Short Ruby Newsletter - edition 133

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Table of Contents

• 🚀 Launches and discounts

• 📅 Events

• 👉 All about Code and Ruby

• 🧰 Gems, Libraries, Tools and Updates

• More content: 📚 🗞 🎧 🎥 ✍🏾

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🚀 Launches and discounts

🚀 The Pragmatic Bookshelf is running their Spring Best Sellers Sale, featuring Ruby/Rails books at 40% off this week only. Use code 2025RAILS at checkout until April 29

🚀 Ed Izaguirre announced the launch of The Digital Press, an AI-curated personalized newsletter. In his thread, he explains how it works, how they built it, and what they learned during development

📅 Events

📅 African Ruby Community announced that early bird ticket sales have started for their conference. They're inviting people to book slots for Africa's biggest Ruby event at rubyconf.africa/tickets 🎉

👉 All about Code and Ruby

👉 Bram Jetten published a new article about The One-Person Framework in practice

👉 Aaron Patterson shared a code sample and benchmark results showing Ruby 3.5's significant performance improvement in object allocation. For more details check his PR → Inline Class#new. #13080

👉 Vishnu M published an article about Understanding Puma, Concurrency, and the Effect of the GVL on Performance

👉Jean Boussier published a new article about about Unlocking Ractors: object_id - there are many insights that you can find in that article

🆕 Hasumi Hitoshi announced a new version of mruby 3.4.0 - “mruby is the lightweight implementation of the Ruby language complying with part of the ISO standard. mruby can be linked and embedded within your application“

💻 Code Samples

️💻 Jamie Schembri shared a time-saving Bundler tip. Since version 2.5.10, you can enable automatic gem installation by running bundle config --global auto_install true

️💻 Josef Strzibny shared how to customize Rails' .field_with_errors behavior

️💻 Matt Swanson suggested we should stop focusing on specific LLM model versions and instead use descriptive terms like "cheap" or "smart" when requesting models. He shared code showing this approach, using “:cheap” as the model parameter

️💻 John Nunemaker shared a simple middleware solution for blocking IP addresses using Flipper

️💻 Ruby Cademy asked about using pattern matching for type-checking method arguments in Ruby. Their example shows a “process_response”method that uses pattern matching to ensure the input is a String before trying to parse it as JSON.

️️💻 Elvinas Predkelis joked that he didn't expect modern Ruby to be so "GenZ," showing code that uses the trendy shorthand “methods.map { send(it) }” syntax

💻 Ruby Cademy shared a code sample showing why using “with_defaults()” is more readable than “reverse_merge()” for handling default values in Ruby hash variables, even though they're actually the same function

️💻 Kaka Ruto shared a code sample from their real estate AI platform showing complex access limit management

️💻 Ruby Cademy shared a code sample demonstrating how using “delegate” with “prefix: true” in Ruby on Rails models improves code when working with associations

️💻 Alex Yarotsky shared a code sample explaining how to avoid race conditions in database operations using "SELECT ... FOR UPDATE"

📐 Thinking about Code Design

️️📐 Nate Berkopec shared that Ruby's gRPC gem is surprisingly large (bigger than Ruby itself) and often causes bugs and instability, making it a dependency they try to avoid despite recent improvements

️📐 Greg Molnar shared security concerns about HTTP Basic Authentication, warning it's unsafe for serious applications because credentials are only base64 encoded (vulnerable to sniffing), and it lacks rate-limiting, session termination control, and CSRF protection

Julik replied:

️📐 Steven R. Baker warned that every extra gem in your Gemfile doubles the time needed to upgrade Rails

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

💡 Rosa Gutierrez shared how the Shakespeare/Cervantes death date coincidence (April 23, 1616) actually involved different calendars, with Shakespeare dying 10 days later in the Gregorian calendar

And Andrew replied that they used this example in Ruby documentation to explain when to use Time vs DateTime classes 🕰️

❤️ Why Choose Ruby and Rails

❤️ Kieran Klaassen shared that Rails empowers individual developers to build valuable businesses, noting that a single developer using Rails can create and maintain a seven-figure business without needing microservices or large specialized teams

🧰 Gems, Libraries, Tools and Updates

🆕 New Gems and Repos

🆕 Andrew Kane created a new gem → sqlite3-ffi - “A drop-in replacement for sqlite3 for JRuby“. Gem available on Github: ankane/sqlite3-ffi

🆕 Sokmesa Khiev created a new gem → ai_localized - “AI Localizer is a powerful Ruby gem designed to streamline internationalization (i18n) by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically translate localization files into multiple target languages”. Gem available on Github: sokmesakhiev/ai_localizer

🆕 Joel Drapper created a new gem → AyeVar - “A Ruby gem to keep your instance variables in check“. Gem available on Github: joeldrapper/aye_var

🆕 Todd Kummer published a new gem next_page - Simple pagination for Rails controllers

🆕Robert published a new gem llm.rb - Ruby adapter for various LLM providers - “ it has been implemented with zero dependencies outside Ruby's standard library”

🆕 Gavin Morrice published a gem tag_ripper - A gem to parse tags from Ruby code comments

🧰 Updates

🧰 David Heinemeier Hansson announced a new version of Hotwire Native - “Hotwire Native is a web-first framework for building native mobile apps“. Check the blog post for more details on this release → Announcing Hotwire Native 1.2 by Jay Ohms

Joe shared his excitement about Hotwire Native demo server app being rewritten in Ruby on Rails, making it easier to understand server-side implementations of forms, flash messages, redirects, authentication, and bridge components

And Bruno found the source code for the demo → hotwire-native-demo

🧰 Chris Oliver announced an update for pay-rails/pay - “Payments for Ruby on Rails apps“

🧰 Cédric Delalande announced a new version of barley - “Barley is a fast and efficient ActiveModel serializer“

🧰 Igor Alexandrov opened a pull request adding autocomplete support and a kad alias (for kamal deploy) to Kamal, inspired by Capistrano's cap command that Ruby developers used for years. For more details, check out his PR → feat(kamal): add autocomplete support and aliases for Kamal (https://kamal-deploy.org/) #13080

More content: 📚 🗞 🎧 🎥 ✍🏾

📚 Maciej Mensfeld posted his slides from RubyKaigi 2025 → Bringing Linux pidfd to Ruby

🗞 Newsletters

🗞 This Week in Rails published a new edition about Continuously improving the framework

🗞 Hotwire Weekly posted a new edition of their newsletter → Week 16 - Introducing Herb, JSX over the Wire, and more!

🗞 Ruby Weekly published a new edition about Releases, releases, and more releases

🗞 Matt Solt published a new edition of Ruby AI News → Ruby AI News - April 24th, 2025

🗞 Awesome Ruby Newsletter published a new edition about Issue 466 - Understanding Ruby’s tap — A Powerful Debugging and Configuration Tool

🗞 Ruby Central published a new edition about Ruby Central's OSS Changelog: April 2025

🗞 Andy Croll published a new edition of One Ruby Thing about Using Deep Duplication to Avoid Surprises

🎧 Podcasts

🎧 The Ruby On Rails Podcast published a new podcast → Episode 535: Judoscale with Adam McCrea

🎧 David Hill published a new podcast → Ode to RailsConf - Rhiannon Payne

🎧 Maintainable Software Podcast published a new podcast → Freedom Dumlao: What 70 Java Services Taught Me About Focus

🎧 Rooftop Ruby Podcast published a new podcast → 42: You Can Go Any Speed You Want

🎧 Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots published a new article about Giant Robots Ep 571: Space, Software, and Surprises with Rémy Hannequin

🎧 Remote Ruby published a new article about São Paulo to Sin City

🎥 Videos

🎥 YCombinator published a video How To Get The Most Out Of Vibe Coding | Startup School

🎥 Graceful.Dev published a new video → Subclassing Array in Ruby

🎥 Tropical.Rb published a new video → Irina Nazarova (CEO @ Evil Martians) - Startup on Rails

🎥 SupeRails published a new video about #238 Deploy Rails 8 to Render.com. Solid Trifecta on Postgres

🎥 Zhephyn published a new video from the reading club → Ruby Jr Dev Book Club - Eloquent Ruby - Chapters 21-22 and Ruby Jr Dev Book Club - Eloquent Ruby - Chapter 23

🎥 Ruby Cademy published a new video → Don't overcomplicate refactoring

🎥 Yaroslav Shmarov published a new video → Deploy Rails 8 to Render.com. Solid Trifecta on Postgres

🎥 Lucian Ghinda posted a new video → Why I Am Using Getter Methods Over Instance Variables in Ruby

🎥 Drifting Ruby published a new video about Application Templates | Drifting Ruby

🎥 montreal-rb published a new video about Montreal.rb April 2025 Domain Driven Design in Ruby on Rails

✍🏾 Articles

What’s new 🆕

🆕 Julik Tarkhanov published a new article about A Can of Shardines: SQLite Multitenancy With Rails

🆕 Vishnu M published a new article about Scaling Rails Series and you can read the first article Understanding Puma, Concurrency, and the Effect of the GVL on Performance

🆕 Mohammad A. Ali published a new article about Ruby data serialization options in 2025

🆕 Jean Boussier published a new article about Unlocking Ractors: object_id

🆕 Dave Thomas published a new article about Premature Design Is Not Design

🆕 Bram Jetten published a new article about The One-Person Framework in practice

🆕 Sara Jackson published a new article about Making the case for Rails monoliths over microservices

🆕 Jake Zimmerman published a new article about Past, Present, and Future of Sorbet Type Syntax

🆕 Jamie Schembri published a new article about The SOLID Principles and about SOLID: The Single-Responsibility Principle (SRP)

🆕 Rémy Hannequin published a new article about Between immutability and memoization, you might have to choose

🆕 Yutaka Hasoai published an article about Secure Coding in Ruby on Rails

🆕 Jeremy Kreutzbender published a new article about Preloading Nested Active Record Associations Syntax

🆕 Stanko Krtalic published a new article about Building Simpl息

🆕 Matt Stuchlik published a new article about [WIP] Low Overhead Tracing Profiler for Ruby

🆕 Amanda Bizzinotto published a new article about Extracting Deprecation Warnings from the Rails Source Code

🆕 Louis Antonopoulos published a new article about Don't Steal a Penguin -- A Guide to Rails Flashes

🆕 Lucian Ghinda published a new article about Prefer getter methods over instance variables inside Ruby objects

🆕 Stephen and Alan published a new article about Seamless Loading with Hotwire Native

🆕 Avo published a new article about Adding shortcodes to the Marksmith editor

🆕 Ismael Celis published a new article about Give it time - Modeling your domain as timelines instead of object graphs

🆕 Flagrant published a new article about Modernizing Training Tracker: Enhancing the User Experience and Upgrading the Technology Foundation

🆕 Rails Designer published a new article about Keep Active Record models clean with Decorators

How-TOs 📝

📝 Joey Wang published a new article about Debugging Transaction Deadlocks in Rails Tests: A Case Study

📝 Stephen Nelson written a new article about Seamless Loading with Hotwire Native

📝 Rails Designer published a new article about Sanitize your strings in JavaScript like a Rails developer

Related ✍️

✍️ Maciej Mensfeld published a new article about From pidfd to Shimanami Kaido: My RubyKaigi 2025 Experience - Closer to Code