This article offers a concise summary of the key features coming to
Rails 8. Damilola provides an excellent high-level overview, while also
delivering detailed insights into each feature.
Excerpt from "How Propshaft Works: A Rails Asset-Pipeline (Visual) Breakdown"
In this article, Jon provides a visual and clear explanation of
Propshaft's work when serving the assets files. This is a continuation
of a previous article about How Propshaft
Works: A Rails Asset-Pipeline (Visual) Breakdown, which is also a
very good article with explanation and explanations of Ruby code
samples.
While this article isn't about Ruby, it is an excellent and well-written
resource for understanding B-trees and database indexes. It deep dives
into details explaining how indexes work and includes animations that
help you feel the concepts.
Andy Croll launched usingrails.com - a directory to gather all organizations that are using Ruby on Rails
Prabin Poudel launched Zero Config Rails - Generators - a single command to add any Ruby gem
Greg Molnar launched an MVP of a Gumroad alternative
Alexandre Ruban launched an ebook about Cookie-based authentication with Rails
📅 Events:
RubyConf is one month away, happening on 13-15 November and Error Schmidt is organising a private dinner with leaders from Ruby community
Tropical.rb announced tickets will go on sale on October 30th
Ruby Banitsa announced Ruby Banitsa Conf happening on 7th December
18 Ruby and Ruby on Rails meetups are happening this week around the world
👉 All about Code and Ruby:
Ruby 3.4.0-preview2 was launched having Prism as the default parser
Xavier Noria announced release of Zeitwerk 2.7 and wrote a super nice explanation of namespacing in Ruby
You can find code samples about updating to Kamal 2, about the new ignoring counter cache columns in Rails, using Rails runner with heredocs, merging queries, Turbo mount code samples, debugging Devise and much more.
Remember to read the Thinking about Code section and Around Code, where
there are engaging discussions about moving variables out of views,
using kamal-proxy with more than one server, a big discussion about how
Hotwire can simplify UI development and when to reach for React and many
more insights from coding with Ruby and Ruby on Rails
🧰 Gems, Libraries, Tools and Updates
Kamil Nicieja announced the release of lammy - an LLM library for Ruby
Christoph Lipautz announced release of test-map, a Rubygem to identify associated test-files for any code-file
Janko Marohnić announced a new gem rodauth-openapi: Generate OpenAPI documentation for your Rodauth endpoints
Paweł Strzałkowski open sourced the repo for RubyEurope
Kristján Oddsson announced a new project koddsson/eslint-config-stimulus: A set of ESLint rules for authoring Stimulus controllers
As always, we have links to newsletters, videos, podcasts, and articles.
Landon Gray (pre)launched Dashi - a Streamlit-like Framework for Rubyists
Justin Bowen launched activeagents - The AI framework for Rails with less code & more fun
Josef Strzibny announced the release of the Kamal Handbook, 2nd edition for Kamal 2
👉 All about Code and Ruby:
News: Ruby Central is looking for new board members, DragonRuby version 6 is released and Eileen Uchitelle is the newest Ruby Core Committer
Xavier Noria shares how to get a sense of progress when switching to Zeitwerk
Jean Boussier shares how they discovered a parser bug
Ufuk Kayserilioglu shared a code sample about how to make the private method public for playing in IRB or testing
Joel Drapper shared a code sample for a private server-side fetched async Gravatar component using Flecks
Vitaly Gambala shared a benchmark result using Rails 8 behind kamal-proxy and found a reduction in memory usage between traefik and kamal-proxy
There are a lot of code samples and ideas of what you can do with Ruby and Ruby on Rails inside the newsletter
Remember to read the Thinking about Code section and Around Code, where
there are interesting discussions about UI components in Rails, a
Japanese discussion about Ruby and types, and much more.
🧰 Gems, Libraries, Tools and Updates
New gems discovered last week: phlex-variants: Compose your Phlex component with style variants, basic user registration generator for Rails 8 and a repo with Kamal Github Actions
You can also find updates for Avo, RubyLSP, apicraft-rails, lennarb, Sequel, Trix, Rubygems and more in the updates section.
As always, we have a variety of links to newsletters, videos, podcasts,
and a good selection of articles to choose from.
This is a post that I will update this weekend with all the steps I am
doing to move the newsletter.
05 October 2024 -
07:00 AM First thing, I put the newsletter on private on
Substack:
How does it look like while being on private
05 October 2024 - 10:00 AM Second, I need to
manually unsubscribe people who unsubscribed from Substack between the
first import (20 September) and now. I seem not to have found a way to
delete all subscribers in Beehiiv and start from scratch.
I could have deleted everything and started from scratch, but I also
have some imports running so I don't want to force my newsletter into a
state where it has some errors (like I delete some subscribers and the
imports are still running). Maybe it is just my developer brain that
thinks about this :)
05 October 2024 - 11:56
AM Third thing, I did a small PR to change how citation is
displayed in our internal source:
Git commit
A shoutout to Kevin Chambers,
who quickly replied to all my questions, good or stupid, that I had.
This helped me a lot with the migration.
05 October
2024 18:35 (06:35 PM) After finalizing all the imports, I
noticed there is a difference in the total number of subscribers between
Beehiiv and Substack: Beehiiv has less than Substack.
I tried to import them manually, but Beehiiv reports back 0 imported.
They are not found to be imported into the interface.
06 October 2024 - 00:04 AM A ticket has been
created after Kevin tried to help me debug this. We will probably have
to consider announcing that some people will not receive the newsletter
until this issue is solved. 06 October 2024 - 06:00 AM I continue to edit the newsletter and add content to it
The newsletter editor at Beehiiv
The editor is super good. I discovered that it allows markdown so I will
do some PRs to my Rails app where I have the content and create the
citations to generate some markdown ready to copy/paste in the editor.
I also want to play a
bit with the API - the first thing I think is probably an
integration between LemonSqueezy and updating the subscriber status on
Beehiiv if possible. I will probably use
https://developers.beehiiv.com/api-reference/subscriptions/put to add a
custom field to the subscription and then create a dynamic segment from
that. I will figure this out next week. But I am pretty excited to have
an API and thus will be able to automate more stuff.
Just figured out a new task for today: export the paying subscribers in
LemonSqueezy and cross-reference them with the subscribers marked as
paid in Beehiiiv.
07 October 2024 - 06:30 I discovered that by default, Beehiiv does not have an RSS
feed via
a question on Ruby.social, where someone noticed that the newsletter
feed is gone.
Found a way to generate one via Settings -> Publication -> RSS
Feed, but the generated URL is not good:
https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/X67SCnFvlW.xml
I haven't been able to find a way to add an RSS feed button to the main
website using the website builder.
I made a quick fix to https://feed.newsletter.shortruby.com
and this will be the way to go for anyone that wants to add the
newsletter feed. This reinforces my idea that whatever you build you
should own the URLs. It allows you to add features that are missing or
fix bugs even if the platform does not have support for them.
8 October 2024 06:23 Beehiiv support reviewed all
the non-imported email addresses and confirmed that all of them are
invalid. And I agree that it does not make any sense to import them. I
don’t want to have subscribers just for numbers but I want people that
are reading the newsletter.
Continuing my
updates about the migration of shortrubynews to Beehiiv, at the end of the day today or
tomorrow morning (Saturday morning), I will put the newsletter on
Substack on private. This means any new subscription needs to be
approved and the purpose is to ensure there are no new subscriptions to
the newsletter during the migration.
Next on my list is to add a visible notice in the next edition with a
clear Unsubscribe button just in case someone unsubscribed during the
export/import but is still imported as active.
The new newsletter layout will take a couple of iterations to work, but
I look forward to customizing it and making it a bit more readable.
This move to Beehiiv opens multiple possibilities:
Maybe start doing the 3 Ruby Links project as a weekly project under the umbrella of
They have an API, so maybe I can automate the content editing more, shorten the time spent arranging items on the page, and do proper citations.
The possibility of having more ads or offering boosts for other IT-related newsletters
In general, this move will help make the newsletter sustainable and, in
the long run, afford to pay someone to fully help with content editing.
It also opens up the possibility to focus can of automation and allow
more time to be spent on better curation.
I hope to finalize the move by Sunday, 6 October, so the next edition
can be sent via Beehiiv.
What is keeping me busy with this migration?
Roadblock: The imported content does not have image
captions
The current roadblock is that the migration of old content did not
import the image captions, where I was writing the citation ("Source:
@name") with a link to the post in the screenshot.
I wrote to their support, and it seems like this is not supported so
far.
So it seems my only decision is to manually add all those citations -
which is a lot of work: there are 108 editions (and around 160 posts,
because I experimented in the early days with various formats).
Unclear: What should I do with the content on Substack?
Once the migration is finished, what should I do with the
content on Substack?
First, the content cannot remain there as there will be duplicates with
the one being hosted on Beehiiv.
After the switch the main domain: newsletter.shortruby.com will point to
Beehiiv and the Substack one will remain at shortruby.substack.com
Also, the subscribers should only be in a single place, so the list of
subscribers on Substack should be deleted.
I am thinking about a couple of options:
Remove all the posts and unsubscribe everyone on Substack, but keep
the subdomain there with a message stating that the newsletter is
now hosted there.
Close the publication: this will delete all content and all
subscribers
Over the weekend I have to take a decision also about this.
If you can browse your git history and understand why those changes were
made and why/how that technical decision happened without needing to
refer to tickets, issues, or requirements, then you likely have an
excellent git history.
If your git history looks like:
commit 04796b39d364b6c580bbe17ecf3f0160b5c8877d
Author: John Snow
Date: Sun Jul 7 12:03:51 2024 +0300
Fix PRJ-5623
commit 828394c2864ea98003491e17b2562ad24bada653
Author: John Snow
Date: Sun Jul 7 12:03:51 2024 +0300
Implement PRJ-6523
commit f64299c822a7cd38557eb935f074f18eed5719a2
Author: Jane Dane
Date: Mon Aug 15 17:41:23 2022 +0300
Refactor User authentication
commit abbd91854acce973ec662b0f2b75e89a4ceb3261
Author: Jane Dane
Date: Mon Aug 15 15:30:08 2022 +0300
Move parse_with_options to Team
Then, you might want to reconsider how you write your commits.
An example of a goodish git commit message
Here is an example of a git commit message that is good enough:
Commit 234a85f59da9c81edfa981dd56a1d97795a7d1c9
Author: Lucian Ghinda
Date: Sun Aug 25 07:56:07 2024 +0300
Add new tag formats to improve the speed of tagging
This commit introduces new tag formats in the TagTypeMap and updates
ContentTypeIdentifier tests for compatibility.
These changes ensure that the ContentTypeIdentifier can correctly
identify content types using the new tag formats, maintaining
the system's flexibility and reliability.
Why these changes?
(1) We want to allow users to tag content using shorter tags
eg: `stype` instead of `section:type`
(2) Automatically fix typos in tag formats:
eg: typing `a` instead of `s` in `s:type` => `a:type`
(3) Duplicate tag letter replaces `:`
eg: `aatype` is the same as `a:type`
`sstype` is the same as `s:type`
Changes:
1. Updated TagTypeMap to include new formats:
- 's:type' (e.g., 'a:code', 'a:article')
- 'stype' (e.g., 'scode', 'sarticle')
- 'sstype' (e.g., 'sscode', 'sstarticle')
- 'a:type' (e.g., 'a:code', 'a:article')
- 'aatype' (e.g., 'aacode', 'aaarticle')
- 'Aatype' (e.g., 'Aacode', 'Aaarticle')
2. Updated ContentTypeIdentifier tests to cover new tag formats
for all existing content types:
- Code, Articles, Videos, Library, Newsletter, Podcasts
- Related, Community, Events, Books, Launch, Slides
A better example
Here is an example of a git commit message shared by Zlatko
Alomerovic via Linkedin. The message is written by Jean Boussier (@byroot) in a
commit for Rails and it looks like this (here is just the first
part of it)
commit 8c7e69b79b63a88a170a9b9004a906db00161a3b
Author: Jean Boussier
Date: Mon Jan 8 18:43:37 2024 +0100
Optimize Hash\#stringify_keys
Using Symbol\#name allows to hit two birds with one stone.
First it will return a pre-existing string, so will save
one allocation per key.
Second, that string will be already interned, so it will
save the internal `Hash` implementation the work of looking
up the interned strings table to deduplicate the key.
```
ruby 3.3.0 (2023-12-25 revision 5124f9ac75) [x86_64-darwin21]
Warming up --------------------------------------
to_s 17.768k i/100ms
cond 23.703k i/100ms
Calculating -------------------------------------
to_s 169.830k (±10.4%) i/s - 852.864k in 5.088377s
cond 236.803k (± 7.9%) i/s - 1.185M in 5.040945s
cond 236.803k (± 7.9%) i/s - 1.185M in 5.040945s
Comparison:
to_s: 169830.3 i/s
cond: 236803.4 i/s - 1.39x faster
```
```ruby
require 'bundler/inline'
gemfile do
source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'benchmark-ips', require: false
end
HASH = {
first_name: nil,
last_name: nil,
country: nil,
profession: nil,
language: nil,
hobby: nil,
pet: nil,
longer_name: nil,
occupation: nil,
mailing_address: nil,
}.freeze
require 'benchmark/ips'
Benchmark.ips do |x|
x.report("to_s") { HASH.transform_keys(&:to_s) }
x.report("cond") { HASH.transform_keys { |k| Symbol === k ? k.name : k.to_s } }
x.compare!(order: :baseline)
end
```
Short Ruby Newsletter - edition 107 is published. Here are some highlights:
🚀 Launches
Ruby Europe launched their community and presented the plans for the rest of 2024
Obie Fernandez launched the book "The Rails 8 Way"
Pragmatic Programmers are running a 40% discount on all Ruby and Rails eBooks
John Pigford launched Revise - an AI Code Correction Tool
RoRvsWild launched their one-on-one personalized performance advice
📢 News from Rails World
This edition contains an entire section dedicated to Rails World where I curated a couple of the many photos, ideas and talk summaries shared online last week from the conference.
👉 All about Code and Ruby:
Seth Horsley shared a thread about how to implement method overloading in Ruby using class methods
Samuel Wiliams shared how to use with_connection
Deepak Mahakale shared how to create aliases in Kamal 2
Julian Rubisch shared how they upgraded BetterStimulus.com to Kamal 2
Joel Drapper shared a couple of videos and code samples showing how to support async rendering in Rails using Phlex
In Around Code you will find the results of the Ruby on Rails community survey by Planet Argon where there are a lot of interesting updates. And much more code samples and Ruby ideas.
🧰 Gems, Libraries, Tools and Updates
Mike Delassio launched tailwindcss-ruby: A self-contained tailwindcss executable, wrapped up in a ruby gem
Chris Oliver launched ferrum_pdf: A PDF generator for Rails using Ferrum & headless Chrome
Stanislav Katkov published a couple of gems about making Jekyll work with nobuild Tailwind CSS: jekyll-tailwind-cli, jekyll-heroicons and a template jekyll-tailwind-cli-template
Joel Drapper published a new gem called Flecks - Render IO-bound content asynchronously and stream it into a wrap-around shell in a single HTTP response with Phlex
Ben Sheldon started working on Spectator Sport - Record and replay browser sessions in a self-hosted Rails Engine
Thomas Marshall published a new gem called minitest-verify - A minitest plugin to prevent false negative tests And like there are a bunch of gem updates that we included in the newsletter.
Like always we have a lot of newsletters, videos, podcasts and a good
selection of articles to choose from.
I am not at Rails World,
and I have huge FOMO at home. I look at almost all the people going
there and already have a great time even before the conference starts.
Enjoy the conference and make some new friends!
With this occasion, I'd like to invite you all to share/post online what
you are learning during the conference. It would be good for the
community to post live updates on social media during all conferences.
Here’s the structure of a good social media post:
Take a screenshot of a slide, ensuring the speaker is included.
Highlight the most important idea the speaker mentioned
Add your own thoughts about it.
Publish the post, then reply with the next interesting point from the presentation.
In case you want to see some examples, I did something like this from my
own account during EuRuKo (see a
list of posts here)
and did the same from the Friendlyrb account on Twitter and Mastodon during Friendly.rb conference.
I got very good feedback about doing this kind of live posting.
I know that usually all videos and slides are posted online, but
creating a buzz during the conference and sharing the ideas that YOU
find interesting is also an important contribution. It helps show
how active our community is and how many ideas are shared.
Later on, the series of posts that you shared could be transformed into
a blog post about how it was at that conference, and in the process, you
will get the side effect of doing a recap of what you learned from that
experience.
This week, I'll be at EuRuKo
2024 , where I'll speak on two subjects close to my heart:
Systematically writing tests to cover more business logic with fewer
test cases - Thursday at 14:00, Third Track
Keeping Ruby relevant by using new language features - Friday at
15:20, Main Track
Talks at EuRuKo 2024
If you are there, let's meet and talk about Ruby, the future, and how to
attract new people to learn Ruby and Rails. Looking forward to hearing
your ideas.
The one about Rails performance benchmarks, new Array#fetch_values
method and Rails launched an official video series with tips and best
practices.
🚀 Launches
Ruby on Rails launched a new video series called Rails in Focus created by Emmanuel Hayford
Alexandre Ruban is working on a new tutorial about the New Rails Authentication Generator (similar with the hotwired.dev)
Events: Friendly.rb shared the latest update about speakers and outdoor activities and Ahmed Nadar with AppSignal launched the AppSignal's Guide to Toronto for Rails World
👉 All about Code and Ruby:
Takashi Kokubun announced Ruby 3.3.5 is published and Charles Nutter published an article about his plans and vision for the future of JRuby
DHH announced that Solid Cache and Solid Queue are now defaults for Rails 8
Xavier Noria shared about type aliases in Ruby and Kevin Newton shared some interesting Ruby grammar examples, while Jean Boussier did a deep dive into accessing a hash via an object key
There is a wide range of discussions about code design and I picked some of the posts shared last week about Ruby on Rails performance.
There are also many more inspiring and useful code samples. Don't forget to read the section "❤️ Why Choose Ruby and Rails," where people share why they chose Ruby or Ruby on Rails.
PS: Remember to read Nick Schwaderer's thread about how the
RubyGems homepage changes over time.
🧰 Gems, Libraries, Tools and Updates There are a bunch of gem
updates that we included in the newsletter:
Avo launched some big changes like DateTime filter, new custom components and many Dynamic Filters improvements and Joel Drapper announced Phlex 2.0 alpha
Nate Berkopec announced a new benchmark-ips release with a new syntax while Akira Matsusa announced a new release of simplecov-html after 4 years.
I also highlighted 3 discussions from the latest Ruby Dev Meeting about
the Namespace on read, optimized instructions for frozen literal Hash
and Array and the new Array#fetch_values method.
As always, we have a large number of newsletters, videos, podcasts, and
a good selection of articles to choose from.
Excerpt from "The Thread API : Concurrent, colorless Ruby"
JP Camara continues their series about concurrency, parallelism, and
async programming and this one is about threads. It is a deep dive into
Ruby threads with a lot of code samples.
Ashok found an interesting allowed behavior from CRuby interpreter that
allows to create scripts that can run both bash and Ruby commands. The
article shows code samples about how to do this.
Dmitry is writing a good tutorial about how to test GraphQL using RSpec,
but the ideas presented here can be applied also to Minitest. The code
samples are clear, with comments to understand pros and cons.
Check out the schedule for https://friendlyrb.com - a conference
I co-organize in September this year in Bucharest, Romania. We will have
exciting talks and a relaxing atmosphere to meet new Ruby developers.
