Rubyland

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…

Merry Christmas! I made a little present for any of my fellow Japanese learners out there. 🎁

Today I'm pleased to share this ChatGPT-powered Shortcut for Apple platforms I've been working on with you.

Here are its headlining features of the Ingest Japanese shortcut:

• Render Furigana - ChatGPT tokenizes words and produces readings for kanji and okurigana, which are then assembled into an HTML page with proper <ruby> and <rt> tags (copyable as an HTML file)
• Show Kana Reading - ChatGPT tokenizes the words and converts them their kana pronunciations, separating each word with a space, so you can understand word boundaries at a glance
• Translate to English - Uses whatever additional context has…

It also exposes these utilities:

• Copy Input - copy whatever input…

Created by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto and first released in 1995, Ruby arrived with a purpose that was simple but profound: to make coding more human, more intuitive, and more enjoyable. Its object-oriented model, dynamic typing, and elegant syntax offered a fresh alternative to the heavier and more complex languages of that era.

As Ruby marks its 30th anniversary alongside the release of Ruby 4.0, we on the RubyMine team want to reflect on the path that led the language to where it is today and honor this remarkable milestone.

This year, with Ruby turning 30, we’re making RubyMine free for non-commercial use, helping nurture the next generation of Ruby developers and supporting a…

Click here to try Ruby 4.0 in…

It’s (for a few in this world) Christmas day. And also, again for a bit more than a few, the end of 2025. That means things slow down and thus a perfect opportunity to read up on what was happening and published on Rails Designer. Last year I also published a “best of” list (for 2024). And looking at it, things have not slowed down much. Next to Rails Designer’s UI Components Library being steady (about ~1.2k total in 2025), I also published a few new OSS projects (some on this list will be officially launched next year; so you read about them first here; unless you read my newsletter—those were truly the first! 🤫).

• Courrier is one I am really happy about (and use in all my projects)…

We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 4.0.0. Ruby 4.0 introduces “Ruby Box” and “ZJIT”, and adds many improvements.

Ruby Box

Ruby Box is a new (experimental) feature to provide separation about definitions. Ruby Box is enabled when an environment variable RUBY_BOX=1 is specified. The class is Ruby::Box.

Definitions loaded in a box are isolated in the box. Ruby Box can isolate/separate monkey patches, changes of global/class variables, class/module definitions, and loaded native/ruby libraries from other boxes.

Expected use cases are:

• Run test cases in box to protect other tests when the test case uses monkey patches to override something
• Run web app boxes in parallel to…

My first and longest read of 2025.

Ruby 4.0 is here, releasing on Christmas Day 2025, marking 30 years since Ruby’s first public release. This release packs some genuinely exciting features.

Let’s explore the most impactful changes in Ruby 4.0.

ZJIT - A New JIT Compiler

Ruby 4.0 introduces ZJIT, a new just in time compiler built by the same team behind YJIT. Unlike YJIT’s lazy basic block versioning approach, ZJIT uses a more traditional method based compilation strategy.

The key difference? ZJIT is designed to be more accessible to contributors. It follows a “textbook” compiler architecture that’s easier to understand and modify.

To enable ZJIT, we can use the --zjit flag:

ruby --zjit my_script.rb

While ZJIT is…

I'm working on an inadvisably complex Apple Shortcuts widget for studying Japanese language, and just realized two things that may save you some time in the future:

1. If statements are expressions: the value of the "If Result" is available and evaluates to the final value of whatever branch was traveled at runtime
2. Repeat blocks may say "each" but actually double as map functions: they return a "Repeat Results" value, which evaluates to a List of the final value of each iteration

Because Shortcuts exposes such a gobsmackingly-frustrating UI for actually building programs, it's easy to assume that you're hobbled by the conventions of something like BASIC, but there are some surprisingly…

So many, many times this past year, I’ve thought to myself, ‘Holy cow, things are moving so fast.’ This is as true in the wider tech world, as it is in the Ruby community. These are exciting times.

Ruby 4.0.0 is days away, the Ruby website and documentation just got awesome new rebrands, and there are constant updates to the Rails framework.

But we’ve also watched this year as companies built on Rails grow and adapt to a new (and constantly shifting) AI landscape in fascinating ways. There are new startups choosing Rails every day, new projects and gems taking shape, new folks joining the community, new conversations, new collaborations, new books being published, new events popping up…

Ruby 4 with Ruby::BOX December 24, 2025 Ruby 4 introduces one of the most important runtime features in the history of the language: Ruby::BOX. It allows Ruby to execute multiple isolated class worlds inside the same process, finally making it possible to load conflicting libraries, plugins, and user code safely. In this guide we will … Continue reading Running Ruby 4 with Ruby::BOX inside Docker (Alpine) →

Following the ruby-lang.org redesign, we have more news to celebrate Ruby’s 30th anniversary: docs.ruby-lang.org has a completely new look with Aliki—RDoc’s new default theme.

A Fresh Look for Ruby Documentation

Ruby has always been a joy to write, and now reading Ruby documentation can match that experience. Aliki brings a modern, clean design to docs.ruby-lang.org and any gem that generates documentation with RDoc v7.0+.

Key Features

• Improved search: Case-aware ranking, fuzzy matching, and support for searching constants
• Dark mode: Respects your OS preference with a manual toggle
• Three-column layout: Left sidebar for navigation, center for content, right sidebar for table of…
• Code block…

Version 6.1.1 of the Passenger application server has been released. This release adds packages for Ubuntu 25.10 "questing", and removes packages for Ubuntu 25.04 "plucky". Compatibility with the upcoming Ruby 4 is also improved.

Passenger 6 introduced Generic Language Support, or: the ability to support any and all arbitrary apps.

Nginx Uploads Bug

Passenger 6.1.1 includes a fix for a bug where if Passenger was loaded via the Nginx module, and had passenger_request_buffering off; then any request body larger than the client_body_buffer_size would be corrupted.

Future Ruby Versions

Passenger 6.1.1 has improved support for Ruby 4 and Frozen String Literals.

Updates & improvements

• [Ubuntu] Add…

Ruby has always been a joy to write. But for a long time, reading Ruby documentation on docs.ruby-lang.org hasn’t really matched that experience.

Last year, I brought a new look to the Darkfish theme by updating its visuals and improving mobile support. It was a visible improvement, but it wasn’t enough.

So this year, I built something new from the ground up. Starting with RDoc 7.0.0, Aliki is now the default theme for RDoc.

This release also coincides with Ruby’s 30th anniversary and the redesign of ruby-lang.org—a great moment to give Ruby’s documentation a fresh look as we head into the next chapter with Ruby 4.0.

Why a New Theme?

Even after last year’s improvements, I still…

Each morning I open four tabs: Calendar, Gmail, Jira, and Obsidian. I read all, discard low priority emails or calendar events, and start building a mental picture of what I’ll do that day, and when exactly. For each piece of data I decide whether it’s time sensitive or not, whether I need to prepare beforehand, and whether I should tackle it later (or never). After warming up my brain, I kick off the actual work.

I decided an LLM should do that pre-work instead of my well-rested brain. To build such automation I’d practice Claude Code subagents and local MCP servers setup, a good exercise for my new startup, RailsPilot.ai. So I started creating my /today Claude Code command.

/today…

Rewrite with Confidence: Validating Business Rules Through Isolated Testing

A few months back, our team at Arkency faced a challenge that many Rails developers might recognize. We needed to implement a new flow at Lemonade that would eventually replace a legacy process — but with three major constraints that couldn’t be compromised: user experience, cost efficiency, and avoiding technical debt.

The stakes were high. Any discrepancies between systems would impact customers and potentially create legal issues in the insurance domain. We had just three months to understand, replicate, and improve a complex flow that had evolved organically over years. And we needed to break free from…

Aji and Sally join forces to discuss the different ways they utilise active models in their workflows.

Aji describes a new system for working with active models they’ve been using recently, Sally recalls a project where active models could have saved her a lot of time, before putting their heads together to think of new creative ways to utilise rails’ tools toolset to build other active models.

—

Discover more of The Magic of Rails through Eileen Uchitelle’s Keynote, or check out the GitHub repo mentioned in this episode.

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

Your hosts for this…

RubyGems 4.0.3 includes enhancements and documentation and Bundler 4.0.3 includes enhancements.

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=4.0.3

RubyGems Release Notes

Enhancements:

• Installs bundler 4.0.3 as a default gem.

Documentation:

• Fix broken documentation links. Pull request #9208 by eileencodes

Bundler Release Notes

Enhancements:

• Fall back to ruby platform gem when precompiled variant is incompatible #9211

Manual Installation

To install RubyGems by hand see the Download RubyGems page.

SHA256 Checksums:

• rubygems-4.0.3.tgz
  f5f…

This is a copy of the Searls of Wisdom newsletter delivered to subscribers on December 20, 2025.

Hey everybody, we've almost survived another year! Just ten days to go—I hope we all make it!

Looking back on the home stretch of 2025, this is all I have to report since our last issue:

• I built a sexy new gaming PC over 3 days, 120 teeny-tiny M3 screws, and at least ten cups of coffee
• I got my first nose job. I've always had a huge fucking nose, and I'm relieved to finally be able to breathe out of it
• I talked about both of the above on my podcast
• I'm so sick of bracing for the AI bubble to pop, that I've decided to look forward to it instead. Buy popcorn futures, everyone 🍿
• I released…

T…

Happy holidays everyone! Have a great rest of the year!

While going through recently merged PRs in Rails, I came across a new feature from DHH, that handles a common concern in app configuration: managing credentials across different configuration backends in a single, consistent manner.

Add Rails.app.creds to provide combined credentials lookup in ENV and encrypted file by dhh · Pull Request #56404 · rails/rails

Many applications use a mix of ENV and encrypted keys to store cloud service keys and the like. Depending on the service, it might make sense only to inject the ENV during Docker boot or to keep it…

GitHubrails

When you're going through the PR, I highly recommend you also read Jean's (byroot) code review comments and how DHH addresses them…

December 22, 2025 Reflections from RubyRelease30th and Matz’s Keynote As 2025 comes to an end and Ruby moves closer to the long-awaited release of Ruby 4, the Ruby Release 30th Anniversary Party, held on December 20, felt like more than a commemorative event. It was a moment of reflection—about history, values, and why Ruby continues … Continue reading Ruby at 30: A Community Built from Imperfection →

State of Hanami, December 2025

I’m very pleased to share our State of Hanami update for 2025! We’re back for our second time. If you want to get caught up, check out our update from last year.

This has been a pivotal year for Hanami, our first steps into a new era: we made a substantial new release, began unifying our ecosystem, expanded our team, launched our sponsorship program, and saw a real uptick in community activity.

I’ll go into all these highlights below, before leaving you with some plans for 2026.

Our biggest release yet

In November we released Hanami 2.3. This was our first major release in a year, and it…

This small practice made me more productive and happy as a software engineer. If you chat with LLMs && you are in a room where you can speak to your computer && you are not speaking to your computer, you might be missing out.

Using a voice-to-text tool is excellent for software engineering and knowledge work for several reasons. Let's check those reasons with examples and look at the tools I used to give myself some engineering boosts.

Brain dump LLMs

War story: Once, we forgot to record or transcribe a meeting where we discussed a bunch of action points and a summary we needed to forward to the CEO. The CTO brain-dumped everything he remembered from the convo to ChatGPT and asked it to…

We are excited to announce a comprehensive redesign of our site. The design for this update was created by Taeko Akatsuka.

As part of this update, we have redesigned the site’s identity as “A language where people gather, a site where people are visible.”

Ruby has been a language centered on “programmer happiness” for 30 years. The new key visual expresses the presence of people surrounding Ruby.

The composition features diverse hand-drawn illustrated characters radiating outward from the central Ruby logo, representing developers around the world connecting through Ruby, creating value in their respective fields, and enjoying Ruby alongside familiar motifs.

While conveying Ruby’s…

Welcome to Hotwire Weekly!

Welcome to a double-week, holiday special edition of Hotwire Weekly! Thanks for reading, and Merry Christmas! 🎄🚀

📚 Articles, Tutorials, and Videos

Articles

Tricks to work around nested <form> elements, for Rails - Ben Sheldon shares practical tricks for handling tricky nested <form> markup in Rails, such as wrapping inputs to avoid invalid HTML, using Turbo Frames for partial form updates, and ensuring accessible label/input associations without breaking Stimulus behavior.

AnyCable, Rails, and the pitfalls of LLM-streaming - Vladimir Dementyev on the Evil Martians blog explores why streaming large-language model (LLM) responses in Rails apps isn’t as simple as…

Mike McQuaid recently blogged that he's joined the POSSE Party. He reached out a couple times to say he was scraping my own site to figure out how I accomplished certain things (like the iMessage previews for my takes section, but in general it must have been straightforward enough, because he didn't need me at all to get up and running. Kind of cool to see that he can teach his 20 year old blog new tricks.

In his LinkedIn post sharing it:

In practice, this looks like building your own version of a single-serving social network on your own site and exposing RSS/Atom feeds to other services to consume. Justin recently released POSSE Party which makes this easier by cross-posting to various…

I recently migrated GoodJob’s Dashboard from Rails UJS (“Unobtrusive Javascript”) to Turbo. One of the most significant changes for me of moving from UJS to Turbo is that UJS’s data-method is not functionally replaceable with Turbo’s data-turbo-method. This -method attribute allows you to make a button or link act like a form submission without using a<form> element.

I learned some stuff, but first let’s back up even further

HTML <forms> are hard

There’s three practical things, and one conceptual, that are going to challenge us here

You cannot nest a <form> element within another <form> element. When rendering the page, the browser will remove it, or ignore it;…

In the last few weeks I’ve been writing here about my work on UringMachine, a Ruby gem for doing I/O with io_uring. Before I talk about my work this week, I’d like to address something that is important to me.

Maybe, We’ll See…

I usually share my blog posts in a few different places on the internet, and sometime people write their reactions. Last week, on Reddit, someone didn’t like the title (of all things… 🙂) I gave my last blog post, and made the following remark:

When a project or people aren’t open on what their tech is good for, and what it’s not good for, it really drives me away…

To which I replied:

I try to be as open as possible, and the thing is I don’t yet know what…

Now that programmers are at war with the robots (Gen AI) for our jobs, we need to lean into the things that they cannot do. Today, I’m going to be talking about how to be a human and communicate with other humans in the most hostile of scenarios, “in conflict (drama).”

TLDR: Be clear in your communications what you support and “whose side are you on.” There’s a bullet point list of suggestions at the bottom.

Knot-quite-right help

Before connecting my thoughts back to tech and to “drama”, I’m going to start with a made-up example: Imagine you’re at school and a classmate comes to you and says:

“Hey idiot, tie your shoes.”

What do you do next? Do you say, “Hey, thanks! I…

Testing server-rendered HTML:

1. Make a request, look at the result.

Testing React et al:

1. Make a request.
2. Receive HTML.
3. Ignore it!
4. It also contains a string.
5. The string is attached to a bird
6. The bird speaks latin
7. Find an antiquities professor
8. He can distract the bird
9. While you build a fake browser

With apologies to Penny Arcade

I became a software engineer because writing code is fun. Thinking through hard problems, designing elegant solutions, seeing the things you’ve built working for the first time… these moments are all deeply satisfying, so why in the world would I ever surrender them to AI?

I know the arguments for using AI to write code; I hear them constantly from all levels of the tech industry. I’m told that it’ll make me more productive. I could use Copilot to write boilerplate or unit tests for me so I can focus on more creative work. I could use Claude Code as a sounding board or planning tool for complex features, refactors, or other projects. I could run and coordinate multiple concurrent…

Here on the 37signals developer blog, we go deep into technical topics, but some ideas are easier to explain through conversation, a little back-and-forth, and an occasional screen share. That’s why we’re launching RECORDABLES, a new video series hosted by Kimberly Rhodes, who you may know from The REWORK podcast, alongside Fernando Olivares, Lead Programmer on our Mobile Team.

We couldn’t think of a better way to kickoff RECORDABLES than exploring recordables! We’ve had many requests over the years to explain how and why we use the delegated types pattern from Rails in our products and we’re finally explaining it in-depth.

Kimberly and Fernando sit down with Principal Programmer Jeffrey…

Ever felt like a superhero after solving a tricky bug or implementing a complex feature in your Rails application? What if you could capture that moment with your own custom superhero card?

We’re immortalizing those heroic coding moments with our new Rails Superhero Card Generator! This AI-powered tool creates personalized superhero cards featuring your photo and a catchy superhero name that reflects your coding prowess.

Navigate to the Rails Superhero Card Generator, tell it your superhero skills, upload a picture and generate your custom hero card!

How it Works

The Rails Superhero Card Generator combines the power of large language models (LLMs) and image generation models to create…

Here on the 37signals developer blog, we go deep into technical topics, but some ideas are easier to explain through conversation, a little back-and-forth, and an occasional screen share. That’s why we’re launching RECORDABLES, a new video series hosted by Kimberly Rhodes, who you may know from The REWORK podcast, alongside Fernando Olivares, Lead Programmer on our Mobile Team.

We couldn’t think of a better way to kickoff RECORDABLES than exploring recordables! We’ve had many requests over the years to explain how and why we use the delegated types pattern from Rails in our products and we’re finally explaining it in-depth.

Kimberly and Fernando sit down with Principal Programmer Jeffrey…

I spent way too long getting the animations right for my dialog post. Chrome’s documentation on entry/exit animations made it look simple—define your open state, your starting state, your closed state. Three blocks of CSS. Done.

The entry animation worked immediately. The exit was a disaster. The dialog snapped to full width mid-animation, jumped around, then vanished. The backdrop lingered after close, or disappeared instantly while the dialog was still fading. Nothing synced up.

I want to walk through each problem I hit and how I fixed it, partly as documentation for my future self, partly because I suspect these same issues will bite anyone trying to animate native dialogs.

My…

Update: This article originally concluded that Eisel-Lemire wasn't worth it for Ruby. I was wrong. After revisiting the problem, I found a way to make it work - and submitted a PR to Ruby. Read the full update at the end.

Recently, I submitted a PR to Ruby that optimizes Float#to_s using the Ryu algorithm, achieving 2-4x performance improvements for float-to-string conversion. While that work deserves its own article, this article is about what happened when I tried to optimize the other direction: string-to-float parsing.

String-to-float seemed like an equally promising target. It's a fundamental operation used everywhere - parsing JSON, reading configuration files, processing CSV data,…

In this episode, Chris and David Hill catch up on wild winter temperature swings, then dive into what Chris has been refactoring in Jumpstart to reduce merge pain, cut dependencies, and make upgrades smoother. The conversation branches into AI-assisted coding pitfalls and where AI shines, new web security headers that could simplify CSRF handling, and a promising new “old school Heroku on steroids” platform from Evan Phoenix called Miren, plus a few Hatchbox deployment learnings along the way. Hit download now to hear more!

Links

• Chris Oliver X
• Andrew Mason Bluesky
• Judoscale- Remote Ruby listener gift
• David Hill LinkedIn
• Blastoff Rails (submit a talk)
• RBQ Conf (submit a talk)
• Why GitHub Why?…

Hi, Wojtek here. The Rails Community is not slowing down giving us another week of great news and features.

Ruby turns 30. Happy anniversary to the language that made Rails possible!

Marco Roth as 2025 Rails Luminary
If you attended any Ruby/Rails conference this year, there are high chances you met Marco in person sharing his passion and if you didn’t try his excellent herb gem yet, then install it and run in your Rails app: herb analyze app/views - for sure it will find a bunch of small HTML mistakes for you.

Congratulations Marco, well deserved!

Use a modern approach for cross-site request forgery protection
Modern browsers send the Sec-Fetch-Site header to indicate the relationship…

Rails 5 brought major improvements: ActionCable for WebSockets, API mode, Turbolinks 5, and ActiveJob integration. But it also introduced breaking changes that require careful migration.

If we’re still on Rails 4.2 (EOL since 2016), this upgrade is critical for security and performance. Let’s walk through the key changes and how to handle them.

Note: This is Part 2 of our Rails Upgrade Series. Read Part 1: Planning Rails Upgrade for strategic planning guidance.

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,…

You are iterating on a design. Maybe you are redesigning your dashboard. Maybe you are trying three different layouts for a landing page. Maybe Claude just gave you four variations of a pricing table and you need to pick one.

Here is the problem: every time you make a change, you overwrite the last version.

Designing directly in code has become incredibly fast with LLMs. You describe what you want, you get working HTML and CSS back in seconds. But the speed creates a new problem. You generate version one, tweak the prompt, generate version two, and now version one is gone. You want to compare them. You want to send both to your designer or PM and ask which one feels better. You want to open…

Real-time LLM streaming sounds simple—until it isn’t. A Rails-focused look at hidden pitfalls, AnyCable’s fixes, and the future of durable streams.

By the end of 2025, it's hard to find a web application that doesn't have AI-powered features (or that hasn't tried to incorporate them). And when reflecting AI-generated content in a UI, LLM response streaming capabilities are essential. They enable us to provide feedback quickly, reduce the perceived slowness of AI, and thus improve the UX. But even though frameworks and…

Introduction

Modern observability platforms thrive on structured data. They can parse JSON, extract fields, build dashboards, and alert on specific conditions. But Rails has traditionally given us Rails.logger, which produces human readable but unstructured log lines.

Parsing these logs for analytics is painful. We end up writing regex patterns, hoping the log format doesn’t change, and losing valuable context along the way.

Rails 8.1 introduces a first class solution: the Structured Event Reporter, accessible via Rails.event.

Before

Before this change, logging in Rails meant working with unstructured text.

Rails.logger.info("User created: id=#{user.id}, name=#{user.name}")

This…

With the end of 2025 near, let’s build something fun: a snow effect for your (Rails) app or site (built with Perron?) using one Stimulus controller. Snow will fall from the top of the viewport, pile up at the bottom and you can sweep it away by dragging your mouse. Give it a try on this page! 😊☃️

Creating the basic controller

Start with the controller structure and lifecycle methods. Create a new Stimulus controller:

// app/javascript/controllers/let_it_snow_controller.js
import { Controller } from "@hotwired/stimulus"

export default class extends Controller {
  connect() {
    this.#startSnow()
  }

  disconnect() {
    this.#stopSnow()
    this.#meltSnow()
  }

  // private

  #star…

We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 4.0.0-preview3. Ruby 4.0 introduces Ruby::Box and “ZJIT”, and adds many improvements.

Ruby::Box

A new (experimental) feature to provide separation about definitions. For the detail of “Ruby Box”, see doc/language/box.md. [Feature #21311] [Misc #21385]

Language changes

• *nil no longer calls nil.to_a, similar to how **nil does not call nil.to_hash. [Feature #21047]

• Logical binary operators (||, &&, and and or) at the beginning of a line continue the previous line, like fluent dot. The following two code are equal:

    if condition1
       && condition2
      ...
    end
  

    if condition1 && condition2
      ...
    end
  

  …

Core classes updates

Note: We’re only listing outstanding class updates.

• Kernel

  • Kernel#inspect now checks for the existence of a #instance_variables_to_inspect method, allowing control over which instance variables are displayed in the #inspect string:

      class DatabaseConfig
        def ini…

Campsite has some of my favorite UI styling on the web. Naturally, I cracked open their source hoping to learn something. What I found: React components rendering <div>s inside <div>s, with piles of JavaScript doing what <dialog> does for free.

So I borrowed their visual design and rebuilt it with semantic HTML and CSS using affordance classes. I want to walk you through all of the choices I’ve made and how it all comes together.

The HTML

Here’s the markup structure I use for a full-featured dialog:

<dialog id="example-dialog" class="ui/dialog" 
        aria-labelledby="example-dialog-title" 
        aria-describedby="example-dialog-desc" 
        closedby="any">
  <header>
   …