~rubyweekly | Bookmarks (168)

WebMock 3.25.0: Stub and Set Expectations on HTTP Requests for Testing — Supports lots of HTTP libraries like Net::HTTP, Excon, the http gem, and Curb::Easy.

Marksmith: A GitHub-Style Markdown Editor for Rails — Well known for his Avo Rails app dev framework, Adrian is back with another banger: a GitHub-style Markdown editor you can use in your Rails apps. It features a similar toolbar, supports Active Storage, and is ready to drop in.

Parklife: Turn a Rack App into a Static Build — Got a Rack-powered app and want to spin it into a static version to quickly deploy on GitHub Pages, S3, or just your own basic HTTP server? The latest version adds Rails 8 support.

Ruby on Rails on WebAssembly: The Full-Stack In-Browser Journey — This post takes DHH’s famous “build a blog in 15 minutes” tutorial and embeds it in the browser using WebAssembly. While this is a bit of a parlor trick, it shows the possibilities of WASM. The author goes on to show how the magic happens and points out more practical and exciting use cases.

Ruby 'Thread Contention' is Simply GVL Queuing — We’ve enjoyed a great run of articles on the depths of Ruby’s implementation recently and it continues with this look at how threads wait politely for their time to shine, thanks to Ruby’s GVL (Global VM Lock). But all this politeness has a downside.. so you may have to get involved and tune things a bit.

🚀 FastRuby.io Makes Your Rails Upgrade Delightfully Boring — FastRuby.io ’s monthly maintenance services keep security and uptime high & costs low (starting at $4,000/month). The team behind RailsBump.org offers gradual, 0-downtime upgrades — making technical debt remediation feel delightfully boring.

Inserting One New Element into Hashes of Varying Sizes — An experiment from Pat’s work on updating Ruby Under a Microscope shows how performance can spike on specific insertions into a hash. It’s explained well and is a detail worth knowing.

📊 Benchmarking Caching in Rails with Redis vs Alternatives — There are now many ways to speed up caching in Rails. This benchmark includes open-source options, SolidCache with Postgres, and a couple of SQLite options. The results may surprise you.

How to Avoid Problems with Turbo Morphing — The most significant feature of Turbo 8 isn’t without its issues. Here, Radan examines three common Turbo ‘gotchas’ and how to solve them so you don’t morph into a frustrated developer.

Is Heroku Still Worth It in 2025? 💸 — You might want to give this guide a read — we took a tour through PaaS alley and found some worthy (💵) alternatives.

Hitimes: High Resolution Timer Library for Recording Performance Metrics — Uses different high resolution clock sources on different systems (more on that here).

Horizontal, Vertical, Diagonal? What Even IS Scaling?! 👀 — Up, down, left, right… A+B, A+B?? No no.. scaling isn’t that complicated. Let’s unpack horizontal vs. vertical scaling.

So You Want to Remove Ruby's GVL? — The GVL is a CRuby implementation detail that prevents Ruby code from running in parallel across multiple threads, and there have been many calls over the years to get rid of it in order to improve concurrency and performance. Is it that easy? And would it make much difference? Ruby committer Jean Boussier digs in..

Updating Ruby Under a Microscope: A Look into Hashes — Pat is updating his highly successful 2013 book that digs into Ruby’s internals to meet the modern reality of Ruby 3.x and its many changes. As a teaser, he shares an excerpt diving into how hash tables are implemented.

🔥 Make Rails Upgrades Budget-Friendly & Boringly Reliable — FastRuby.io’s monthly maintenance services keep costs low (starting at $4,000/month) and uptime high. The team behind RailsBump.org offers Bonsai for gradual, 0-downtime upgrades — making technical debt remediation feel delightfully boring.

Seven Things I Know After 25 Years of Development — Victor, creator of the Ruby Changes documents and many fantastic blog posts, shares some broad insights he’s gained from being a Rubyist and a serving member of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Monitoring Action Cable — If you’re ever paged asking why the real-time features of your Rails app are breaking, you’ll have wished you read this technical tale.

Building Rails Apps with Components — Superview is a gem that makes it possible to build Rails apps from the ground-up using nothing but components. Here’s how to automatically render Phlex and ViewComponents for controller actions with Superview.

☠️ Feature Creep Kills Great Products — Why (and how) to exercise intentional restraint to boost user satisfaction, operational efficiency, and lasting success.

CSS Zero 1.0: A 'No Build' CSS Starter Kit for Rails Apps — Imagine something akin to Tailwind CSS in terms of offering a design system and utility classes but with no build step and fully integrated with Rails 8. There’s an online showcase of some components built with it.

Puma 6.6.0: Ruby's Fast, Multi-Threaded HTTP 1.1 Server — Now essentially the de facto server for Rack apps, Puma continues to be well maintained with v6.6 offering some benefits for JRuby users, “a few debug/logging/observability related goodies”, and a new after_refork hook for recreating any resources shut down prior to a refork (e.g. database connections).

Optimizing Ruby’s JSON — Rails core team member Jean concludes a seven-part series going super deep into efforts made to significantly boost the performance of Ruby’s json library, with the end results trumping many of the alternatives. We linked to this when Jean began the series, but now the whole epic journey is here to enjoy.

Lrama: Pure Ruby LALR Parser Generator — An official Ruby project to implement an LALR parser generator in pure Ruby with a goal of providing error tolerant Ruby parsing.

Rage: An HTTP API Framework Compatible with Rails — There are plenty of ‘alternative’ Ruby webapp and HTTP API approaches (e.g. Sinatra, Roda, or Hanami) but ‘Rails compatibility’ is the big win for this high performance, fiber-based API-only option. v1.12.0 adds a Redis adapter for scaling Cable-based apps across servers.