Ruby Weekly Issue 673: October 12, 2023

#673 — October 12, 2023

✍️ Due to being on the road at a conference, this is going to be a compact and bijou issue – but maybe you'll prefer it that way! Back to full steam next week 😉
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Peter Cooper, your editor

Together with

▶ DHH's Rails World 2023 Keynote — David was full of energy out of the gate for the inaugural Rails World keynote. Starting with a little history, he quickly got to his main points covering what he’s excited about, the benefits of the ‘no build’ approach, the allure of simplicity, and new tools like Kamal and Solid Queue.

David Heinemeier Hansson

DHH has also published a write up on how he felt Rails World went. He was even gifted 🐦 a Lego replica of his famous hypercar.

⏰ TLDR: A New, Speedy Ruby Testing Framework — Developed by a mighty combination of Aaron ‘tenderlove’ Patterson and Justin Searls called tendersearls, TLDR is a testing system originally built in jest on a livestream. It has an interesting twist: it blows up if your tests take more than 1.8 seconds to run. If this sounds bizarre, read this post - Justin does a great job of selling the idea.

Justin Searls

Monitoring for All Ruby Frameworks & Infrastructure — You only need to install the Ruby gem. We'll set up our Ruby performance monitoring and error tracking in minutes, with automatic data categorizing and graphing.

AppSignal sponsor

Numbered Block Parameters: 'Useless Syntax Sugar'? — Victor begins his promised series on Ruby syntax additions by putting numbered block parameters (e.g. arr.each { puts _1 }) under the microscope. I like them for personal code and scripts, but Victor shows off the potential complexity they can introduce.

Victor Shepelev

Explaining an MIR-Based JIT Prototype for Ruby — I’ll raise my glass to anyone doing work to speed up Ruby. The author implemented an interesting universal approach to JITing Ruby (and dynamic languages, generally) and explains it here, though ultimately he has deferred to Shopify and YJIT’s broader support and progress.

Vladimir Makarov

IN BRIEF:

🗣 RubyConf 2023 takes place this November in San Diego and Ruby Central has announced the speakers which includes keynotes from Matz, Sharon Steed, and Saron Yitbarek. Full roster here.
🎤 Hanami Mastery has done an interview with the Hanami core team.
⏭ Ben Sheldon, the creator of the Good Job ActiveJob backend, shared his reflections on DHH's announcement of Solid Queue and the design decisions involved in building such background job processors. He ends with: "Oh, and Solid Queue isn’t released yet, so if this seems compelling, use GoodJob in the meantime." 😉
📔 Stanko Krtalić's diary of attending Rails World.
🤖 There's now a Ruby AI community on X/Twitter.

Using Action Policy for a Rails App: The Basics — Action Policy is an authorization framework for Rails apps built by the Evil Martians folks.

Aestimo Kirina

Service Objects in Rails: How to Find a Mess — Some developers find using service objects helps to keep things clean, others find things turning into a mess! Dmitry walks through some examples and gives some pointers to help you avoid messy outcomes.

Dmitry Tsepelev

Product for Engineers: A Newsletter Helping Flex Your Product Muscle — Subscribe to get curated advice on building great products, lessons from PostHog, and best practices of top startups.

PostHog sponsor

Five Best Practices for Preventing Chaos in Tailwind CSS
Nina Torgunakova

14 Ways to Reduce Risk with Feature Flags
Dimon and Nunemaker (Flipper)

🛠 Code & Tools

Authentication Zero 3.0: Auth System Generator for Rails — Rather than being an authentication library, this generates a pre-built authentication system within your app directly which you can then modify as you see fit.

Lázaro Nixon

Heya 0.9: A Campaign Mailer for Rails Apps — Think of it “like ActionMailer, but for timed email sequences.” LGPLv3 licensed. Now supports Rails 7.1. GitHub repo.

Honeybadger

IMAP Backup 14.0 – Tool to backup and migrate IMAP accounts. Now with a config-free single account option.
ActiveRecord PostGIS Adapter 9.0 – Use PostGIS's geospatial features from AR.
parallel_tests 4.3 – Run RSpec, Test::Unit and more in parallel on more cores.
PgParty 1.7 – Create and manage Postgres partitions from ActiveRecord.
Arbre 1.7 – Build DOM trees in Ruby, a la Phlex.
ActsAsParanoid 0.9 – Soft delete for Active Record.
Pliny 1.0 – Opinionated toolkit for writing Ruby APIs.

Jobs

Apply Now and Work #LikeABosch — Our promise to our associates is rock-solid: we grow together, enjoy our work & inspire each other. Join in & feel the difference.
Bosch

Find Ruby Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.
Hired

“As a principal engineer, I view it as my role to keep us off the bleeding edge as much as possible. That way, when we really do need to innovate, we have the capacity to do so. And when we don't need to, we can go really freaking fast.”

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Nicole Tietz, in this fantastic article that covers working with proven technologies and when and why to choose new frameworks and solutions.