Rubyland

More than a decade ago, I was seated on the jury of a civil trial for “complex litigation”. I’ll try to keep this quick, but the case does come to mind more frequently than I would have imagined at the time.

In this trial, the plaintiff. a pharmaceutical company. was suing the defendant, a chemistry professor, for fraud. The chemistry professor, as part of his day job at a university, would create a bunch of novel molecules (put a carbon there, or an extra hydrogen here) that the university would test for various interesting bio-medical properties, and then license them to pharmaceutical companies for commercialization.

In this specific instance, the pharmaceutical…

Welcome to Hotwire Weekly!

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

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📚 Articles, Tutorials, and Videos

Debugging Hotwire Native -…

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This may be the version 45 release of Breaking Change, but when you factor in its Hotfixes and Feature Release entries, this is somehow the 50th episode of the show!

Why? Why are we still doing this to ourselves? Write in your answer and how you feel about yourself as a result to podcast@searls.co. Seriously, I need some new material.

The web runs on links, so have some:

• KnightCite's Wikipedia page
• Whisprflow wasn't for me
• The POSSE Party is still on and will come to you, eventually
• Aaron's puns, ranked
• This Cheap, Tiny Device May Reverse Memory Loss—And Even Prevent Alzheimer's (News+)
• Why Western executives who visit China are coming back…

On September 9, without warning, Ruby Central kicked out the maintainers who have cared for Bundler and RubyGems for over a decade. Ruby Central made these changes against the established project policies, while ignoring all objections from the maintainers’ team. At the time, Ruby Central claimed these changes were “temporary". However,

• None of the “temporary” changes made by Ruby Central have been undone, more than six weeks later.
• Ruby Central still has not communicated with the removed maintainers about restoring any permissions.
• Ruby Central still has not offered “operator agreements” or “contributor agreements” to any of the removed maintainers.
• The Ruby Together merger agreement…

Like many other Vision Pro sickos, I was far more excited about this week's announcement of a newly-updated Developer Strap than I was about last week's news of the M5 Vision Pro itself.

Why? The original strap allowed you to connect your Vision Pro to a Mac, but at unacceptably slow USB 2.0 (480 Mbps) speeds. This still achieved much lower latency connection than WiFi, but the image quality when running Mac Virtual Display over the USB connection was rendered far too blurry to be worthwhile. The new strap, however, offers a massively-upgraded 20 Gbps connection speed. I rushed to order one at the news, because, in theory, those speeds ought to offer the absolute best experience…

While Apple's support…

We appreciate the community’s patience and grace as we briefly paused our regular cadence of weekly updates. Out of respect for last week’s announcement from Matz and its importance to the community, we held this Q&A until today. For this week’s update, we’re sharing a collection of all the questions that have been presented to Ruby Central over the past several weeks. To respect privacy and consent, we are not attributing where individual questions originated, but in the spirit of transparency and equitable communication, we are including them all here. 

Many of the questions we received overlapped or touched on similar themes, so we’ve organized them into groups. This makes it easier to…

Hi, Emmanuel Hayford here. This one will be quick!

Two days ago, Rails 8.1 was released! Rails 8.1 comes with a lot of rad features. Among them are Active Job Continuations, Structured Event Reporting, Local CI, Markdown Rendering, and a ton more! You can read details about this release or check the release notes. If you want to see the commits that make up 8.1, you can check them out.

Enjoy your weekend!

You can view the whole list of changes here. We had 40 contributors to the Rails codebase this past week!

Until next time!

Subscribe to get these updates mailed to you.

Our Kubernetes platform test suite creates namespaces with their corresponding contents, then deletes everything during cleanup. We noticed a strange problem: namespace deletion would sometimes get stuck indefinitely. The root cause was surprising — we had to clear the contents before deleting the namespace! We also learned that getting stuck isn’t the only issue that can occur if we don’t do this.

This was counterintuitive because Kubernetes automatically deletes a namespace’s contents when you delete the namespace itself. So why does the order matter? Here’s what can go wrong if you delete the namespace first (or simultaneously with its contents):

1. When you initiate namespace…

In my previous post, I showed how to use Warbler to package a simple image-processing tool as an executable jar. This post will demonstrate how to “warble” a larger project: the Sidekiq background job server!

Warbling Sidekiq

Sidekiq is one of the most successful packaged software projects in the Ruby world. It provides high-scale background job processing for Ruby applications atop Redis, and it has been commercially successful via enterprise features and support arrangements. It also happens to work great with JRuby and takes advantage of our excellent parallel threading capabilities.

Seems like a perfect use case for Warbler!

The Easy Way

The easiest way to set up a new warbler…

Fonts are a critical part of web performance: Custom fonts can cause significant layout shifts, and their file size can be quite enormous. The fastest option is to bypass them completely by using web-safe fonts. However, a custom font can provide a lot of personality to a website, so many web designers consider them indispensable. So how can we make a font as small as possible to reduce its impact on web performance?

Typefaces

Let’s use Fixel, the font I’m using on this website, as an example. Fixel comes in three variants:

• A display variant for headings
• A text variant for continuous text
• A variable font

Both the text and display typeface come in 9 weights in both italic and…

Ruby 3.3.10 has been released.

This release includes an update to the uri gem addressing CVE-2025-61594, along with other bug fixes. Please refer to the release notes on GitHub for further details.

We recommend updating your version of the uri gem. This release has been made for the convenience of those who wish to continue using it as a default gem.

Download

• https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/3.3/ruby-3.3.10.tar.gz

  SIZE: 22233705
  SHA1: e4be04af44d536ba3572c2ccedcaeb06078d021b
  SHA256: b555baa467a306cfc8e6c6ed24d0d27b27e9a1bed1d91d95509859eac6b0e928
  SHA512:…

• https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/…

After last week’s introduction of Perron, I am now announcing another little “OSS present”: a JavaScript-free JavaScript library. 🎁 Say what?

👉 If you want to check out the repo and star ⭐ it, that would make my day! 😊

Attractive.js lets you add interactivity to your site using only HTML attributes (hence the name attribute active). No JavaScript code required. Just add ⁠data-action and, optionally, data-target attributes to your elements, and… done! Something like this:

<button data-action="addClass#bg-black" data-target="#door">
  Paint it black
</button>

<p id="door">
  Paint me black
</p>

Or if you want to toggle a CSS class, you write: data-action="toggleClass#bg-black". Or toggle…

SF Ruby and Evil Martians are excited to invite you to our premier event: the San Francisco Ruby Conference.

You still have time to grab your late bird SF Ruby ticket! Come say hello to Evil Martians in real life and join the creative, generous, and unapologetically mischievous Ruby community at SF Ruby!

Rails 8.1 represents the work of over 500 contributors across 2500 commits since our last major release. After some weeks of people trying the betas and releases candidates, we are excited to share the final release.

This release shows the stability of Rails, with applications like Shopify and HEY running it in production already for months.

Here are a few of the highlights:

Active Job Continuations

Long-running jobs can now be broken into discrete steps that allow execution to continue from the last completed step rather than the beginning after a restart. This is especially helpful when doing deploys with Kamal, which will only give job-running containers thirty seconds to shut down…

Every so often, someone in the Ruby community will ask,
“So… what does Planet Argon actually do these days?”

Fair question.

We’re not a startup factory.
We don’t parachute in to build a shiny MVP, disappear, and leave you with a maintenance headache.
Most of our work begins after the launch party.

We get the call when the freelancer moves on.
When the agency shifts its focus.
When the last in-house developer, the one who knows every corner of the codebase, decides it’s time to retire.

It’s rarely a crisis.
It’s usually a quiet realization…
“This system runs part of our business. We can’t afford for it to fail… but we don’t need a full-time team to babysit it.”

That’s where we come in.

Rails 8.1 is set to bring a new API, Rails.event.notify(...), that will help make it simple to publish structured events that are immediately consumable by monitoring and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) platforms like Datadog, AppSignal, New Relic, or Honeycomb.

In this post, we’ll look at how it works, why it matters, and how to prepare your app for data-hungry observability tools.

The Problem: Rails AS::Notifications and Scattered Instrumentation

If you’ve ever tried to add observability to a Rails app, you’ve probably touched ActiveSupport::Notifications API. It offers flexibility, but requires boilerplate code and can be inconsistent across projects.

Many applications…

Warbler is the JRuby ecosystem’s tool for packaging up Ruby apps with all dependencies in a single deployable file. We’ve just released an update, so let’s explore how to use Warbler to create all-in-one packaged Ruby apps!

Application Packaging for the Java World

The Java world has been creating distributable, “run anywhere” packages since Java was first released in 1996. Java source code is compiled to bytecode, stored in .class files and then archived together with metadata in JAR files (Java ARchive) that can be run as command-line executable files or as deployable web applications. A JAR file is just a zip file, laid out in a specific way to contain the code and resources your…

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Joe Leo and Valentino Stoll sat with me to talk about why I quit speaking and an exciting year of iteration on AI development workflows.

Appearing on: The Ruby AI Podcast
Published on: 2025-10-25
Original URL: https://www.therubyaipodcast.com/2388930/episodes/18044989-the-tldr-of-ai-dev-real-workflows-with-justin-searls

Comments? Questions? Suggestion of a podcast I should guest on? podcast@searls.co

Our developer, Sergiu Truta, reflects on Rails World 2025—what’s new, what’s next, and how Rails continues to evolve with its community.

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The OTP plugin for Devise I help to maintain goes 2.0 this week. Here is what’s new and how to upgrade.

What’s new

We tried to address a couple of things in this release, mainly support for lockable strategy, improving locale files, and fixing Hotwire and Remember me support. On top we refactored some code, cleaned up ERB views, and added Rubocop and linting.

Most of these things are self-descriptive but it might be important to note that the devise-otp shares failed login counter with lockable for now. In a way, a login failure is a login failure at the end of the day.

We also have some breaking changes that warrant the big version bump. Laney Stroup refactored browser persistance to…

This is our third threat intelligence post. Each week, if appropriate, we will aim to share some wider industry news that might impact our clients. We didn’t have one last week because there was nothing of major importance.

This issue will be covering; Ruby, and some wider points.

Ruby

Last week, a PR into Rails main means that the CVE information in the stock bin/bundler-audit will be kept up to date, meaning it is more useful, and avoids false positives.

Matz has written about the transition of RubyGems stewardship from Ruby Central to the Ruby core team. This will hopefully stabilise some of the discontent in the Ruby community.

Wider / Misc notes

AWS had a major outage, impacting…

Aji and Sally set out to crack the problems surrounding remote working as they share their thoughts on the various aspect of working from home.

Together they discuss their time at the recent thoughtbot summit in Amsterdam, how they felt about working in-person again, what they took away from the experience, the best remote solutions they’ve found to recreate that in-person feeling, and what friction points about remote working still linger for them both.

—

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

Sign up for thoughtbot’s open summit at the end of the month.

Your hosts for this…

This is a copy of the Searls of Wisdom newsletter delivered to subscribers on October 18, 2025.

It's me, your friend Justin, coming at you with my takes on September, which are arriving so late in October that I'm already thinking about November. To keep things simple, I'll just try to focus on the present moment for once.

Below is what I apparently put out this month. I'm sure I did other shit too, but none of it had permalinks:

• Added Tot to my (very) short list of apps I use every day, finding it helps me manage the ephemeral text needed to juggle multiple coding agents
• Cut only one major release of the podcast, but did apply two Hotfixes with José Valim and Mike McQuaid
• Iterated…

Rails 8.1 is set to bring a new API, Rails.event.notify(...), that will help make it simple to publish structured events that are immediately consumable by monitoring and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) platforms like Datadog, AppSignal, New Relic, or Honeycomb.

In this post, we’ll look at how it works, why it matters, and how to prepare your app for data-hungry observability tools.

The Problem: Rails AS::Notifications and Scattered Instrumentation

If you’ve ever tried to add observability to a Rails app, you’ve probably touched ActiveSupport::Notifications API. It offers flexibility, but requires boilerplate code and can be inconsistent across projects.

Many applications…

This post is part of our Engineering Productivity Series, where engineers and leaders from Gusto share the practices and mindsets that help us do our best work, sustainably! Read the first installment where Wouter offers us practical productivity habits.

In this second installment, Asaf explores how efficiency isn’t about working faster, but about understanding your own way of thinking, focusing, and creating — and designing your work around it.

A Boeing cockpit looks different from an Airbus cockpit.

Both can fly thousands of miles safely, but the layout — the buttons, screens, and controls — are completely unique.

That’s how I think…

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

Rails 8.1.0.rc1 was released! Rails 8.1.0 is right around the corner! Try out the latest release candidate and report any bugs you find!

The newest add-on tutorial is now live on the Rails tutorials page!
In this guide, you learn how to add Wishlist functionality to the e-commerce demo app you already started. Find this tutorial and more on the Rails tutorials page: https://rubyonrails.org/docs/tutorials

Add support for bound SQL literals in CTEs
When creating a SQL literal with bind value parameters, Arel.sql returns an instance of Arel::Nodes::BoundSqlLiteral, which is not currently supported by #build_with_expre…

Today I released a new version of InvoicePrinter, my Ruby library for generating PDF invoices. Here’s what’s new.

New features

I finally implemented last feature I had in mind, QR code images. I decided not to add dependencies and keep it as a simple image, although we could consider a built-in feature later on.

To add a QR code, simply point to your QR image path:

invoice = InvoicePrinter::Document.new(
  number: 'NO. 202500000001',
  provider_name: 'John White',
  provider_lines: provider_address,
  purchaser_name: 'Will Black',
  purchaser_lines: purchaser_address,
  issue_date: '10/20/2025',
  due_date: '11/03/2025',
  total: '$ 900',
  bank_account_number: '156546546465',
  descrip…

The QR code will always appear bottom…

I have just released Papercraft version 3.0. This release includes a new API for rendering templates, improved XML support and an improved API for the Papercraft::Template wrapper class. Below is a discussion of the changes in this version, as well as what’s coming in the near future.

A New Rendering API

Papercraft 2.0 was all about embracing lambdas as the basic building block for HTML templates. Papercraft 2.0 introduced automatic compilation of Papercraft templates into an optimized form that provides best-in-class performance. The two most important operations on templates were #render and #apply:

# Papercraft 2.0:
Greet = ->(name) { h1 "Hello, #{name}!" }
Greet.render("world") #=>…

The official Ruby docs are at https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/. This documentation (and any documentation built with rdoc 6.15.0 or greater) now can be searched using a query parameter. Check it out!

https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/master/?q=String%23gsub

I added this to RDoc because I was fed up with accidentally ending up on a horrible 3rd party website I won’t name with 8+ year stale docs that Google inexplicably prioritizes.

If you use Kagi Search you can now search !rb String#gsub and it will take you directly to the result.

I appreciate that Kagi’s “bangs” are open source and accept contributions, but you don’t need to sign up for a service to have this ability. It seems a bit odd…

While I already covered the basics of Minitest::Spec, I forgot to discuss a few aspects of the spec flavor. This post serves as a complement to the previous one and digs a bit deeper into some extra Minitest::Spec shenanigans.

let over @ivar

So far, in my setup, I only used ivars to store a User accessible in my test examples:

  class UserTest < Minitest::Spec
    before do
      @user = User.new(first_name: "buffy", last_name: "summers")
    end

    it "returns the capitalized full name" do
      expect(@user.full_name).must_equal "Buffy Summers"
    end
  end

However, Minitest::Spec allows me to use the let(:user) method instead of @user.

If you use RSpec, this will look very…

In this episode of Remote Ruby, Chris and Andrew catch up with Chris discussing the arrival of a new baby and the challenges of balancing work and parenting. Then, they dive into the complexities of dealing with OpenSSL 3.6 issues on their development environments, exploring various debugging attempts and ultimately finding a workaround. The conversation also touches on the ongoing drama within the Ruby community, expressing concerns about its impact and the need for unity. Additionally, they share thoughts on shows/series they’ve been watching and reflect on the joys and frustrations of nostalgic activities like building with Legos. The episode wraps up with a teaser about forthcoming…

Celebrating 2 Years of Hotwire Weekly! 🎉

This issue marks two years of Hotwire Weekly! Every week since launch, we’ve shared the latest news, tutorials, and projects from the Hotwire community.

Thank you for following along and supporting the newsletter!

❤️ Sponsors

Rails Blocks is a growing library of 250+ beautiful, simple and accessible Rails UI components to you build modern, delightful apps faster. Sponsor

Visit railsblocks.com and make your Rails app more delightful today

No more reinventing the wheel, just copy-paste the Stimulus controllers, and the component into your codebase, and save hundreds of hours of dev time. Use code HotwireWeekly to get 40% off and sta…

People usually read fiction before going to bed. I have a strange habit of reading the Rails source code at night. Not because it puts me to sleep, but for some reason I find the process of opening the Rails codebase, picking some feature, and just reading Ruby for an hour or two strangely calming. It lets me forget everything and just get in the flow for a few hours.

Anyways, after I published the post on Active Storage Domain Model, I stayed up until 2 am last night reading the Active Storage codebase to figure out how the has_one_attached method worked. It uses a couple of interesting patterns, and thought I'd share everything I learned. So since it's a rainy Saturday, I've been writing…

I recently went on a brief deep dive into 103 Early Hints because I looked at a Shakapacker PR for adding 103 Early Hints support. Here’s what I learned.

Briefly, 103 Early Hints is a status code for an HTTP response that happens before a regular HTTP response with content like HTML. The frontrunning response hints to the browser what additional assets (javascript, css) the browser will have to load when it renders the subsequent HTTP response with all the content. The idea being that the browser could load those resources while waiting for the full content response to be transmitted, and thus load and render the complete page with all its assets faster overall.

If…

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Post-recording update: As I've been lobbying for (both publicly and behind the scenes), it has been announced that the RubyGems and Bundler client libraries are being transferred to Matz and the Ruby core team.

Mike McQuaid (of Homebrew fame) and I scheduled this episode of Hot Fix a week before the Ruby community exploded. Hot Fix is all about getting spicy, but even we were a little wary of the heat in that particular kitchen. The problem Mike brought to the table is the same one he's always on about: open source is not a career. Incidentally, Mike's favorite topic also happens to be relevant to the latest RubyGems controversy—because it all boils…

Not content to miss out on the…

Earlier today, the Ruby core team announced the transfer of repository ownership for RubyGems and Bundler to the Ruby core team. This decision reflects our shared commitment to the long-term stability and growth of the Ruby ecosystem.

While repository ownership has moved, Ruby Central will continue to share management and governance responsibilities for RubyGems and Bundler in close collaboration with the Ruby core team. We remain deeply committed to strengthening security, performance, and the developer experience through ongoing investments, grants, and active development.

• Ruby Central will continue to own and operate rubygems.org for the community.
• RubyGems and Bundler remain open source…

Dear Ruby community,

RubyGems and Bundler are essential official clients for rubygems.org and the Ruby ecosystem, bundled with the Ruby language for many years and functioning as part of the standard library.

Despite this crucial role, RubyGems and Bundler have historically been developed outside the Ruby organization on GitHub, unlike other major components of the Ruby ecosystem.

To provide the community with long-term stability and continuity, the Ruby core team, led by Matz, has decided to assume stewardship of these projects from Ruby Central. We will continue their development in close collaboration with Ruby Central and the broader community.

We want to emphasize the following…

Two weeks after beta1, it’s time for 2.3 beta2!

This will be our last beta, and we’re aiming for the full 2.3 release in two weeks. Read on to see what’s new.

hanami run command

You can now can run your own scripts and code snippets with the hanami run command!

$ bundle exec hanami run my_script.rb
$ bundle exec hanami run 'Hanami.app["repos.commit_repo"].all.count'

Improved action formats config

Our previous approach to action formats config (config.formats in action classes or config.actions.formats in app or slice classes) made it too hard to configure and use your own custom formats. We’ve now overhauled this config and…

This is an important…

Just like git, jj offers tiers of configuration that layer on top of one another. Every setting can be set for a single repo, for the current user, or globally for the entire system. Just like git, jj offers the ability to create aliases, either as shortcuts or by building up existing commands and options into new completely new commands.

Completely unlike git, jj also allows configuring revset aliases and default templates, extending or replacing built-in functionality. Let’s look at the ways it’s possible to customize jj via configurations. We’ll cover basic config, custom revsets, custom templates, and custom command aliases.

config basics

Let’s start with some configuration basics. You…

Active Storage is a wonderful library for managing file uploads in Rails. But terms like blob and attachment are easy to mix up, and that confusion can remain even after you’ve been using Active Storage regularly. I’ve run into that myself. I’ve used Active Storage for a long time in several projects, without ever really understanding how models, blobs and attachments worked together.

So I decided to read up and really understand the whole system, and what follows is my understanding of the Active Storage domain model. Once you understand their roles, it becomes easier to reason about file uploads, deletions, and reuse. This understanding is really useful as your app grows over time and you…

I am excited to introduce Perron, an OSS Rails-based static site generator (SSG). This one has been in the making for years. Not that the actual building took years—it was just a few hours every week over the last months—but conceptually I have been thinking about this for a long time.

Want to check it out right away? Check out and ⭐ the repo or explore the docs. 👈

So… another static site generator? In 2025? While there are already hundreds (thousands?) of similar tools out there? Why?!

Good question! For one, because I can. 🤷 But more importantly all of the existing (great!) SSG, including those written in Ruby, do not match the framework I built my products in, which happens to be…

system = {  users: [    { username: 'alice', role: 'admin', email: 'alice@example.com' },    { username: 'bob', role: 'user', email: 'bob@example.com' },    { username: 'charlie', role: 'moderator', email: 'charlie@example.com' }  ]}moderator = system[:users].find { |u| u[:role] == 'moderator' }email = moderator[:email] puts email # charlie@example.com

Now here is doing the same thing in Ruby using pattern matching:

system = {  users: [    { username: 'alice', role: 'admin', email: 'alice@example.com' },    { username: 'bob', role: 'user', email: 'bob@example.com' },  …

Our friends at FastRuby share how to spot the quiet warning signs of growing technical debt and how to address it strategically instead of reactively.

Continue Reading

Debugging AI agents shouldn’t mean digging through endless JSON. AgentPrism, an open-source React component library by Evil Martians, turns raw OpenTelemetry traces into clear visualizations, instantly revealing loops, errors, and cost spikes. Built with Quotient AI, AgentPrism helps teams ship reliable, production-grade AI systems up to 5x faster.

AI agents fail silently, loop endlessly, skip steps, and give wrong answers. If you're debugging them by parsing JSON logs at midnight, you're suffering needlessly. At Evil Martians, we've built enough AI agents to intimately know this pain: 4-hour…

I'm two weeks behind on the newsletter, so I was trying to be responsible by resisting the urge to document the success I've had with my current coding agent setup. My self-restraint has paid off, as Peter Steinberger essentially wrote the exact post I was planning to write.

There's lots of good nuggets in here, and it's uncanny how many I agree with:

1. I also use Codex CLI (well, this fork) on a $200 ChatGPT Pro plan. Claude Code was an epiphany, but their models are overrated for the task, whereas GPT 5's variants are more adherent and diligent across the board. OpenAI's usage limits are virtually infinite by comparison, too
2. I run 3-6 agents in parallel (usually up to 3 per project and up…

In part one of this series, we walked through how to use Showcase in a Rails app.

It's now time to read some Ruby code written by experienced Rails developers. To do this without getting lost, we'll choose one feature of the showcase engine and analyze how it works: rendering a preview of a component.

Let's get started!

About Showcase's Button Component Preview

If we visit http://localhost:3000/docs/showcase/previews/components/button in the browser, we should see the complete documentation for a button component:

According to the showcase documentation, this view is generated by the following code in the test/dummy application:

<%#…

If you have something like this in your en.yml file:

en:  terms:    yes: Yes    no: No    switch_on: On    switch_off: Off    accept: true    reject: false

And then you will try to load them via Rails console like this:

I18n.locale = :en # make sure you have set a default localeI18n.backend.send(:translations)[:en][:terms]# => {true => true, false => false, switch_on: true, switch_off: false, accept: true, reject: false}

Notice there that there is no key yes, no and more so all values Yes, No, On Off, true, false were converted to TrueClass or FalseClass in Ruby.

That for me was quite interesting so I dig deeper to understand…

There seems to be a lot of confusion about vision and mission statements, what each is for, and how they should be structured. I honestly could not find a canonical definition for either. So, I wrote my own. Values are equally as important, so I've included them here, too.

Vision

A vision statement should be an inspirational postcard from an aspirational future. It should be brief. It should paint a picture. And it should make you wish you were there!

A great example is Microsoft's 1980s vision statement:

A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software.

Mission

A mission statement describes an organization's reason for being. These statements often take the structure of,…

• Part 1: Models
• Part 2: Controllers
• Part 3: Forms
• Part 4: Associations (you are here)

In the first three parts of this guide, we set about building up a way that works with a table called books to display these records through some controller actions, and to allow us to create more and edit them in forms.

In this part, we’re going to cover how we can set up an association to books called reviews. We’ll create a new table for this, and work out how to display reviews next to books on the books.show page. In this part, we’ll be spending a lot of time working back on our repositories and relations.

Creating the table

To get started, we first need to create a table called reviews.…

What is Lexxy?

Lexxy is a new rich text editor for Action Text, developed by Basecamp. It is built on top of Lexical.

Lexical is a fast, robust, flexible framework for building text editors, developed by Meta (and used in WhatsApp and Facebook apps).

Lexxy makes it easy to write and format rich text content. It is designed to work smoothly with Action Text and Active Storage, so users can add images, videos, and other files directly in the editor.

Motivation for Lexxy

Lexxy was created because Trix didn’t meet Basecamp’s expectations or support all the features they wanted to offer. With Lexxy, the team now has a strong foundation to build on.

Let’s see which features Lexxy…

In my previous post, I talked a lot about how Minitest comes in various syntax flavors. One flavor I did not cover much is Minitest’s spec extension.

Before I dive in with a dedicated post about assertions, I want to cover this RSpec-style way of writing tests.

Minitest syntax flavors: a recap

As I wrote in my previous post, Minitest comes in multiple flavors:

• plain Minitest: def test_this_method
• Rails’ style: test "this method"
• and a spec system called Minitest::Spec: it "tests this method"

Each flavor changes the syntax we use to define our test files and our test examples. The changes in the DSL are minimal, in the sense that they all look familiar to Ruby developers.

Assert…

Aji and Sally sit down to discuss their struggles with ADHD and the systems they have in place to stay focused at work.

They each share the note taking systems and tools they use to navigate a normal working day, how they came to fully understand and manage their ADHD, and Sally reminds us all why it’s very important to use a slash in your Slack reminders.

—

This episode of the Bike Shed has been sponsored by Judoscale - Autoscale the Right Way, check the link for your free gift!

Try out the reminder app Aji mentioned in this episode to help keep yourself on track.

Your hosts for this episode have been thoughtbot’s own Sally Hall and Aji Slater

If you would like to support…

Ruby takes a large part of its inspiration from two older languages:

• Perl for general syntax and design philosophy
• Smalltalk for Object-Oriented structure

I’ve been in kind of a writers block, for all kinds of reasons, personal and professional. I started to think about an article that I could write that would get my fingers typing, and drifted into what I could do for another “Better Know A Ruby Thing”, started thinking about String literals, wondered how I would answer the question of why Ruby has so many ways to write String literals.

The answer to that is that most of them were inherited from Perl.

In fact, a lot of Ruby’s more unusual syntax was taken from Perl.

And then I realized…

Current Setup 🔗

I have a Boss Katana-50 MkII combo guitar amp. This is far from unique, but it serves my needs. It more than serves my needs, given I pretty much use it as a pedal platform.

You could argue that this is redundant given the built-in features of the Katana, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But it’s more fun for me to tweak knobs and dials that I can more easily see than play with presets. Or, even worse, have to connect it to my computer. I’m trying to get away from the computer!

Anyway, it works great for my use case, with one minor problem. I’m guessing it might sound a little…more like it’s supposed to…if the speaker wasn’t pointed at my feet.

I had an opportunity to reunite with my…

We’ve spent the last decade optimizing for scale. How do we handle more traffic? More users? More engineers? The assumptions were baked in: Growth is coming. Prepare accordingly.

So we split things apart. We mapped services to teams. We built for the org chart we were about to have.

Then 2023 happened. And 2024. And now 2025.

Turns out, the future isn’t always bigger.

The Question Nobody’s Asking

What if your team gets smaller? Not as a failure scenario. As a design constraint.

What if you architect with the assumption that in three years, you’ll have less capacity than you do today? Less engineers. Less time. Less runway to maintain complexity.

How would that change what you build…

Have you ever felt completely stuck on a task, unsure of how to move forward? In the fast-paced world of work, it’s easy to get bogged down by blockers and context switching. This blog post details actionable productivity habits. These aren’t just concepts to grasp, but practical strategies to implement consistently until they become ingrained. By adopting these habits, you can overcome common challenges and significantly boost your work efficiency.

Stay unblocked

Proactively address challenges and adapt your approach to consistently overcome blockers and ensure continuous progress.

When I’m working on a task, I often feel blocked, sometimes by design decisions or other external factors, but I…

DHH unveiled Rails 8.1 during his keynote at Rails World 2025, releasing the first beta live on stage. This new version brings a suite of tools aimed at making Rails apps simpler to build, maintain, and collaborate on. With a strong focus on developer experience and consistent workflows, Rails 8.1 helps teams sidestep common frustrations and work together more smoothly.

Continuous Integration (CI) is a cornerstone of modern Rails development. It’s a common pain for developers to run tests with slightly different commands on their own machines, while CI servers like GitHub Actions or CircleCI use their own scripts; they might also have different versions of bundler or a specific gem…

Something that's been on my mind lately: Why is a customer going to choose my product? There's tens to hundreds or even thousands (looking at you CRM's) of every app for every problem. Why would someone choose mine?

Price? I'm a firm believer in charging a price that works for the customer and for you. Competing on price is a race to the bottom. If this is where you are at, you've already lost.

Features? Maybe but that's a grind and a bit whack-a-mole. Having all the features someone could ever want waters down a product. Honestly, it makes products confusing. How do you build work flow and create value for the customer when the customer is anyone and the work flow is anything?

Something…

A recruiter sent me this screenshot of some kind of GitHub profile scraper. Aside from naming me as a "top 1%" JavaScript developer (which I'm not sure is a compliment or a threat…), I just couldn't get over the "active on weekends" checkmark.

Lady, on weekends I charge double. 🤌

Now that you hopefully have an idea of how to operate jj, let’s look at the commands you need to get work done in jj. One great aspect of jj layering on top of git repos is that the git repo is still there underneath, and you can use any git command exactly like you usually would if there’s anything missing from your jj workflows.

submit a pull request

The flow to create and send a PR will probably look pretty familiar: use jj git clone to get a copy of the repo, make your changes, use jj commit to create your new commits. When you’re ready, use jj bookmark set NAME to give your changes a name and jj git push to create a new branch on the remote. Use GitHub.com or gh pr create --head NAME…

If you amend the commits in your PR, you can force-push the…

Welcome to Hotwire Weekly!

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

📚 Articles, Tutorials, and Videos

🧰 Libraries and Tools

Create a Kanban board with Rails and Hotwire - Rails Designer builds a drag-and-drop Kanban UI using Stimulus + SortableJS + Rails Request.js, backed by a model structure and minimal controller logic.

Preventing edit conflicts in Rails with Turbo and Stimulus - Nicolás Galdámez on the Unagi Blog shows how to lock records when a user begins editing, broadcast lock status across clients with Turbo Streams, and unlock automatically using Stimulus listeners on navigation or page unload.

Improving Turbo Frame UX with the busy Attribute - Victor Cobos…

This week I was away on a little trip to Paris to attend a Paris.rb meetup and meet some friends, so I was less productive, but still got some stuff done, and still managed to do some work on Papercraft. Here’s what’s changed:

Using Papercraft in IRB

Up until now, perhaps the biggest limitation of Papercraft was that you couldn’t use it in an IRB session. That was because Papercraft always compiles your templates, and for that it needs access to the templates’ source code. But if you’re defining a template in IRB, where is that source code?

Then, while taking the train to Paris, it occurred to me that maybe IRB keeps the lines of code you input into it somewhere, and maybe it would be…

With the help of many new contributors, and after many late nights wrestling with make, we are happy to (slightly belatedly) announce the 0.2 release of rv!

This version dramatically expands support for Rubies, shells, and architectures.

Rubies: we have added Ruby 3.3, as well as re-compiled all Ruby 3.3 and 3.4 versions with YJIT. On Linux, YJIT increases our glibc minimum version to 2.35 or higher. That means most distro releases from 2022 or later should work, but please let us know if you run into any problems.

Shells: we have added support for bash, fish, and nushell in addition to zsh.

Architectures: we have added Ruby compiled for macOS on x86, in addition to Apple Silicon, and added…

In July, I wrote a short tutorial called Code Reloading for Rack Apps. It laid out all the pieces required to get Rails-like code reloading in Rack app using Zeitwerk. Today, I'm announcing that I've put the main pieces of that in a gem!

At the moment Burg.rb (pronounced 🍔🐝) has no documentation, but if you follow the tutorial I'm sure you'll figure out how to use it. I'm using Burg.rb in an app that's deployed in the wild right now. My plan is to continue extracts the more framework-y bits of that app into Burg as they stabilize.

I hope that in its current state, Burg serves as a decent reference for getting code reloading working in a Rack app. If I have time at some point, I might even…

Java 9 added the ability to mark a @Deprecated annotation with a “since” version, so we figured it was worth updating JRuby.

Deprecation in Java

Deprecation is the process of marking a feature as “no longer supported” or “on its way out”, usually in a programmatic way so users can see warnings at build time. Nearly all languages and ecosystems have some way to mark features, APIs, or libraries as deprecated.

In Java 1.4 and earlier, this was done via the @deprecated directive (note lower-case “d”) in JavaDoc, which was great for documentation users but required extra processing by source-level tools and was not visible to any tools at runtime.

Java 1.5 introduced a new annotation java.l…

Yesterday, we released our Security Incident Report,  a comprehensive review of the September AWS root-access event. The report reflects both independent and internal analysis, outlining what occurred, what was verified, and the actions we’ve taken to strengthen our systems and practices.

You can read the full report here → Rubygems.org AWS Root Access Event – September 2025

The findings confirm that this was a procedural lapse in credential management for production hosting after a person was discharged.

Where We Are Now

All RubyGems.org services remain stable, secure, and operational.

The triggering event revealed weaknesses in credential management practices, which we have corrected. All…

Hello! Earlier this summer I was talking to a friend about how much I love using fish, and how I love that I don’t have to configure it. They said that they feel the same way about the helix text editor, and so I decided to give it a try.

I’ve been using it for 3 months now and here are a few notes.

why helix: language servers

I think what motivated me to try Helix is that I’ve been trying to get a working language server setup (so I can do things like “go to definition”) and getting a setup that feels good in Vim or Neovim just felt like too much work.

After using Vim/Neovim for 20 years, I’ve tried both “build my own custom configuration from scratch” and “use someone else’s pre-buld…

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

New documentation PR is up for community review
The Rails Initialization Guide covers how Rails boots up, including the internal method calls, file load order, and how to hook into the initialization process. If you want to help by reviewing, find the PR here: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/55862

Add link-local IP ranges to RemoteIp default proxies
This PR updates the RemoteIp middleware to include the following link-local addresses as trusted proxies: 169.254.0.0/16 for IPv4 and fe80::/10 for IPv6.

Don’t ignore X-Forwarded-For IPs with ports attached (again)
A change originally requested over 4 years ago lands…

1. Use time.iso8601

2. Use time.to_fs(:iso8601)

Comparing two DateTime values

For example, to compare two DateTime values maybe you can try to write it like this:

def test_question_answered_at_the_same_as_survey   assert_equal question.answered_at, survey.answered_atenddescribe 'question#answered_at'   it 'is the same as survey' do        expect(question.answered_at).to eq(survey.answered_at)   endend

This approach can cause issues if there are microsecond delays when saving…

Ruby Central posted an extremely concerning “Incident Response Timeline” today, in which they make a number of exaggerated or purely misleading claims. Here’s my effort to set the record straight.

First, and most importantly: I was a primary operator of RubyGems.org, securely and successfully, for over ten years. Ruby Central does not accuse me of any harms or damages in their post, in fact stating “we have no evidence to indicate that any RubyGems.org data was copied or retained by unauthorized parties, including Mr. Arko.”

The actions I took during a time of great confusion and uncertainty (created by Ruby Central!) were careful, specific, and aimed to defend both Ruby Central the…

I’ve been thinking about what happens when open source organizations hit their breaking point… when funding dries up, relationships fracture, and everyone’s scrambling to make sense of what went wrong.

It turns out, the patterns look familiar.

The Organic Growth Problem

Open source projects rarely start with governance documents. They start with people solving problems. Infrastructure gets donated. Roles emerge organically. Someone’s AWS account becomes the infrastructure. Someone’s time becomes the bottleneck. Someone’s relationships become the organization.

This works remarkably well… right up until it doesn’t.

The moment you try to formalize what’s been organic, you discover all the…

Maintaining a Ruby on Rails application often slips down the priority list. Everything seems fine, until suddenly it isn’t. A gem update breaks a feature, a security flaw makes headlines, or your app refuses to deploy after a server upgrade. When that happens, teams scramble to find help, often at the worst possible time. This “as-needed” upgrading approach may appear cost-effective in the short term, but it leads to stress, downtime, and unpredictable expenses.

But there is a smarter path forward: fixed-cost monthly maintenance. In this post, you’ll see why investing in a maintenance retainer is better than reactive upgrades, and how our service delivers value month after month.

The…

Just a list of haikus, mostly written when I was working dying of boredom in marketing. Making fun as a tool to push through.

[TL;DR, Ruby Central has alleged that after he was notified that the board had voted to remove his production access to RubyGems.org, André Arko accessed the Ruby Central AWS account without authorization and proceeded to change the root password. 👇]

For context, last week I wrote a post bringing to light a number of things André Arko had said and done in the past as a way to provide some context. Context that might explain why any of the principal actors involved in the RubyGems maintainer crisis (summarized well up to that point by Emanuel Maiberg) would take such otherwise inexplicable actions and then fail to even attempt to explain them.

Today, Jean shed some light on Shopify's…

As part of standard incident-response practice, Ruby Central is publishing the following post-incident review to the public. This document summarizes the September 2025 AWS root-access event, what occurred, what we verified, and the actions we’ve taken to strengthen our security processes.

On September 30th, a blog post raised concerns that a former maintainer continued to have access to the RubyGems.org production environment after administrative access was removed from several accounts earlier that month. We want to share the outcome of our investigation including: what happened, the extent of what we verified, what we got wrong, and the actions we have taken to strengthen our security…

I’ll be giving a talk in November in at SF Ruby Conference (tickets on sale now!). My talk is speeding up your application’s development cycle by taking a critical eye at your application’s development boot. Which all boils down to do less. In Ruby, the easiest, though not the simplest, is to load less code. So yeah, autoloading.

To expand my horizons and hopefully give a better talk, I branched out beyond my experience with Ruby on Rails to talk to Tim Riley about Hanami and how it handles code loading during development.

The following are my notes; it’s not a critical review of Hanami, and it only looks into a very narrow topic: code loading and development…

I’ve been meaning to write a post about my perspective on Open Source and corporate entities. I already got the rough outline of it; however, I’m suffering from writer’s block, but more importantly, the whole post is a praise of how Shopify engages with Open Source communities. Hence, given the current climate, I don’t think I could publish it without addressing the elephant in the room first anyway.

So here it is, I am deeply convinced that contrary to what has been alleged recently, Shopify has nothing but good intentions toward Ruby and its community.

It is healthy to be skeptical toward corporations, I certainly am, but I believe Shopify is currently receiving undue distrust…

This one has been in my “articles backlog” for a long time. But for whatever reason it kept getting pushed back. I’ve built drag & drop features multiple times in the past, but recently I helped a new client with some custom UI work and a kanban-like feature was on the list. So I assessed again what resources for such a feature for Rails and Hotwire are out there on the internet, and concluded that there is a place for another article as my approach is really clean, I think.

This is the feature I want to build in this article:

The solution is using three key components to make life easier:

• SortableJS—my go-to library for drag and drop features, just helps with a few niceties…

This blog post is part of a series called “Hanami for Rails Developers”.

• Part 1: Models
• Part 2: Controllers
• Part 3: Forms (you are here)

In the first two parts of this guide, we covered off the familiar concepts of models and controllers, and saw how Hanami approached these designs. We saw that Hanami split the responsibilities of models between repositories, relations and structs, and we saw that the responsibilities of a controller and its views were split between actions, views and templates.

In this part, we’re going to continue building on our application’s foundation by introducing a form that lets us add further books to our application. In a Rails app, we would handle…

Join me on a breathtaking journey as we add a client-side search to an SSG docs-first site, built with Astro!

Building static sites with Astro is a dream (especially for documentation). But what to do when your growing docs need full-text search, but you don’t want to give up that static delight? In this post, see how to bring powerful, fuzzy, and accessible search to Astro-generated sites. (This means no external crawlers and no remote APIs.) We’ll also look at the limits of AI-based and third-party search, demonstrate how to generate a build-time JSON index with Astro’s endpoints, and fine-tune the…

In this episode of Remote Ruby, Chris is on paternity leave celebrating the birth of his son, so Andrew brings in Drew Bragg and Rachael Wright-Munn (aka ChaelCodes), to discuss recent controversies surrounding Ruby Central and its alleged takeover of Ruby Gems and Bundler. They dive into the timeline of events, conflicting narratives, communication failures, and the underlying security concerns. They address theories and facts, scrutinize the governance of Ruby Central, and discuss the implications for the Ruby community. The episode emphasizes the importance of asking questions and seeking clarity, while advocating for a balanced and constructive approach to resolving the community's…

Direct link to podcast audio file

Jared Norman interviewed me after he wrote about the order in which programmers choose to write their code and I offered this response. In this episode, we touch on this before launching into a more expansive discussion on why the agile movement fizzled out and what we can reclaim from a developer workflow perspective now that we're experiencing our first major market upheaval since then with the rise of coding agents.

Appearing on: Dead Code
Published on: 2025-09-09
Original URL: https://shows.acast.com/dead-code/episodes/fear-driven-everything-with-justin-searls

Comments? Questions? Suggestion of a podcast I should guest on? podcast@searls.co