensures your web process remains responsive and keeps latency down. A typical setup is to have your web processes enqueue jobs to an external system, and one or more worker processes consume and execute those jobs asynchronously.

This works well for keeping your…

One of my main interests with mruby is its ability to create standalone executables. As explored in this post, this is absolutely possible and works well. However, there is a classic issue of most standalone binaries: they can only be run on the same, or very similar, system as the one they were built on.

For example, if I take an executable from my mruby Hello World project, built on amd64 Linux, it won’t work on Silicon Mac:

$ ./hello
exec: Failed to execute process: './hello' the file could not be run by the operating system.
exec: Maybe the interpreter directive (#! line) is broken?

Mruby does have some cross-compilation capabilities, but I’ll be honest: it always felt intimidating,…

At 39c3, Marc-Uwe Kling, together with the CCC, called for the Digital Independence Day: The idea is to use the first Sunday every month to reduce your personal dependence on big tech and billionaires.

What I like about this approach is that it acknowledges that this is a process of many tiny steps and that a lot of people will need support. Hackerspaces in Germany will offer help to those who require it. I also really liked the idea of the “plus one rule”. Let’s take the example of WhatsApp, the quasi-standard messenger in Germany. Instead of telling people to uninstall WhatsApp, which they will likely be unable to do, ask them to add Signal. This starts a network effect for Signal,…

This is a copy of the Searls of Wisdom newsletter delivered to subscribers on January 1, 2026.

As promised last month, this issue is just oyster meat. It's a new year and as good a time as any to hit reset and get this monthly newsletter back on its preordained beginning-of-the-month-ish delivery cadence. That makes this a quick turnaround after our last issue, so there's not much new to report. Good thing I asked you all to lower your expectations!

Let's see, since we last corresponded:

• Mike McQuaid wrote that he's joined the POSSE Party, so I pulled a quote and recruited him to help deal with maintenance and triage. Another early adopter posted an architectural review of my…
• I spent a few afternoons tweaking a ChatGPT-powered Shortcut for Japanese…

In 2025 I followed the direction many people headed in and switched my version manager to mise-en-place. It has been going really well for me, but recently I came across a problem which took me a bit to figure out (and few very frustrating conversations with LLM, which did not lead to anything). I wanted to test some code with unreleased version 1.20 of Elixir, straight from git.

How to do it? It’s really simple in retrospect. Here are the steps:

1. Build Elixir

$ git clone https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir.git 
$ cd elixir
$ make

Verify it’s built correctly:

$ bin/elixir --version
> Elixir 1.20.0-dev (88cbabf) (compiled with Erlang/OTP 28)

2. Link it in mise

mise link…

My most-used display has been Vision Pro ever since it launched in February 2024, but it's been used exclusively as a Mac Virtual Display. This is not only because the Mac is a real computer and visionOS is an IMAX-sized iPad, but because its software keyboard is worse than the worst iPhone keyboard to ever be released. And while I'd be happy to pack a travel keyboard, Vision Pro is already too bulky to fit in my bag. As a result, I may as well lug a real computer around with me and just use Vision Pro as a dumb display.

My second most-used display is an iPad mini, which essentially replaces my iPhone when I'm at home. It's set up to be more book-like: an iPhone stripped of any way to…

Problem: I have hundreds of pages of PDF catalogs in Japanese and no great way to translate them while retaining visual anchors. I like how Safari's built-in translate tool handles images, but it doesn't support PDFs

Solution: point Codex CLI at the directory of PDFs, tell it to rasterize every page of every doc into high-resolution images, then throw together a local webapp to navigate documents and pages. Now I can toggle Safari's built-in translation wherever I want.

Result: I'm no longer worried the curtains won't match the drapes. 💁‍♂️

This is the golden age of custom software if you've got an ounce of creativity in your bones.

Ruby on Rails Developer | Ruby, Backend January 2, 2026 In late 2025, during a RubyConf presentation about disaster-response systems, an uncomfortable truth was stated publicly: Generating map tiles and images on the server is difficult in Ruby. RMagick and MiniMagick were too slow. ruby-gd is used, but it is poorly maintained. This was not … Continue reading Rebuilding Ruby’s Image Processing Layer: Why ruby-libgd Matters for GIS and the Future of Ruby →

Greetings, Judoscale readers! While we usually write our posts as a team, I (Jon) wanted to take a novel approach this time around. I wanted to interview Adam, Judoscale’s founder and still the head of our tiny team, to get his outlook on the marketplace of hosting as we begin 2026.

The goal here wasn’t to host a cage match between the various PaaS vendors currently on the market. It was to setup a scenario:

Let’s frame this conversation as a thought experiment: if you were starting a new startup today — something like Judoscale, but fresh — would you still choose Heroku? We’ll look at that decision through the lens of a founder building a real business, not a hobby app — meaning…

I've recently discovered (or at least found a good use case for it) the satisfy matcher in RSpec.

My intention was to ensure an attribute contained a string and not another string (within have_attributes).

I tried a few variations of the code below, but none of them worked:

message = Message.first
expect(message).to have_attributes(
  conversation_id: conversation.id,
  customer: "customer@example.com",
  response: include("Hello, world!").and(not_to(include("Subject:")))
)

While inspecting rspec-expectations's source code in search of an exclude matcher or something similar, the satisfy matcher stood out as a good fit:

expect(message).to have_attributes(
  conversation_id: conversation…

In this episode of Remote Ruby, Chris, Andrew, and David humorously discuss the rapid increase of 'wrapped' features in various apps, recount personal experiences with food apps, and then dive into their favorite conference moments of the year. They also explore the concept of UI affordances and its importance in web design and give a preview of upcoming conferences in 2026, and a brief discussion on modern CSS and JavaScript elements. Hit download now to hear much more! 

Links

• Chris Oliver X
• Andrew Mason Bluesky
• David Hill Bluesky
• Judoscale- Remote Ruby listener gift
• RBQ Conf, March 26 & 27, 2026
• Tropical on Rails, April 9 & 10, 2026
• Blue Ridge Ruby, April 30 & May 1, 2026
• Blastoff Rails, June 11 &…

ActiveRecord joins is used to combine records from multiple tables based on associations, generating an SQL INNER JOIN.

With update_all, we can update multiple records quickly without triggering model validations, callbacks, or modifying timestamps.

Combining these two methods is useful when we need to perform bulk updates based on data from associated tables. For example, syncing a column value from a parent record to all its children in a single query.

Before

When we use update_all together with joins, Rails generates a subquery that prevents referencing joined tables in the SET clause, which results in an ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid error.

For example:

class Client < Application…

Hi, it’s zzak. Hope everyone had a great holiday season and a happy new year! 🎊
Let’s explore this week’s changes in the Rails codebase.

Add Rails.app.revision
Add Rails.app.revision to provide a version identifier for error reporting, monitoring, cache keys, etc.

Add ActionDispatch::Request#bearer_token
Add ActionDispatch::Request#bearer_token to extract the bearer token from the Authorization header. Bearer tokens are commonly used for API and MCP requests.

Allow Rails.app.creds to access .env values in dev
In addition to ENV and the encrypted file, Rails.app.creds can now access values from .env files in development mode.

Fixed bin/rails notes command to work with CSS comments
This…

I bought a Pixoo64 LED Display to play around with, and I love it! It connects to WiFi and has an on-board HTTP API so you can program it. I made a Ruby client for it that even includes code to convert PNG files to the binary format the sign wants.

One cool thing is that the display can be configured to fetch data from a remote server, so I configured mine to fetch PM2.5 and CO2 data for my office.

Here’s what it’s looking like so far:

Yes, this is how I discovered I need to open a window 😂

Building HTML UI forced me to figure out how to write reusable CSS classes that play nice with Tailwind. Along the way, I looked at how other libraries tackle this. Spoiler: most of them get it wrong.

Let me show you two approaches I found, then I’ll show you what I landed on.

Here’s how Basecoat defines a badge:

@layer components {
  .badge,
  .badge-primary,
  .badge-secondary,
  .badge-destructive,
  .badge-outline {
    @apply inline-flex items-center justify-center rounded-full border px-2 py-0.5 text-xs font-medium w-fit whitespace-nowrap shrink-0 [&>svg]:size-3 gap-1 [&>svg]:pointer-events-none focus-visible:border-ring focus-visible:ring-ring/50 focus-visible:ring-[3px]…

House moves, robot armies, and scratching itches.

January—February

Ten years ago, I was looking at the prices of T-shirt printing machines and figuring out the best way to manage stock and postal services. I’ve always wanted to have a place to exercise my design eye and this year I launched Ruby T-shirts.

I use a mix of Shopify and Printful and add designs whenever they come to me. I don’t have the headspace to manage stock and posting things myself, so this setup “just” (read mostly) works. From a financial perspective it just about breaks even: I’ve had over 100 orders this year and the relatively low cost cost of running a Shopify store combined with the low margins means it’s…

While 2022 was all about joins, this year we made a whole new record.

Her name is Zoé and she’s wonderful. I can’t wait for her to meet the world in spite of its flaws.

Along the way, Zoé helped me refocus on what really matters:

• getting lost in that afternoon shine
• holding hands (or fingers)
• ~naps~
• the percussive pleasure of deep farts 💨
• improvising harmonies to soothing songs
• watching sunrises and sunsets like movie premieres
• singing and walking (at the same time)
• feelings within & without
• blissful abandon

Merci Zouzou et à demain matin ☺️

35 books, 17,000 pages. That fell short of the 50 books target I set for myself, but there were quite a few great books in there. Most of my “reading” this year was through audiobooks, so I ended up listening to 240 hours (that’s 10 whole days!) worth of books.

Non fiction

A Random Walk Down Wall Street (Burton G Malkiel)

Malkiel is one of the earliest advocates for index funds, so a lot of today’s personal finance wisdom comes from this book. Originally written in the 1970s, but regularly updated, it has remained relevant through half a century. He also weaves the narrative much better than most personal finance writers, so it is a delightfully engaging read. He can easily jump from the…

Becky gave me a $100 gift card to Steam for Christmas, so for the first time in a decade I endeavored to hunt for some hidden gems in the Steam Winter Sale. I haven't even booted it up yet, but this trailer immediately convinced me to instabuy Ball x Pit.

I'm sure the game is great, but I wish more trailers were this stupid and irreverent. Gaming is a silly hobby and the best favorite game marketing isn't afraid to embrace that fact.

🔗 youtube.com

🧂 justin.searls.co

Becky gave me a $100 gift card to Steam for Christmas, so for the first time in a decade I endeavored to hunt for some hidden gems in the Steam Winter Sale. I haven't even booted it up yet, but this trailer immediately convinced me to instabuy Ball x Pit.

I'm sure the game is great, but I wish more trailers were this stupid and irreverent. Gaming is a silly hobby and the best favorite game marketing isn't afraid to embrace that fact.

Watch on YouTube

On September 23rd, 2025, in a Berlin hospital room, I became a dad. Emma Elanor Margheim entered the world and promptly rearranged every priority I thought I had.

She’s currently asleep, so let me tell you about the rest of the year.

Becoming a Family

The year began with a milestone: on January 13th, Geniya became a German citizen. After oodles of paperwork and appointments and waiting, she walked out of the Ausländerbehörde as a dual citizen. We celebrated with sushi.

By spring, we knew Emma was on the way. In June, we escaped to Südtirol for a babymoon—a last hurrah of lazy mornings and mountain views before our family of 2 become a family of 3. We hiked (more like…

Adding multi-tenancy to a DDD Rails app

Many businesses when they set out to create some software they need, don’t know that one day, they might need multi-tenancy.

This is one of the features, that is not easy for programmers to add later easily. It might take months or even years.

Let me describe how I approached this in an ecommerce app. Essentially, the idea is to allow to create multiple stores, where previously it was one (or actually lack of any, all resources were global).

The ecommerce project

The project I am talking about is called ecommerce and it is part of the RailsEventStore (RES) organization on github. It started as a sample application for RES but over the last 10…

Did a few cat pics tonight!

Direct link to podcast audio file

During the end-of-year podcasting doldrums, I'm pleased to bring you this Feature Release, in which I eschew my tradition of eschewing traditions and present a second annual sorting of the puns. As 2025 (a.k.a. Season 2) of Breaking Change comes to a close, Aaron Patterson once again joins the show to execute our latest iteration of the punsort algorithm.

Following along at home? Here's a spoiler-free link to the original Season 2 rankings.

Ready to be spoiled? Visit /puns for the final pun rankings of 2025.

If you agree, disagree, or are indifferent about where things landed, feel free to get it off your chest at podcast@searls.co.

Two days ago, Rails added a new feature that makes working with bearer tokens easier. Before, you had to parse the Authorization header to extract them. Now, there's a dedicated bearer_token method on the request object that handles this for you.

Add `ActionDispatch::Request#bearer_token` to extract the bearer token by dhh · Pull Request #56474 · rails/rails

Add ActionDispatch::Request#bearer_token to extract the bearer token from the Authorization header. Bearer tokens are commonly used for API and MCP requests.

GitHubrails

When building APIs that use bearer token authentication (OAuth 2.0 and JWT-based authentication), you typically receive tokens from the client in the Authorization header…

When we are running Rails migrations, it’s common to combine multiple changes into a single change_table block especially when we want to keep database schema in sync.

Before Rails 7.1

Previously, validate_constraint and validate_check_constraint had to be called outside the change_table block, requiring constraint creation and validation to be handled as two separate steps.

For example:

class AddNameColumnsAndConstraintToUser < ActiveRecord::Migration[7.0]
  def change
    change_table :user, bulk: true do |t|
      t.string :first_name
      t.string :last_name
      t.check_constraint "first_name IS NOT NULL AND last_name IS NOT NULL",
        name: "name_not_null", validate: false
 …

After

With the enhancement introduced in Rails 7.1, we can now create cleaner migrations by combining column additions and constraint validations within a single change_table…

def validate_constr…

Joël contributes some thoughts on working with custom attributes as he follows up on last week’s discussion about ActiveModels with Sally.

Joël breaks down how he transforms various strings and objects when working with ActiveModels to simplify more advance workloads, as Sally queries their different use cases and how best to utilise them for her own workflow.

—

Catch up on Sally and Aji’s episode from last week on ActiveModels before diving into this discussion!

If you’d like to give some of the gems mentioned in this episode a try for yourself they can be found here - phonelib - money-rails - astronoby

Thanks to our sponsors for this episode Judoscale - Autoscale the Right…

At RailsWorld earlier this year, I got nerd sniped by someone. They asked “why can’t Bundler be as fast as uv?” Immediately my inner voice said “YA, WHY CAN’T IT BE AS FAST AS UV????”

My inner voice likes to shout at me, especially when someone asks a question so obvious I should have thought of it myself. Since then I’ve been thinking about and investigating this problem, going so far as to give a presentation at XO Ruby Portland about Bundler performance. I firmly believe the answer is “Bundler can be as fast as uv” (where “as fast” has a margin of error lol).

Fortunately, Andrew Nesbitt recently wrote a post called “How uv got so fast”, and I thought I would take this opportunity to…

schema.rb documents the database structure in a database-agnostic way, providing a Ruby representation of the schema within the limits of what Active Record can express.

Before

When running migrations, Rails generates the schema.rb file by dumping the current database structure. However, the order of columns in schema.rb reflects the physical column order in the database, which typically follows migration history.

Imagine you have a posts table:

create_table "posts", force: :cascade do |t|
  t.string "title"
  t.boolean "published"
  t.text "summary"
end

After applying different migrations, the order of columns may differ on other machines:

create_table "posts", force: :cascade do |t|…

If you look closely, you'll spot that the Instagram algorithm has successfully identified my absolute number-one-with-a-bullet favorite topic. How on earth did it figure that out? My phone must be listening to me.

How RIZAP Technologies Turns Junior Developers Into Senior Ruby Engineers December 29, 2025 At RubyWorld Conference 2025 and Kaigi on Rails 2025, a talk by Tomohiro Umeda from RIZAP Technologies quietly delivered one of the most important messages for the future of Ruby engineering. Most companies would love to hire senior engineers. But in reality … Continue reading How RIZAP Technologies Turns Junior Developers Into Senior Ruby Engineers →

After a decade under Pablo Cantero's stewardship, Shoryuken has a new maintainer - me. I'm grateful for his graceful handoff of this Ruby SQS library, and I'm picking up where he left off: v7.0.0.rc1 is out now, with the stable release close behind.

What's in v7.0.0

This release modernizes the codebase substantially. It brings several improvements including:

• Rails 8.1+ features:

  • ActiveJob Continuations let jobs checkpoint progress during shutdown and resume after restart.
  • Bulk enqueuing via enqueue_all now uses SQS batch API.
  • CurrentAttributes automatically flow from enqueue to execution.

• Dependency reduction:

  • myumura removed concurrent-ruby entirely, replacing it with pure Ruby…
  • Co…

Who is this for? STEM majors realizing they're better off running Uber Eats?

Sometimes you get stuck thinking about less-than-ideal solutions, missing the big green elephant staring right at you. I had a nice win in a short time that I didn't want to leave unshared.

I had used a bookkeeping app for several years to file my taxes. Once I decided to switch accountants, I found that this application isn't very interested in you leaving, so it doesn't offer an "export all functionality" option. (a black-hat churn buster right there for you SaaS builders!)

Here are a couple of these screens:

Basically, I stood before a gigantic mechanical task: clicking through dozens of pages and downloading hundreds of invoices I had uploaded manually for the past years.

My first thought…

Recently I built the psych-pure gem, a pure-Ruby implementation of a YAML 1.2 parser and emitter. It fully conforms to the YAML 1.2 specification, passes the entire YAML test suite, and allows you to preserve comments when loading and dumping YAML documents. This post explains how and why.

Motivation

First, let’s talk about YAML. YAML is a surprisingly complex data serialization format. It supports a wide variety of data types and syntactic structures, making it both powerful and a huge pain to implement correctly. If you check out matrix.yaml.info you’ll see that very few of the YAML parsers in use fully conform to the YAML 1.2 spec.

Notably, the one used by Ruby — libyaml — errors out…

Happy Holidays, this is Claudio, Emmanuel, 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 2700 commits from 430 contributors and 14 releases, including Rails 8.1! The Rails Foundation also released a wrap up of 2025, and here are the most noteworthy changes landed in Rails this year.

Fix inconsistency between “delete_all” & “update_all” allowed methods
After this change, trying to call update_all with distinct or a CTE (with, with_recursive) is deprecated and will raise an error in Rails 8.2. This is consistent with the behavior of delete_all.

Add a script for using dev containers outside VSCode
I…

Chris, Andrew, and David are back together, and the conversation starts out with TV talk, Fallout hype, why some shows overstay their welcome (Prison Break), and the “season one magic” problem (Reacher). Then there’s a big shoutout to Marco’s Rails Luminary win, and a deep dive into AI rabbit holes: self-hosting LLMs, Mac minis, and the looming reality of both token costs and RAM shortages. They discuss the Ruby releases (3.4.8 + Ruby 4.0 preview3), highlighting practical fixes, previewing features like Ruby:: Box, new syntax tweaks, and core classes updates they’re excited about.  Hit download now! 

Links

• Chris Oliver X
• Andrew Mason Bluesky
• David Hill Bluesky
• Judoscale- Remote Ruby listener gift
…

Rails 6 is a major milestone that modernizes Rails for the 2020s. The biggest change? Zeitwerk autoloader replaces the classic autoloader, requiring careful attention to file naming conventions.

Plus: Webpacker as default, multiple database support, parallel testing, Action Mailbox, and Action Text.

Note: This is Part 3 of our Rails Upgrade Series. Read Part 1: Planning and Part 2: Rails 4.2 to 5 first.

Before We Start

Expected Timeline: 2-4 weeks for medium sized applications

Medium-sized application: 20,000-50,000 lines of code, 30-100 models, moderate test coverage, 2-5 developers. Smaller apps may take 1-2 weeks, larger enterprise apps 6-12 weeks.

Prerequisites:

• Current…

Highlights:

Note: As Ruby doesn’t follow SemVer, the 4.0 version marks not some significant change/set of changes, but was chosen by Matz to celebrate Ruby’s 30s birthday.

• Support for line breaks before logical operators
• Set reimplemented efficiently
• Pathname became a core class
• Ruby::Box
• Ractor: ports

Read more »

Ruby 4.0.0 was released on December 25, 2025, and RubyGems/Bundler 4.0.3 is now bundled with Ruby 4.0.0.

Since my previous post focused on migration and compatibility concerns, I’d like to highlight some of the exciting new features in this release.

Parallelization of C-extension Gem Builds

Add MAKEFLAGS=-j by default before compiling

When installing gems with C extensions (such as mysql2 or pg), RubyGems now automatically adds MAKEFLAGS=-j to the make command for parallel execution. Users previously had to manually configure this themselves. By leveraging multi-core CPUs by default, installation times are significantly reduced.

By default, RubyGems uses Etc.nprocessors + 1, fully…