Short Ruby Newsletter - edition 129

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Table of Contents

• 📅 Events

• 👉 All about Code and Ruby

• 🧰 Gems, Libraries, Tools and Updates

• 🤝 Related (but not Ruby-specific)

• More content: 📚 🗞 🎧 🎥 ✍🏾

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📅 Events

📅 African Ruby Community shared that Ruby Conf Africa opened its Call for Papers for this year event which will took place on 18-19th July. If you are interested, here you can submit your talk → CFP Ruby Conf Africa 2025

📅 Euruko announced their 2025 Call for Papers is open, seeking talks on Ruby 3.x evolution, the Ruby ecosystem, and Ruby in production for their "The Heart of Code" themed conference

📅 Rubyconftw announced the date for this year event and more information that will coming soon

👉 All about Code and Ruby

👉 ️Hiroshi Shibata announced the release of Ruby 3.1.7 (the final version of the 3.1 series) and 3.2.8 (starting the security maintenance phase). He also recommended updating your Ruby to 3.3 or 3.4:

Talking about compatibility AWS SDK announced AWS SDK for Ruby: Deprecating Ruby 2.5 & 2.6 Runtime Supports and Future Compatibility

👉 Igor Kasyanchuk published a cheatsheet about Hotwire cheatsheet

👉 Oskars Ezerins published LLMs benchmarks - Popular LLM benchmarks for ruby code generation:

👉 Russ Olsen shared that he and Brandon Weaver are working on a second edition of Eloquent Ruby, maintaining the original structure while updating it for modern Ruby

👉 Joe Masilotti announced a new library bridge-components that provides ready-to-use UI components for Hotwire Native applications. You can take a look on Github joemasilotti/bridge-components and read more about this amazing gem 💎

👉 Samuel Williams announced the availability of Rack documentation

💻 Code Samples

💻 Kasper Timm Hansen shared a neat Ruby trick to automatically generate namespace modules when using collapsed class names

💻 Hans Schnedlitz discovered that you can use emoji characters as Rails routes, which is a very funny way of writing Rails code 🧑‍💻

Josh also replied to this post by saying that the hashtag emoji can be used as valid comment syntax in Ruby #️⃣

💻 Joel Drapper shared a left-weighted trigram fuzzy index in Ruby that outperforms Raycast search for relevance. Here you can check this gist → fuzzy_index 🔎

💻 pankowecki.bsky.social shared a code sample about Slack integration with Rails, pointing to a blog post which is worth reading it → Using HTTP request body for Rails routing: Slack integration case study

💻 Andy Croll shared a clever Ruby one-liner that generates a random number grid by nesting multiple map methods with range operations and the sample method

💻 Igor Alexandrov shared a useful Rails tip about ActionMailer's email_address_with_name method that formats email addresses with sender names, showing it in action within an InvoiceMailer example

️💻 Ruby Cademy suggested using Bundler’s inline mode for quick Ruby scripts instead of setting up a Gemfile, demonstrating how it automatically installs missing gems and runs code in one step

️💻 Ed Izaguirre shared his enthusiasm for RubyLLM, which makes it easier to integrate AI language models into Rails applications

️💻 Lucian Ghinda shared a thread about examples of using Data class:

️💻 Lázaro Nixon suggests using esm.sh or copying import map files to your project to solve dependency issues, as it has a pre-build process that improves compatibility

️💻 Devin Starks shared a useful Ruby tip from Shopify's style guide: use Hash#fetch instead of bracket notation for accessing hash values, as fetch raises a KeyError making typos immediately obvious, while brackets silently return nil

️️💻 Hans Schnedlitz shared that Kamal Proxy now supports path-based routing, allowing apps to be hosted under different paths instead of subdomains

️💻 Benito Serna shared a "Publishable" Rails concern that adds draft/published status to models with visibility controls based on user permissions

️💻 Jonathan Frias demonstrated how combining "joins" and "includes" in ActiveRecord queries eliminates duplicates while maintaining eager loading benefits

️️💻 Hans Schnedlitz shared a Ruby tip about implementing pattern matching for custom models by adding a deconstruct_keys method, demonstrating it with a User class example that supports regex, ranges, and other pattern matching options

️💻 Ruby Cademy shared a Rails performance tip showing how to identify what fields are being accessed in a controller action, then optimize queries by selecting only those necessary fields using Article.select instead of Article.all

️💻 Nidhi Sarvaiya highlighted the usefulness of ActiveRecord's excluding method for cleaner and efficient queries to remove specific records

💻 Sebastian Wilgosz shared a code sample about managing multiple Gemfiles in Ruby

️💻 Ruby Cademy shared that in Rails 8, adding ! to a column type in migrations automatically makes it non-nullable, a small but useful improvement to the framework

📐 Thinking about Code Design

️️📐 Carmine Paolino shared that by making the transition from Puma, SolidQueue, SolidCable to another stack like Falcon, AsyncCable, AsyncJobAdapter dramatically improved LLM response speeds

️📐 Gavin Morrice shared insights on encapsulation, arguing attr_accessor exposes internals and suggests custom methods that validate input, protect state, and separate interface from implementation

️📐 Joe Masilotti deployed an API-only Rails app to Render and found that leading slashes in database paths are crucial to prevent SQLite databases from being wiped on every deploy, even with persistent disk setup

️📐 Gregory Brown asked what kind of buggy code could cause a Ruby program to repeatedly execute the same sequence before eventually raising a SystemStackError and crashing

👀 He got some responses on this topic:

️📐 Nate Berkopec only optimizes for memory usage when he knows a transaction will create over 1 million objects, otherwise letting performance profiles guide his optimization decisions 💡

💡Around code (news, findings, books, and more - all about Ruby)

💡 Ruby Central announced that the RubyGems team is strengthening the platform's foundations with new safety, reliability, and governance policies. These policies are open for community feedback over the next 60 days. For more info you can check their post → Introducing New Policies to Support the Growth of RubyGems

💡 Robby Russell asked his community about the wildest use cases of Ruby on Rails they've encountered over the years

And he got some interesting responses 🤩:

❤️ Why Choose Ruby and Rails

❤️ David Heinemeier Hansson responded to Andrej's post noting that Rails has always been a rebellion against piecemeal development approaches. Rails 8 is more fullstack than ever, with complete integration from backend to frontend, deployment and production, all without cloud vendor lock-in. Below is also the Andrej post which is worth reading it:

❤️ Igor Alexandrov highlighted Rails' advantages: unified frontend/backend with Hotwire, built-in authentication, Docker deployment via Kamal, preconfigured CI, and developer productivity comparable to entire teams

🧰 Gems, Libraries, Tools and Updates

🆕 New Gems and Repos

🆕 Alessandro Rodi released Letter Thief, a gem for logging emails in Rails apps that stores them in your database and can open them in development, similar to letter_opener. This gem is available to use from Github coorasse/letter_thief

🆕 Abdelkader Boudih launched a new gem → mcp_rails_template (A minimal Rails API template for creating MCP servers with robust tool execution capabilities and examples). The gem is available and worth checking on Github seuros/mcp_rails_template

🆕 Yorick Jacquin published a new gem fast-mcp → a Ruby Implementation of the Model Context Protocol 📝. You can check this gem on Github: yjacquin/fast-mcp

🆕 Julik Tarkhanov created a new gem serve_byte_range (Utility module for serving HTTP Range responses without buffering). This gem is up on Github → julik/serve_byte_range

🆕 Hcb announced their open source Rails app hackclub/hcb: 🏦 The neobank built for nonprofits.

🆕 Sahil Lavingia announced that flexible is now open source at flexible - Payroll & equity for everyone. Look inside app/rails for the Rails app part of flexible

🆕 Davide Santangelo published a new gem hyll - "Hyll provides a robust implementation of the HyperLogLog algorithm, enabling highly accurate cardinality estimation (counting unique items) with minimal memory footprint. Perfect for analytics, databases, and stream processing where tracking distinct elements in large datasets is required. This implementation offers configurable precision and serialization support."

🧰 Updates

🧰 Bozhidar Batsov (a.k.a. Bug) announced a new release for RubuCop v1.75.0 (A Ruby static code analyzer and formatter, based on the community Ruby style guide)

🧰 Fred Snyder announced a new version of solargraph

🧰 John Nunemaker announced a new version of httparty 🥳 (A popular Ruby gem that makes HTTP requests simple and fun, with an intuitive API for both quick scripting and class-based organization)

🤝 Related (but not Ruby-specific)

🤝 Prajwal Tomar posted a thread about his new "knowledge base" technique for Cursor that reportedly reduces AI hallucinations and assumptions by 85%. This thread contains plenty of details and interesting insights, and is worth checking it on X 🤖

🤝 Gergely Orosz explained that successful indie developer SaaS stories are outliers, with the real challenge not in building products but in finding viable market niches that attract customers without drawing competition from larger companies. This is an amazing thread, and is highly recommended to check it completely on X

More content: 📚 🗞 🎧 🎥 ✍🏾

🗞 Newsletters

🗞 Ruby On Rails published a new edition of their newsletter → Capturing error reports in tests and more

🗞 Ruby Weekly published a new article about How good different LLMs are at writing Ruby code

🗞 Hotwire Weekly published a new article about Week 13 - Hotwire Native Bridge Components, Hotwire Cheatsheet, and more!

🗞 Women On Rails Newsletter International Version published a new article about Newsletter WoR #60: AI everywhere, DEI is dead (?), more humans in DevOps solutions...

🗞 RubyCademy published a new edition of their newsletter → The Art of Ruby Scripting

🗞 Ruby Central published a new article about Ruby Central's OSS Changelog: March 2025

🗞 Awesome Ruby Newsletter published a new article about Issue 462 - The future of AI is Ruby on Rails

🎧 Podcasts

🎧 David Hill published a new podcast → Freedom Dumlao - Ode to RailsConf

🎧 Jason Swett published a new podcast → 253 - Dave Thomas, Author of The Pragmatic Programmer and Sin City Ruby 2025 Keynote Speaker

🎧 Chris Oliver, Andrew Mason published a new podcast → The Learn Hotwire Course, GitHub Sign-off for CI and Yarn versions

🎥 Videos

🎥 Gavin Morrice published a new video about How to protect your Ruby code from common attacks

🎥 Chris Oliver posted a new video about VCR re_record_interval_option

🎥 Yaroslav Shmarov published a new video

🎥 Yaroslav Shmarov published a new video Vibe coding basics. Adding Dark mode to existing app with only prompts?!, about Ruby on Rails #235 Easiest way to hide all user-facing IDs and about #233 Build your next B2B SaaS with Moneygun SaaS

🎥 Drifting Ruby published a new video about Chat Agent

🎥 Jason Swett published a new video about Nailing Down the Conceptual Model for Users - Live Coding on SaturnCI

🎥 Ken Greeff published a new video about Sorting Images with Sortable.js and Stimulus in Rails

🎥 Rails Quest by Kaleb Lape published a new video about Rails 8 + The Good Migrations Gem: Avoid These Database Migration Footguns

✍🏾 Articles

What’s new 🆕

🆕 Josef Strzibny published a new article about The future of Rails front-end is hybrid

🆕 Igor Kasyanchuk published a new article about Hotwire cheatsheet

🆕 Saeloun Blog published a new article about Rails 8 Removes Channels From Default App Structure

🆕 Joël Quenneville published a new article about Reasoning by Analogy

🆕 Trésor Bireke published a new article about Using the Presenter Pattern in Ruby on Rails

🆕 Cirdes Henrique published a new article about Beyond Autocomplete: How Cursor AI is Helping Standardize and Write Ruby on Rails Code

🆕 Mintbit published a new article about Hiding Unfinished Features in Rails - Mintbit

🆕 Radan Skoric published a new article about Rails 8 Assets: Combining importmaps

🆕 Albin Yesudasan published a new article about Building a Mini ORM with Ruby Metaprogramming: A Deep Dive into Active Record Pattern

🆕 Mirosław Pragłowski published a new article about Implementing an Inventory Module in Ruby on Rails: Handling Concurrency with Database Locks and SKIP LOCKED

🆕 Joé Dupuis published a new article about Thruster vs Kamal-proxy: Which HTTP proxy is right for you?

🆕 Scout APM published a new article about Caching Strategies for Ultra-High Performance in Ruby on Rails, Part 2

🆕 Rails Designer published a new article about Touch Events (swipe) using Stimulus

🆕 Lucian Ghinda published a new article about Example of value objects using Ruby's Data class

How-TOs 📝

📝 Scott Werner published a new article about A Vibe Code to User Stories Pipeline using Bolt, Cucumber, and Asana and about Polymorphism is a Force Multiplier for AI

📝 Tejas Bubane published a new article about Using PostgreSQL database constraints

📝 Clayton Lengel-Zigich published a new article about How to configure Postgres as an Accessory with Kamal 2 and Rails 8 on a single server and about How to Configure Sign in With Apple in Rails 8 without Omniauth

Related ✍️

✍️ Dave Thomas published an article about Throwing the Babies Out With the Bathwater

✍️ Rich Steinmetz published a new article about DNS brain teaser for your engineering brain

✍️ Travis Turner published a new article about Hey developer tool teams, don’t copy these copywriting clichés!