🚀 Launches

• Josh Branchaud launched Ruby Operator* Lookup
• Andrea Rocca launched blackfridaycapitalist.com - a pay to play directory of Black Friday deals
• Mikkel Malmberg launched Nitro Kit - is a set of generic UI components to help you build your Ruby on Rails application
• Tonton Cyber launched ShipOnRails AI - a specialized and up-to-date AI for Ruby on Rails developers with Rails 8, Kamal, Turbo, Stimulus, and more than 100 gems

📅 Events:

• Jason Swett announced that tickets for SinCityRuby are now on sale:
• Ruby Conf asked about the interest in the final RailsConf in 2025
• Greg Molnar announced they are thinking of organizing a Ruby conference in Furnas, on Sao Miguel island of the Azores.
• There are 15 meetups happening this week. Check RubyConferences.org for when and where they are happening.

👉 All about Code and Ruby
There a lot of code samples included, here are just some of them:

• Use DRB to interact with Nick Schwaderer blog, and read about neste module calls reopening from Xavier Noria
• Victor Shepelev shared how they implemented a not-a-pipe operator in Ruby
• James shared a code sample about downloading file using multiple range requests, Jorge Manrubia shared a code to replicate a bug on M4 when working in YJIT
• Jeremy Smith shared the code for a bin script that opens the locally sent emails, RoRvsWild shared a script to stop waiting for Redis responses when pipelining
• Emmanuel Hayford shared a code sample showing how the rate limiter works in Rails 8, Kuba Suder shared how to use Skyfall gem to listen to Bluesky firehouse

Remember to read ️ 📐Thinking about Code where you will find discussions about service objects, about TDD, about migrating from Next.js to Ruby on Rails and Inertia, about how to process webhooks and much more.
Inside 💡Around code section you will find a list of Starter Packs about Ruby and Ruby on Rails that you can find on Bluesky and there is a nice collection of why people are choosing Ruby and Ruby on Rails inside the ❤️ Why Choose Ruby and Rails` section

🧰 Gems, Libraries, Tools and Updates

• Marc Köhlbrugge announced a new WIP Rails repository showing how to work with omniauth and atproto
• Peter Bhat Harkins published a new gem called quickquestion - cli utility for asking Claude a quick question
• Igor Alexandrov announced Kamal Deploy · Actions · GitHub Marketplace
• Eth3rnit3 published a new gem chromate - Chromate is a Ruby library to control Google Chrome with the Chrome DevTools Protocol

And you will find updates of their projects or libraries from Roda, 37Signals Writebook, Redmine, skyfall, raix and more gems.

As always, we have more links to newsletters, videos, podcasts, and articles.

Read the full newsletter for free at https://newsletter.shortruby.com/p/edition-114

When I work with VCR in Ruby on Rails, I like to see the structure of the body printed as formatted JSON

The current setup: 

• have VCR save responses as JSON (it is not always a good idea 😀 )
• install `jq`
• setup `~/.local/bin` to be loaded in .zshrc
  

  

  Here is the script: 

\#!/usr/bin/env bash

if [ $\# -ne 1 ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 <json_file>"
    exit 1
fi

input_file="$1"

\# Does the file exists?
if [ ! -f "$input_file" ]; then
    echo "Error: File '$input_file' not found"
    exit 1
fi

\# is jq installed ?
if ! command -v jq &> /dev/null; then
    echo "Error: jq is not installed. Please install it first."
    exit 1
fi

\# Process the JSON file
jq -r '.http_interactions[0].response.body.string' "$input_file" | jq '.'

Here is an example of how to use it: 

I am so grateful for the ongoing effort to improve the Ruby documentation done by Stan Lo.

I think we should try to contribute too in any way we can and make the documentation welcoming for new people who might join our community and start learning.

For example, a while back, while reading some materials for the ShortRuby Newsletter, I encountered people who were confused about which one was the official Ruby documentation.

So I just tried to do a small PR about it:

I think there are a lot of opportunities to contribute. It does not matter if you are a beginner or expert. You can make the Ruby documentation better.

If you don't know how to contribute, I think you should read Stan Lo's  article about his vision on Ruby documentation, where he also shares how other people can contribute: A RDoc Maintainer's View on Ruby's Documentation

On the same direction of improving documentation, there is also this project by Masafumi Okura that won one of the three 2024 Ruby Association Grants  that has as objective to create a plugin system for RDoc:

A little bit of bikeshedding: In Ruby, even outside of guard clauses, I sometimes use modifiers to make the code easier to read out loud.

A mental rule that I use to choose when to use a full if versus a modifier is taking into consideration if the condition has a side effect:

In this case I would choose the explicit if because the post.save has some important information when reading this code, while return Success(post) if post.save focuses on what is returned when skimming the code.

🚀 Launches

• Ruby Cademy (pre)launched a new e-book, "RubyCademy Cards"
• Rob Race launched Rails Simple Auth - Unlock Rails 8 Authentication

📅 Events:

• Brighton Ruby announced videos from 2024 are up, and the tickets for 2025 are on sale
• Ruby Conf shared that on 14th November, there will be a Ruby Core Team AMA
• Check RubyConferences.org for meetups or conferences this week, and don’t forget to submit yours if you are organizing one. There are 23 meetups happening this week.

👉 All about Code and Ruby:

• Two web frameworks released: Rails 8 is released! Hanami 2.2 has been released!
• Two Ruby versions released: Ruby 3.3.6 is released and JRuby 9.4.9.0 is released
• Check code samples about how Xavier Noria is using Module\#set_temporary_name, how to use MAKEFLAGS to make commands in parallel when using bundler, why to prefer select_all vs execute for read queries, why use pick instead of pluck, what the single question mark in ?4 does, how to create normalizers macros for Rails, an example of using Object\#tap with ruby/debug and there are much more code examples to be inspired or to remind you of what you can do with Ruby

Remember to read ️📐Thinking about Code, where Jorge Manrubia discusses moving off system tests, Jason Sweet discusses authorization, and why Pundit could be a good choice.

🧰 Gems, Libraries, Tools and Updates

• Olly Headey open-sourced their web-app pagecord - A minimalist blogging app powered by email
• Stephen Margheim announced a new gem called chaotic_job - Test ActiveJobs for reliability and resilience
• Nate Hopkins announced a new gem local_bus: A lightweight pub/sub system for decoupled intra-process communication in Ruby applications
• John Hawthorn announced a new gem delta_debug - This implements Andreas Zeller's Delta Debugging ddmin algorithm, which aims to take a failing test input and reduce it to a smaller failing input
• Alessandro Rodi announced a new gem called hotsheet: Manage your database with a simple and familiar web interface
• Vladislav Trotsenko published a new gem called ruby-rspec-mock - RSpec dual mocking compatibility. Use RSpec's mocks as secondary, alongside a primary, alternative mocking library

You will find updates of their projects or libraries from Avo, ruby/json, dry-operation, by, ruby/reline, and more.

As always, we have more links to newsletters, videos, podcasts, and articles.

Read the full newsletter for free at https://newsletter.shortruby.com/p/edition-113

A small tip: when using the Ruby debug gem

To shorten the debug time, I like to add a puts <var> at the end of binding.break.

i will also display information about all variables, but when there are many, it is easier to display the last one and then look up.

There is also the option to not use puts but directly call a: 

binding.break(pre: 'ls ;; i ;; a')

But adding a puts or even a p to print the variable will remove some collisions with debug own commands. 

I sometimes use Object\#tapwith debugger to debug chained methods

That will show the following output:

Another useful trick for me is to setup a debugger and also set a new breakpoint at the end:

That will show the following output

Short Ruby Newsletter - edition 112 highlights

🚀 Launches

• Jeremy Smith launched Liminal - "Just forums – no livestreaming, no events, no courses, no chat, Optimized for long-form, async discussion"
• Trae Robrock launched Email.rb - "Dead simple email. Transactional email shouldn't cost a fortune"
• Keygen launched Engines - "easily license and distribute private and commercial gems to users"
• Pragmatic Programmers launched a discount for Agile Web Development with Rails 8

📅 Events:

• Ruby Conf announced that Matz will be there, they will have a track curated by Akira Matsuda - organiser of RubyKaigi and Tim Riley announced Hanami Hack Day at RubyConf
• Thoughtbot announced Intro to AI for Rails developers with Chad Pytel
• Tropical.Rb launched the tickets last week, but they are now Sold Out
• Check RubyConferences.org for meetups or conferences happening this week and don’t forget to submit yours if you are organising one.

👉 All about Code and Ruby:

• Nagachika announced that Ruby 3.2.6, while Rafael Franca released Rails 8.0.0.rc2, Tim Riley announced that Hanami 2.0.0.rc1 is available and Nick Quaranto announced that Rubygems reached billions of gem downloads
• Check code sample about using Ruby methods for adding values and how send changes their behavior, a team of AI agents, how to disable STI in Rails, the up-coming JRuby performance improvements, a code sample for testing controllers with public methods, using Ruby for scripting, protecting Ruby routes and much more code samples to be inspired and use them in your work.

Remember to read ️📐Thinking about Code, where Aaron Patterson, JP Camara, Samuel Williams, Adam Daniels, and others discuss Fibers, where they should be used, limitations, and upcoming improvements.

Check out 💡 Around code section to discover the grant selection for Ruby Association, how to get in the Ruby and Rails Starter Pack for BlueSky, a list of old resources about Ruby, the Product Founders SaaS mastermind group by Tom Rossi and a peak into how the first Ruby on Rails website was built.

🧰 Gems, Libraries, Tools and Updates

• Yaroslav Shmarov announced a new boilerplate for Rails 8 Moneygun - Multitenancy Teams boilerplate
• Stephen Diaconou announced a new gem awfy: CLI tool to help run suites of benchmarks , and compare results between control implementations, across branches and with or without YJIT
• Javi Ramirez announced a couple of new gems like trackdown: 📍 Ruby gem to geolocate IPs (MaxMind BYOK), footprinted: 👣 Ruby gem to track geolocated user activity in Rails , nondisposable: 🗑️ Block disposable emails in your Rails app
• Brad Gessler announced a new gem uri-builder - Work with URLs a little easier in Ruby
• Kristoph announced a new gem intelligence - A Ruby gem for seamlessly and uniformly interacting with large language and vision model (LLM) API's served by numerous services, including those of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others
• Typecraft published a new repo showing how to configure Neovim to work with Rails - this is a simple ruby on rails configuration for neovim
• Joshua Wood published a new gem about festive_errors - Add some year-round holiday cheer to the Rails error page

And check out in Updates section the release of Rails 7.1.6, Rails 7.2.2, the improvements Jean Boussier is doing for ruby/json, the Fiber::Scheduler#blocking_region added by Samuel Williams in Ruby 3.4, a Sinatra CVE and much more.

As always, we have more links to newsletters, videos, podcasts, and articles.

Read the full newsletter for free at https://newsletter.shortruby.com/p/edition-112

Here are some highlights from the Short Ruby Newsletter - edition 111

If you prefer you can listen to an audio version where I go over the most important things from the newsletter at https://podcast.shortruby.com/2417631/episodes/16002047-highlights-from-short-ruby-newsletter-edition-111

🚀 Launches

• Jason Swett launched their new book Professional Rails Testing
• Josef Strzibny launched the second edition of the Kamal Handbook
• Socket launched AI-powered scans for vulnerabilities, malicious code and supply chain threads for Ruby
• Good Enough announced Jelly the shared inbox for teams

📅 Events

• Brighton Ruby tickets are available ``
• Ruby Conf India will happen in 1 month and still has tickets available
• RubyConf announced a series of exciting confirmed speakers; tickets are still available
• Tropical on Rails announced a series of confirmed speakers and will open ticket sales on 30 October
• Checkout RubyConferences.org for more meetups and conferences

👉 All about Code and Ruby

• Some people from the Ruby community joining Blue Sky and started posting there, and Joshua Wood prepared a Starter Pack of people from the Community to follow
• Dave Copeland shared a code sample combining then with => (rightward assignment)
• Michael Chaney shared a code sample and explained why hash rocket syntax is not deprecated
• Nate Berkopec shared a code sample about testing the seeds file
• Jon Yongfook shared how they use before_action in Rails
• Ruby Cademy shared a series of code samples showing how to improve rails console
• CJ Avilla shared a code sample showing how to use retry inside a rescue block

Remember to read the Thinking about Code section and Around Code, where there are engaging discussions about benchmarking Ruby/Falcon vs Bun, putting logic outside the model and a huge discussion about Kamal, easiness to use and replies about what is it for and when it should not be used.

🧰 Gems, Libraries, Tools and Updates

• Stan Lo announced the new red theme for official Ruby docs
• Alessandro Rodi announced a new gem moirai: Let the world be translated, one typo at a time
• Nate Berkopec announced a new gem ids_must_be_indexed: A GitHub Action to ensure all Rails application foreign key columns are indexed
• Josef Strzibny announced a new open source project asciidoc-book-template: Simple technical book template
• Jerome Dalbert published a new gem rubocop-obsession - RuboCop extension focused on higher-level concepts, like checking that code reads from top to bottom
• RailsDesigner published a new tool Rails Development Tool adding features to assist developers during the development process
• Jean Boussier released a new version of Ruby JSON, making the JSON.dump twice faster than before.
• And more gem updates

As always, we have more links to newsletters, videos, podcasts, and articles.

Read the full newsletter for free at https://newsletter.shortruby.com/p/edition-111

I see in the last days quite a big move of people from Ruby community joining Blue Sky. 
Blue Sky offers some interesting automation options via their architecture and API thus this could be the beginning of seeing back tutorials about writing a Ruby script to post on social media.

It is something exciting about running a script on your local machine and publishing something on the internet that was destroyed once Twitter started putting a price on their API. 

So here are three things I recommend to keep the sparkle that is happening this days for people that just joined: 

1. Add a picture and description to your profile 

I know that 10-15 years ago when social media first appeared it was ok to just join, but to start the networking effect (people following other people) I think having a picture (could be an avatar, graphic) and a short sentence about you is a great way to invite people to join.

2. Make your first post

Make a first post on the platform. I am sure you have something to say. Specifically if you are from Ruby community say something about Ruby. Here are some ideas about what you can post: 

• Just say "Hello"
• Publish a short intro about yourself: who you are, what are you working on, where do you live ... whatever you feel like sharing
• Write something about what you are currently working on
• Publish a link to an interesting article that you read this week. Bonus points if it is about Ruby/Rails or something related

3. Engage with other people

To keep the community going it is important to engage with people posting there.
Try to be helpful and reply to people posting.

I suggest to adopt the mindset "A rising tide lift all boats" and so help other people get better, find their answers. Share something constructively. Engage in building and creating. Comment something that you think will add value.

If you are posting already code samples, code screenshots or technical articles on other platforms please try to post them here also.

Because this platform is somehow at the beginning and now people from Ruby community are starting to be more active there, this could be your chance to share your thoughts here and be read by important people in the community.

Short Ruby Newsletter - edition 110 highlights

Avo is looking for a mid-level Ruby on Rails Developer and I could not recommend enough the experience of working with Adrian Marin - the creator of Avo:

🚀 Launches

• Donn Felker launched Ruby Static Pro - a Ruby static generator template based on Middleman
• Tare Robrock (re)launched Translated - auto-magical translations for Rails models
• Rails Designer (pre)launched a new book - "Javascript for Rails Developer"

📅 Events

• Alex Rudall announced a workshop by Obie Fernandez about "Ruby AI Show n Tell"
• Honeybadger and Wafris are organizing an online workshop about "Errors n Incidents"
• Thoughtbot announced the Open Summit
• Lukasz Reske announced a workshop about "10 Arkency Lessons from Rails apps for 2025"
• RubyConf announced there is still time to book a room for the Ruby Conf

👉 All about Code and Ruby

• Rails 8.0.0 first release candidate is out and Lex Friedman announced they are planning to try Rails soon. There is also a new Maintenance Policy announced for Rails
• There are so many code samples like Jason Nochlin sharing how to run Kamal 2 with its own private registry and not rely on Docker Hub, Nate Berkopec sharing common cache mistake in Rails views,  Mohit Sindhwani sharing how to extract base name of a file and add s suffix to it, Alex Rudall sharing a code sample about Ruby OpenAI using RAG, Chris Oliver shared about how Rails looks for \#{name.upcase}_DATABASE_URL constant, Ruby Cademy shared 5 essential Rails shorthands and there is a lot more code to get inspired and use inside the newsletter

Remember to read the Thinking about Code section and Around Code, where there are engaging discussions about Gitlab and Vitalliumm using VCR, Matt Swanson inviting people to roast his code, Daniel Hoelzgen asking about Sidekiq vs. GoodJob vs. SolidQueue, and a bunch more.

🧰 Gems, Libraries, Tools and Updates

• Landon Gray launched an experimental gem called swarm-rb - An educational framework exploring ergonomic, lightweight multi-agent orchestration in Ruby
• RoR vs Wild announced a new gem rorvswild-theme-rdoc - RDoc theme for developers with sensitive eyes
• Ylluminate shared about the existence of traveling-ruby: Self-contained Portable Ruby ( 2.6.10 -> 3.3.x ) Binaries for Linux/MacOS/Windows
• And a bunch of updates for various gems: rails, rubocop, tailwindcss-rails, superform, Rubymine, raix, puny-monitor, faker-ruby, sidekiq-cron and more.
  As always, we have links to newsletters, videos, podcasts, and articles.

Read the full newsletter for free at https://newsletter.shortruby.com/p/edition-110

Two months ago, I was celebrating reaching 5000 subscribers with Short Ruby Newsletter

Today I am happy to share that we have over 5500 subscribers! Not a round number, but the pace of new subscribers is picking up steam.

Thank you for trusting me and subscribing to the newsletter! A huge thanks to all the paying subscribers and founding members who contribute every month to keep the newsletter's costs down.

If you are not a subscriber, visit https://newsletter.shortruby.com and subscribe to get the newsletter every Monday in your inbox.

What is Short Ruby Newsletter?

It is a Monday morning summary of the articles, discussions, and news from the Ruby community. I watch a series of places like Twitter, Ruby social, Reddit, Linkedin, Dev to, Ruby LibHunt, and other news sources.
I also offer space for ads to promote your own products or services.

Checkout the proposals and pricing here.

If I were to recommend three articles published last week to read, here is what I would recommend:

1️⃣  What’s New in Ruby on Rails 8 by Damilola Olatunji

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.

You might also want to check out the Hacker News discussion related to this article. It has a great vibe about Ruby on Rails 8.

2️⃣ How CDNs Work (Propshaft / Static Assets Pt. 2) by Jon Sully

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.

3️⃣ B-trees and database indexes by Benjamin Dicken

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.

---

You can find a lot more articles to read in the full edition of Short Ruby Newsletter at https://newsletter.shortruby.com/p/edition-109

Short Ruby Newsletter - edition 109 highlights

🚀 Launches

• 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.

Read the full newsletter for free at https://newsletter.shortruby.com/p/edition-109

Short Ruby Newsletter - edition 108 highlights

🚀 Launches

• 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.

Read the full newsletter for free at https://newsletter.shortruby.com/p/edition-108