👋 Short Ruby News - Edition #43

Discover the world of Ruby in this comprehensive newsletter covering week 20 of 2023. Find code samples, community updates, gems, resources, and thought-provoking discussions.

Lucian Ghinda (from ShortRuby)

May 22, 2023

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The newsletter is now back to one single email sent. Read here more about this decision. TLDR: both the poll results and the stats from the newsletter show that the two newsletter format was not working correctly, while the majority prefers one email. Thus this edition contains the More Content section inside this edition as before. I will continue to publish the expanded content edition only on the web.
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👐 Our Community

👐 Friendly.Rb announced a new speaker, see friendlyrb.com for more details

👐 Dave Copeland shared reasons why Rails and Ruby are great:

And here are what other people added:

👐 Ruby For Good announced that registrations are open for the event in July at rubyforgood.org/events

👐 Ian announced an update for the alterisian.github.io/helloworld website:

👐 Dave Paola shared feedback from a recent applicant:

Here are some of the replies:

There are many replies to Dave's tweet that I recommend you read.

👐 On the same topic, Gomez shared about how they use Ruby on Rails at PlanetScale:

👉 All about Code and Ruby

👉 wiki.nikiv.dev/programming-languages/ruby is an extensive wiki created by Nikita with many resources for learning or deep diving into Ruby. Here is a screenshot with just a tiny part of all the resources:

Source: https://wiki.nikiv.dev/programming-languages/ruby

There is a similar wiki about Rails maintained by the same author.

👉 Noah Gibbs shared about code and the choices we have to make between them.

This triggered a lot of replies. Please read them directly, as there is a good but healthy debate.

Here are just some of the replies in a random order. This seems to me a sensible topic for our community, so please read the other replies for context:

Source: @samsaffron@ruby.social (Link for ruby-syntax-tree)

Other links mentioned in the replies: GoodCop and Relaxed Ruby Style.

👉 Paul Mucur shared a TIL about create_or_find_by:

👉 Ben Sheldon (He/Him) shared two learning points about Regexp and a code sample showing Ruby 3.2 Regexp timeout:

👉Benoit shared a code sample showing how to display PSQL style tables in Rails console. Check the gist at PSQL table in Rails console

👉 Brandon Weaver asked a question about reducing the processing of requests for assets by Webmock with VCR:

Olivier Lacan replied with the link to Ignore Request for VCR. You might also want to read the analysis Brandon Weaver added in this issue opened on webmock gem: Performance of `WebMock::Util::Headers.normalize_headers` · Issue #1027

👉Kay Rhodes shared a tip about how to fix a MySQL gem error:

👉 Takashi Kokubun shared what the current purpose of RJIT is:

👉 Prabin Poudel shared about deployment options:

Among the replies:

👉 Ruby Cademy shared a code sample showing how to use Object#tap (that Ruby 3.2 seems to be defined at Kernel#tap vs in Ruby 2.7 being at Object#tap):

👉Alexandre Ruban asked a question about SRP on an Active Model has over 70 attributes:

Matt Swanson replied with:

👉 Brad Gessler shared a code sample showing a form builder:

👉 Adrian Marin asked a question about integration StimulusReflex with Hotwire:

Marco Roth clarified this:

👉Ahmed shared a code sample showing how to use metaprogramming to define methods:

👉 Xavier Noria shared a code sample about the break keyword used in loops:

👉 Josef Strzibny shared a thread with gems recommendations:

Here are the recommended gems:

vessel - “high-level web crawling framework”
mapkick - “Create beautiful JavaScript maps with one line of Ruby. No more fighting with mapping libraries”
simple_calendar - “Simple Calendar is designed to do one thing well: render a calendar”
business_time - business hours math
heya - “Heya is a campaign mailer for Rails. Think of it like ActionMailer, but for timed email sequences. It can also perform other actions like sending a text message”
noticed - “Notifications for your Ruby on Rails app”
chartkick - “Create beautiful JavaScript charts with one line of Ruby”
blind_index - “Securely search encrypted database fields”
split - “Split is a rack based A/B testing framework designed to work with Rails, Sinatra or any other rack based app”
store_attribute - “ActiveRecord extension which adds typecasting to store accessors”
logidze - “Logidze provides tools for logging DB records changes when using PostgreSQL”
discard - “Soft deletes for ActiveRecord done right”
counter_culture - “Turbo-charged counter caches for your Rails app”
pretender - “As an admin, there are times you want to see exactly what another user sees”
secure_headers - “The gem will automatically apply several headers that are related to security”
ahoy - “Simple, powerful, first-party analytics for Rails”
blazer - “Explore your data with SQL. Easily create charts and dashboards, and share them with your team”
i18n-tasks - “i18n-tasks helps you find and manage missing and unused translations”
instant18n - “Use OpenAI's GPT large-language model to power internationalization of the text in your Rails application”
jsonb_accessor - “Adds typed jsonb backed fields as first class citizens to your ActiveRecord models”
invoice_printer - “Super simple PDF invoicing. InvoicePrinter is a server, command line program and pure Ruby library to generate PDF invoices in no time. You can use Ruby or JSON as the invoice representation to build the final PDF”

👉 Brad Gessler shared a thread about batch resource manipulation. Here are the first two tweets from the thread:

👉 Craig shared a list of shortcuts they use when programming in Rails:

👉Colleen Schnettler asked for recommendations of Rails CMS:

Here are some of the recommendations:

Sitepress (Ruby)
Bridgetown (Ruby)
Avo (Ruby)
AlchemyCMS (Ruby)
Middleman (Ruby) - check out also this repo for Middleman 4 + Tailwind CSS
Jekyll (Ruby)
SpinalCMS (Ruby)

👉 Ruby Cademy shared a code sample about using Rails ActiveSupport::CurrentAttributes

👉 Xavier Noria shared a thread about “reloading” naming:

He explain further about what happens in Ruby:

That indeed happens if you have reloading and eager loading enabled, a possible but rare combination.
In the app lazy loads, "reloading" only "unloads", really. That is the nuance. Unloaded classes are not loaded again during that operation.
You'll load what you use, on demand.
"Unloading" is also an abuse of language: Ruby has no way to unload code.
"Unloading" means `remove_const` autoloaded constants.
However, if the app is correct, the objects they stored will become unreachable and eventually GCed.
So, in that sense, this one is good enough.

🤞 I imagine that if you have read this so far, you find value in this newsletter.

🧰 Gems, Libraries, and Updates

🧰 Dmitry Tsepelev announced a new gem rubocop_director: Plan your refactorings properly

Source: https://github.com/DmitryTsepelev/rubocop_director

🧰 Dima Fatko announced a new gem pluck_in_batches: A faster alternative to the custom use of `in_batches` with `pluck`

🧰 Nick Schwaderer announced a new gem chat_gpt_error_handler:

Source: https://github.com/Schwad/chat_gpt_error_handler

🧰 Okura Masafumi launched a new gem okuramasafumi/niwa: New, Integrated, Working Annotations

🧰 Mike Dalessio announced the release of version 1.15.0 of nokogiri Read the release notes

Source: https://github.com/sparklemotion/nokogiri/releases/tag/v1.15.0

🧰 Mike Dalessio announced the release of version 1.6.3 of the sqlite3-ruby gem Read the release notes

🧰 Paweł Urbanek published a new gem rails-brotli-cache: Rails cache using Brotli algorithm offers better compression and performance

Source: https://github.com/pawurb/rails-brotli-cache

🧰 Yuta Saito announced they release version 2.0.0 of ruby.wasm Read release notes

Source: https://github.com/ruby/ruby.wasm/releases/tag/2.0.0

🧰 Ivo Herweijer published a new benchmark for Roda that now includes Ruby 3.3 preview1:

Source: https://github.com/easydatawarehousing/ruby_measure_responsetime/blob/main/data/rodauth330preview/README.md

🧰 Atsushi Tatsuma published a new gem llama_cpp - provides Ruby bindings for the llama.cpp

Source: https://github.com/yoshoku/llama_cpp.rb

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🤝 Related (but not Ruby-specific)

🤝 Benoit shared an SQL to simulate a slow SQL update in PostgreSQL:

🤝 Nate Berkopec shared a reminder to check resources if they are over provisioned:

🤝 Chris Wanstrath shared a thread about the early days of Github and keeping it profitable:

Short Ruby Newsletter

👋 Short Ruby News - Edition #43

Discover the world of Ruby in this comprehensive newsletter covering week 20 of 2023. Find code samples, community updates, gems, resources, and thought-provoking discussions.

👐 Our Community

👉 All about Code and Ruby

🧰 Gems, Libraries, and Updates

🤝 Related (but not Ruby-specific)

More content: 📚 🗞 🎧 🎥 ✍🏾

📚 Books

🗞 Newsletters

🎧 Podcasts

📽️ 🎥 Videos

Talks

Screencasts

✍🏾 Articles

What’s new

How-Tos

Deep Dives

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