#497 — April 16, 2020

Read on the Web

Ruby Weekly

Bye Bye Ruby 2.4, Support Has Ended — From the end of April 2019 till now, Ruby 2.4 has been in its ‘security maintenance’ phase but now you won’t even get that, Ruby 2.4.10 should be the final 2.4 release. 2.5 will follow in 2.4’s footsteps next year, so upgrading to 2.6 or 2.7 should now be a priority for those older apps.

Ruby Core Team

Testing Ruby Decorators with super_method — Have you ever wondered how you can properly test the behavior of a method overridden by Module#prepend? Enter super_method which returns a Method object of which superclass method would be called when super is used or nil if none exists.

Simone Bravo

You Hacked the Gibson? Yeah, They Built Their Own Login — Don't let Crash Override pwn your app. FusionAuth adds secure login, registration and user management to your app in minutes not months. Download our community edition for free.

FusionAuth sponsor

Heya: A Sequence Mailer for Rails — “Think of it like ActionMailer, but for timed email sequences.” Note: It’s open source but not free for commercial use beyond a certain point.

Honeybadger Industries LLC

A Final Report on Ruby Concurrency Developments — A report on work funded by a 2019 Ruby Association Grant that puts forth a proposal of using non-blocking fibers to improve Ruby’s concurrency story.

Samuel Williams

Mocking in Ruby with Minitest — Minitest has basic mocking functionality baked in, but be judicious in your use of it.

Heidar Bernhardsson

???? Jobs

Ruby Backend Developer (Austria) — We’re seeking mid-level and senior devs to join us and build top-class backend infrastructure for our adidas apps, used by millions. Our stack includes: jRuby, Sinatra, Sidekiq, MySQL, & MongoDB.

Runtastic

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

▶️ Get ready for your next role: Pluralsight is free for the entire month of April. Stay Home. Skill Up. #FreeApril — SPONSORED

???? Articles & Tutorials

Predicting the Future With Linear Regression in Ruby — Linear regression is a mathematical approach to modelling a relationship between multiple variables and is demonstrated here by exploring whether the tempo of a song predicts its popularity on Spotify.

Julie Kent

Feature Flags: A Simple Way to 'De-Stress' Production Releases — Feature flags bridge a gap between the abstract concept of continuous delivery and tactical release of features.

Matt Swanson

A Guide to Deprecation Warnings in Rails — If you’ve upgraded Rails and you start seeing warnings screaming at you, you can either get Googling or.. read this ????

Luciano Becerra

What's the Difference Between Monitoring Webhooks and Background Jobs

AppSignal sponsor

Understanding webpacker.yml — Have you ever really gone through the Webpack config?

Ross Kaffenberger

Using Optimizer Hints in Rails — Rails 6 removes the need to write raw SQL to use optimizer hints, so that’s cool.

Prateek Choudhary

Dissecting Rails Migrations — You should pick up something new about migrations by reading this article as it covers all of the essentials and a little more.

Prathamesh Sonpatki

The Basics of Custom Exception Handling — Never hurts to revise the basics of effective exceptions.

Mark Michon

How to Improve Code Readability with Closures

Andrey Koleshko

???? Code and Tools

ruby-prolog: A Pure Ruby Prolog-like DSL for Logical Programming — Solve complex logic problems on the fly using a dynamic, Prolog-like DSL inline with your normal code.

Preston Lee

Anyway Config: Keep Your Ruby Configuration Sensible — Get your Ruby project out of ‘ENV Hell’ with anyway_config, a framework for managing configuration.

Vladimir Dementyev

The End of Heroku Alerts — Rails Autoscale keeps your app healthy. Simple and effective autoscaling for Web, Sidekiq, Delayed Job, and Que.

Rails Autoscale sponsor

Tomo 1.0: A Friendly CLI for Deploying Rails Apps — There’s a short tutorial for deploying Rails, and the documentation is thorough.

Matt Brictson

ActiveLdap 6.0: An Object Oriented Interface to LDAP — A very long standing project (16 years!) that has just had an update. LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and while I don’t hear about it much anymore, it has plenty of established use cases.

Sutou Kouhei

Elasticsearch Integrations for ActiveModel/Record and Rails

Elastic

RubyMine 2020.1 Released

Natalie Kudanova

#499 — April 30, 2020

Read on the Web

???? Occasionally we run interviews in Ruby Weekly and we're back with another one.. with long time Rubyist and Kiba maintainer, Thibaut Barrère. Be sure to check out the bottom of this issue to read it, especially if you ever run ETL jobs with Ruby! ????

Ruby Weekly

▶  Let's Build a Twitter Clone in 10 Minutes with Rails, CableReady, and StimulusReflex — You know that cloning Twitter in 10 minutes is impossible, but what about the core mechanism of the idea? After a slow first minute, this video does a pretty good job of showing off some techniques you might not have used before.

Nate Hopkins

discuss.rubyonrails: The Rails Project Discussion Forum — Basically a Web version of the Rails mailing lists and a worthwhile place to head if you want to suggest features, ask questions, etc.

Ruby on Rails Discussions

Easy Rails Deployments — Deploy your Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, and Rack application to any cloud or server. Cloud 66 offers a scalable Heroku alternative that doesn't lock you in. Try it free and get extra $66 free credits with the code: 'Ruby-Weekly'.

Cloud 66 sponsor

sequel-activerecord-adapter: Allows Sequel to Reuse an ActiveRecord Connection — If you want to use more Sequel or migrate in that direction, this makes it easy.

Janko Marohnić

Ruby Adds Experimental Support for 'End-Less' Method Definitions — We’ve touched on this in a previous issue, but if you fancy a proper blog post with examples, this is more accessible than digging through feature tracker discussions. I’m not a fan of this syntax myself yet, but Prateek does a good job of selling it.

Prateek Choudhary

CableReady: Trigger Client-Side DOM Changes from Server-Side Ruby — If you skipped the video above because it’s a video (and I know many of you do ????) CableReady is still worth checking out. It aims to “complete the ActionCable story” by providing a way to directly interact with clients over ActionCable WebSockets. The docs will help you get the idea.

Hopsoft

???? Jobs

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

Security Engineer (Remote) — Are you an engineer with experience in Rails and/or Go? Join our team and help secure our apps and cloud infrastructure.

Shogun

???? Articles & Tutorials

A Practical Use for PStore — PStore is one of the older parts of Ruby’s stdlib and lets you persist (and restore) a Ruby hash to disk. I haven’t seen it in Ruby code for years but Arkency have found a neat, modern use case.

Paweł Pacana

▶  Drag and Drop Sortable Lists with Rails and Stimulus JS — How to wire up drag and drop lists with a Rails app using Sortable, Stimulus and acts_as_list.

Go Rails

Setting Up Multi-Factor Authentication for RubyGems.org — If you’re a registered user of the official Ruby Gems repository, you should have had an email this week about securing your account using 2FA. This is just my own reminder that this is a good idea especially if you publicly publish widely used gems! :-)

Rubygems.org

Let’s Explore Big-O Notation With Ruby ???? — Learn to use Big-O to look at an algorithm and easily discern its efficiency, without having to run a profiling tool.

Honeybadger sponsor

▶  Discussing Docker and Kubernetes with Kelsey Hightower — A worthwhile show to listen to if Kubernetes and Docker intimidate you but you want to know a little more. Kelsey is good at breaking these things down into understandable pieces.

Rails with Jason Podcast podcast

Rails System Tests in Docker — We’re seeing an uptick in articles about system tests in Rails. Here’s how to integrate them into your development Docker setup.

Hint.io

The Difference Between System Specs and Feature Specs — If you’ve felt the difference between RSpec’s “feature specs” and “system specs” is quite subtle, this explanation will help.

Jason Swett

Why Rubyists Should Consider Learning Go — If you want compilation and a type system, Crystal is probably a better fit for Rubyists, but Go is undoubtedly a neat language and ecosystem (and if you do end up in the Go world, check out our Go weekly! ????)

Ayooluwa Isaiah

Building a Ruby CLI with Thor

Daniel Gómez

???? Code and Tools

git curate: Peruse and Delete git Branches Ergonomically — Got a repo cluttered with branches here and there? git curate aims to cure the pains of getting those branches back under control.

Matt Harvey

MessageBus: A Reliable and Robust Messaging Bus for Ruby and Rack

Sam Saffron

Are You Spending Too Much on Heroku?

Rails Autoscale sponsor

bootstrap_form: A Rails Form Builder for Bootstrap v4-Style Forms

Bootstrap Ruby

ActiveModelAttributes: The Active Record Attributes API, but for Active Model — Brings some of the goodies of the Rails 5 Active Record attributes API to ActiveModel too. 1.6.0 just dropped.

Karol Galanciak

#500 — May 7, 2020

Read on the Web

???? Welcome to issue 500! A bit of an arbitrary milestone but thanks to you all :-)

Ruby Weekly

Ruby Next: Make All Rubies Quack Alike — Ruby Next is a Ruby-to-Ruby transpiler that allows you to use the latest features of Ruby in previous versions without monkey patching or refinements. Could this be how experimental features are released going forward?

Vladimir Dementyev

Ruby 3 'Guilds' Proposal Now Called Ractor — This documentation is in Japanese (though the source code examples are easy to follow) but the news is that the new, proposed concurrency mechanism for Ruby 3 called Guilds (explained here) has been renamed to Ractor (as in ‘Ruby actors’, Ruby’s take on the actor model).

Koichi Sasada

Don’t Do Auth From Scratch. Focus On Your App — Spend less time on authentication and authorization and more time developing your awesome app. Auth built for <devs>. Download our community edition for free.

FusionAuth sponsor

Take the 2020 Ruby on Rails Survey — This is the sixth outing for Planet Argon’s survey which began in 2009. We try and support it each time as the results always make for interesting reading (see 2018’s results). Participate and become data ????

Planet Argon Team

Alt::BrightonRuby: A Slightly Odd, Quasi-Conference for Strange Times — Alt::BrightonRuby is not happening in-person this year. Instead, you can buy the recorded talks, get a _why book, and get some podcasts with the speakers.

Alt::BrightonRuby

???? Jobs

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

Security Engineer (Remote) — Are you an engineer with experience in Rails and/or Go? Join our team and help secure our apps and cloud infrastructure.

Shogun

???? Articles & Tutorials

▶  How To Begin Contributing to a Gem — If you’ve been using a library for a while and you want to contribute back, how do you get started? A 12 minute introduction here.

Drifting Ruby

How to Set Up Factory Bot on a Fresh Rails Project — Factory Bot is a library for setting up Ruby objects as test data – an alternative to fixtures, essentially.

Jason Swett

Using Postgres's DISTINCT ON to Avoid an N+1 Query — “Recently I fixed a tricky N+1 query and thought I should write it up..”

John Nunemaker

Need to Upgrade Rails? Don’t Know How Long It Will Take? — Get an action plan for your Rails upgrade and an in-depth report about your technical debt and outdated dependencies ????.

FastRuby.io | Rails Upgrade Services sponsor

5 Uses for 'Splats' — 5 different ways to leverage Ruby’s splat (*) operator.

Jason Dinsmore

Running Multiple Instances of Webpacker — If you’re working on multiple Rails apps at once, changing where Rails gets served up is easy by configuring the port, but what about Webpacker? That requires another tweak.

Scott Watermasysk

Performing Asynchronous HTTP requests in Rails — How to update parts an app’s pages with asynchronous HTTP requests. A step-by-step how-to with JavaScript’s fetch() function, and Rails native server-side partial rendering.

Remi Mercier

How to Use AWS SimpleDB from Ruby — If you haven’t heard of AWS SimpleDB, you wouldn’t be alone as it’s not very popular, but it’s a pretty simple and cheap way to store simple documents in the cloud.

Peter Cooper

What's The Difference Between Monitoring Webhooks and Background Jobs

AppSignal sponsor

Ways to Reduce Your Heroku App's Slug Size — You might be surprised Heroku didn’t already do some of this for you.

Rohit Kumar

A Chat with Thibaut Barrère — If you missed our interview with Thibaut Barrere (Rubyist, and creator of the Kiba ETL framework) in last week’s issue, you can catch up here.

Glenn Goodrich

???? Code and Tools

Rodauth 2.0: Ruby's 'Most Advanced' Authentication Framework — A authentication framework that can work in any Rack-based webapp. Built using Roda and Sequel, Rodauth can be used with other frameworks and database libraries if you wish. Why’s it so advanced? More info on that here.

Jeremy Evans

RubyGems 3.1.3 Released — Lots of little bug fixes and tweaks.

RubyGems Blog

Business: Business Day Calculations for Ruby — Define your working days and holidays and then you can do ‘business day arithmetic’ (for example, what’s in 5 working days after now taking holidays and weekends into account?)

GoCardless

Lockbox: Modern Encryption for Rails

Andrew Kane

split: The Rack Based A/B 'Split' Testing Framework — A mature framework with robust configuration and multiple options for determining the winning option.

Split

P.S. In last week's issue, one of the links to our sponsors was incorrect and some readers emailed us to say they really wanted to read the promised article, Let’s Explore Big-O Notation with Ruby, so here it is. Apologies for any inconvenience.