Why choose #Ruby on #Rails?
I read this article from
Reinteractive: https://reinteractive.com/articles/rails-8-modern-web-framework
But let’s be honest, sometimes you just want a framework that’s reliable, efficient, and doesn’t leave you wrestling with configuration files until 3 AM
I also liked this part:
Rails 8 empowers developers to build features rapidly with its convention-over-configuration approach and a vast library of gems.
I happen to agree a lot with Amanda Brooke Perino here
That’s why I almost always comment on Hacker News or any forum
where I see people still spreading old narratives about Ruby and Rails.
I think we should not just accept them and move on but reply to them and
show why the narrative is wrong. Maybe not with the purpose of
convincing the author who is spreading that narrative but for other
people who might read that without knowing Ruby and Rails. If no one
refutes these statements, people from outside our community could take
them as truth.
I believe it’s important to engage with empathy and try to have a
dialogue with those spreading this myth. We should try to understand
where they heard about it, when they last checked the status of Ruby on
Rails, and how much they know about our ecosystem.
Work at a Startup and
Bookface, two YCombinator
projects are using Rails + React + PostgreSQL
Source:
Update:
Here is a video from YCombinator where they explain the
choice for Rails:
https://youtu.be/BJjsfNO5JTo?t=801
The one with several Ruby releases: 3.4.3, 3.5.0-preview1, and JRuby 10, where Marco Roth announces herb tools and Matz suggests that Ruby 4.0 may be released this Christmas.
🚀 Launches
📅 Events:
👉 All about Code and Ruby
There are a lot of great news this week:
Here are some highlights from Code Samples:
Inside 📐 Thinking about Code Design you will find:
Read the replies around these themes to get more context and maybe get inspiration about how to approach new solutions.
Inside ❤️ Why Choose Ruby and Rails read Irina Nazarova thread that starts with powerful quote highlighting Rails as a secret superpower, revealing how successful companies have been consistently building their products with Ruby on Rails
🇯🇵 RubyKaigi 2025
In this edition, we added a section dedicated to RubyKaigi 2025. There were a lot of things shared online and until the videos will be available here is what you can find out:
🧰 Gems, Libraries, Tools and 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-132
An example of an 1B$ exterior renovation business using #Ruby and Ruby on #Rails sharing why they think Ruby is a good choice for a business.
> “We strongly believe no other language can keep the same quick pace
that Ruby can when it comes to delivering business value"
Source:
RubyCentral
article
Remember to read ️ 📐Thinking about Code where 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 and much more interesting discussions.
Inside 💡Around code section read about Ruby Central announcing that the RubyGems team is strengthening the platform's foundations with new safety, reliability, and governance policies and Robby Russell asked his community about the wildest use cases of Ruby on Rails they've encountered over the years and got some very interesting and inspiring responses. You should check them out!
You will also find updates on their projects or libraries like Rubocop, solargraph and httparty.
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-129
I used Claude Code to refactor a series of tests from Minitest::Mock to the Mocha library this early morning.
The main reason is that I had certain parts of the tests using Mocha and others utilizing Minitest::Mock. Since other projects I work on use RSpec, I find Mocha to be closer toons in RSpec, which minimizes the context change for me overall.
I started with a simple example and provided this prompt:
Go in the test/services/bluesky/save_thread_test.rb and redo the test 'empty result when client returns empty array' to use mocha instead of simple Minitest mock
Here is what Claude Code proposed as a change. It added the line with instance_variable_set (it is not marked here as a diff because I chose 'No' when it asked me to apply, and I'm not sure why it isn't marked).
What is true is that the SaveThread object is not handling dependency injection properly: it instantiates a Bluesky::Client, but it does not accept it during initialization.
So I followed up with:
Instead of doing instance_variable_set wouldnt it be better to do depedency injection in the SaveThread object?
And I got the following answer:
It’s an interesting solution, but I don't like it for obvious reasons: the object I want to test is also the object that is altered by the test (which goes against the fundamental principles of testing).
Thus, I asked:
I prefer to change the SaveThread object itself
Notice that it included the client in the initializer, added an attr_reader for it, and also kept the previous memoized method.
In my opinion, this type of behavior reinforces the notion that you need to know how you want your code to be structured (which I refer to as code design).
It also seems more important than ever to be able to read a diff and understand the proposed changes. LLMs may improve over time, but at least for now, it appears to me that to ensure good code quality, one must first have enough experience to recognize what good quality is and be able to determine which changes to accept or reject.
This edition was sponsored by Judoscale and was created with the help of Vladut Cosmin
🚀 Launches
📅 Events:
👉 All about Code and Ruby
There a lot of code samples included;
here are just some of them:
Remember to read ️ 📐Thinking about Code, where Nate Berkopec shared advice on optimizing ActiveRecord database connections by using external poolers and a large pool setting, and Xavier Noria raised a question about Ruby's flat_map method, suggesting map_flat as a more intuitive alternative name. You can also discovere what Errol Schmidt shared their top 5 good and bad findings from Ruby on Rails app reviews based on production applications and many other interesting conversations.
Inside 💡Around code section Donn Felker shared an interesting business opportunity as he is searching for a co-founder for one of his projects, Remi Mercier asked about questions that people have when starting to work with Minitest, Sourav shared his experience learning Ruby on Rails from a React/Next.js background, posting.
🧰 Gems, Libraries, Tools and Updates
You will also find updates on their projects or libraries like Trix, activeagents.ai, Rubocop, Roda, Sitepress, standard, ruby-openai, Rubygems.
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-127
I am very close to putting this "vibe coding" phrase into ignore lists. But someone saying that Ruby is not fit for vibe coding made me look into what this term is.
Andrej Karpathy introduced this in a post on social media:
But it seems to have evolved into something that is now described more close to the following definition (source: Wikipedia)
> an inexperienced person describes a problem in a few
sentences as a prompt to a large language model (LLM) tuned for coding.
Now let's take a look back at what Andrej wrote and try to add two
contexts to this:
Here are some questions I would like to ask myself:
This might be an expert blind spot for him and us, as we haven’t considered how much his expertise makes things seem simple.
I am not saying this cannot happen, but seeing this vibe coding suddenly
everywhere triggered my skepticism inside.
It is just a thought; I
am not saying this is not working or is not real. We might be in the
beginning of something great.
An interesting point of view about the advantage #Ruby might have when considering AI
"generating equivalent functionality in Ruby costs approximately one-third of what it costs in TypeScript" (source)
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One benefit of using Sorbet is that it can make VSCode and Neovim almost on par with RubyMine's excellent behavior of being able to go to definitions and references from almost anywhere to anywhere. It helps so much with debugging and refactoring.
And that is amazing in a dynamically typed language.
This morning I played a bit with Claude Code and tried it out on a piece of #Ruby that was written in a hurry for a personal project.
I asked the following prompt:
It created a new file that included the previous code and maintained the previous structure with private attr_reader, even though it wasn’t necessary here.
It then replaced the previous code with a call to the new object.
At least two notes:
- It is not necessary to use require relative
since this is a Rails project
- It kept that method with a single
call and here, I would have liked to discuss whether to keep it or not
Then it copied the test from the previous big file to this one and added
an extra test.
Notice not only here but in multiple files that it
does not add new line at the end of the file.
It then executed the tests and wrote a summary.
I would have liked
to have executed the test from the file where the code was extracted to
ensure that the tests there still passed. I executed it manually, and it
still passed.
The total cost for this operation 29 cents and it took 3 minutes. Well the number of minutes is not real because I stopped multiple times taking screenshots.
The following can be expressed in various ways, but isn't it amazing that we can write it like this 👉
Are you curious about what's inside?
We probably all know this, but let me remind you—and mostly myself—that getting a good night's sleep is one of the simplest ways to boost productivity.
Add a 30-minute walk in the morning, and you'll likely see a 3.14x or even 7.5x increase, at least.
You decide!