#​793 — March 26, 2026

Read on the Web

Together with  FastRuby.io

Ruby Weekly

How to Install a Gem (It's Harder Than It Sounds) — As one of the people behind Bundler 1.0 and a former maintainer of RubyGems.org, and now working on gem.coop and rv, André knows a few things about how gems tick (big understatement). This post is full of ‘aha’ moments as he walks through installing a gem by hand, giving us an idea of what tools like gem and rv do for us.

André Arko

A Solo Founder Story: 'I Got Fed Up Chasing Contractors' — Tim tried hiring and outsourcing, but nothing fit. Then he found Bonsai. Now he gets reliable monthly Rails maintenance with almost no oversight. "FastRuby.io works independently. I can trust their work without worrying if something will break."

Bonsai by FastRuby.io® sponsor

Building Browser-Based Ruby Tutorials with Tutorialkit.rbTutorialKit.rb is a toolkit for building interactive Ruby (and Rails!) tutorials that run in-browser with WebAssembly. This post tours building your own experiences, shares working examples right in the post, and explains the tech behind it all, including a custom Ruby WASM build that can run Rails.

Pazderin and Dementyev (Evil Martians)

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

Meet Duck Typer: Your New Duck Typing Friend — Duck typing gives us polymorphism for free, but what if you want the interface to be enforced? Duck Typer does just that, asserting that a set of classes share compatible public interfaces, catching signature drift and missing methods without fuss.

Thiago Araújo Silva (Thoughtbot)

AI Shouldn't Cost More Than It Saves — We can find where LLMs pay off, validate with real data, and tune for cost/effectiveness. Need help from experts? Let's talk.

SINAPTIA sponsor

📄 Ten Ways CSV.read Can Silently Corrupt or Lose Your Data – Pitches SmarterCSV (a library of 14 years' maturity) as the solution. Tilo Sloboda

📄 Transfer Manager Directory Support for AWS SDK for Ruby – The AWS SDK for Ruby Transfer Manager now supports directory uploads and downloads. Juli Tera (AWS)

📄 Deploying a Rails 8 App with Kamal on Hetzner – An exhaustive step-by-step walkthrough of the process. Mooktakim Ahmed

📄 Migrating from Devise to Rails' Authentication Generator Nithin Bekal

🛠 Code & Tools

Nokolexbor 0.7: A Faster Drop-in Replacement for Nokogiri — A Lexbor-based HTML5 parser that’s multiple times faster than Nokogiri. Ruby 2.7 is dropped, but Ruby 4.0 is supported and gets precompiled gems (installed in <4 seconds on my machine).

SerpApi

wreq-ruby: An HTTP Client with Real Browser TLS/HTTP2 Signatures — Uses the Rust-powered wreq under the hood to make HTTP requests that appear as if they come from mainstream browsers by using the same headers, TLS extension and cipher suite ordering, HTTP/2 frame settings, etc.

SearchApi

Your Rails App Has an N+1 Problem. AppSignal Will Show You Where — Auto detect N+1 queries, slow ActiveRecord calls, and memory leaks in your app. One gem, and you're monitoring in minutes. Free 30-day trial, no card required.

AppSignal sponsor

Rubyx-py: A New Way to Call Python Code from Ruby — A Rust-powered bridge between Ruby and Python’s C APIs that brings Python into the same memory space as Ruby and shuttles objects back and forth (with no IPC or serialization) and uses uv to manage dependencies.

yinho999

💡 rubyx-py is clearly experimental, so I gave it a try. Segfaults-a-plenty till I used Ruby 4.0.2 compiled with --enable-shared, but it works! I'll blog about this soon as it opens up some interesting capabilities.

simplecov-compare: Compare Coverage Reports Over TimeSimpleCov reports show the test coverage of code at a point in time, but this will help you track changes over time.

Kevin Murphy

📰 Classifieds

🙋‍♂️ What’s next for Heroku? Jon has some thoughts.


♦️ Build Ruby apps that never lose state, even when things fail. Learn by building an app from scratch in a free Temporal Ruby SDK course.


Help us save the German healthcare system - Develop the leading healthcare stats platform with a small dedicated team in a stress free environment (Cologne based).


💎 Hiring Senior Ruby on Rails Engineers at EverAI: 50 million users, fully remote.  Not used Ruby lately? That's okay, you can still apply!

📢  Elsewhere in the ecosystem

  • Four years ago, we first mentioned Thanos, an experimental Ruby to Go transpiler. Its author has recently wielded AI to 'finish the job'. I took it for a spin and it's very cool, but type inference demands and a lack of metaprogramming make many potential use cases a no-Go...? 😅

  • 37signals made its Fizzy Kanban app, built in Rails, 'source available' a few months ago but maintained the paid, SaaS version. That paid version, however, is now entirely free to use.

  • 🤖 GitHub has announced that, starting late April, data (including inputs and snippets) from Free, Pro, and Pro+ Copilot users will be used, by default, to help train future AI models. You can, however, opt out.

  • 🔒 More than ever, it's essential to ensure no secrets have snuck into your repos. Secretlint is a linting tool dedicated entirely to the task. It's written in Node but can be used with Docker against projects of any language.