Ruby Weekly Issue 774: November 6, 2025

#774 — November 6, 2025

Together with

When Your Hash Becomes a String: Hunting Ruby's Million-to-One Memory Bug — This is genuinely a bug hunting epic that involves Ruby, C, the garbage collector, FFI, and a lot of perseverance. If you enjoy such quests, this is a worthy read that shows just how much timing and chance can contribute to a bug.

Maciej Mensfeld

Ruby and Its Neighbors: Smalltalk — Noel continues his tour of languages that influenced Ruby with what many consider the most influential: Smalltalk.

Noel Rappin

🤖 How Ready Is Your Team for AI-Assisted Development? — AI is changing how we build software. If you don’t have a strategy for AI-tooling adoption, you need one: Our AI Readiness Assessment helps CTOs uncover high-value opportunities to enhance your development workflow.

OmbuLabs.ai | Are you AI-ready? sponsor

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

📗 The second edition of Russ Olsen's Eloquent Ruby book is now available to purchase in beta form. The final release is in June 2026.
Ruby's fundamental Net::HTTP library has reached version 0.7 with a noteworthy breaking change: Content-Type will no longer be automatically set to application/x-www-form-urlencoded for requests with a body.
Remember the 'new gem server in town': gem.coop? The team has published its first status update, saying it served 1.4 terabytes of gems in October.
Reddit's /r/ruby was host to an extensive discussion about what prevents more widespread adoption of Ruby?

An Introduction to Game Development with DragonRuby — DragonRuby is a cross-platform 2D game toolkit based upon a custom mruby-based Ruby implementation. Here’s a look at the fundamentals of using it.

Julian Rubisch

💡 DragonRuby is not free (unless you meet certain conditions) but can often be obtained at a discount around gamejams and similar events.

Upgrade to Puma 7 and Unlock the Power of Fair Scheduled Keep‑Alive — A well explained look at a long-standing Puma bug, the problem it caused, and how Puma 7 resolves it.

Schneeman and Ambrose (Heroku)

Get Smart with Honeybadger — Traditional APMs bury you in dashboards you'll never use. Honeybadger’s new smart dashboards are different. See how →

Honeybadger sponsor

📄 Using Google Gemini's 'Nano Banana' with RubyLLM – Currently one of the most popular AI image editing models. Carmine Paolino

📄 Rendering Mesh Gradient Avatars in Rails Apps – A neat example of using ChunkyPNG, a way to render PNG files with Ruby. Exequiel Rozas

📄 RSpec and let!: Understanding the Potential Pitfalls Lucian Ghinda

📄 How Ruby Compiles a Call to a Block Pat Shaughnessy

🛠 Code & Tools

Administrate 1.0: Build Admin Dashboards in Rails Apps — A library for Rails that generates admin dashboards in a flexible way that’s easy to customize by overriding the parts you need. v1.0 bundles assets inside the gem which makes it easier to get started. Here’s a demo of how such a dashboard looks in practice.

Thoughtbot

Macroscope - The Best AI Code Review Tool — Macroscope helps you ship fewer bugs, merge faster and understand how the codebase is changing. Try a 2 week free trial!

Macroscope sponsor

Pagy 43.0: The Popular Pagination Gem — A popular framework-agnostic way to handle pagination in Ruby apps. v43 is a significant redesign and features all-new pagination techniques. The homepage goes into full detail.

Domizio Demichelis

Zaxcel: A DSL for Building Excel Spreadsheets — If you like a good Ruby-based DSL, this is a neat way to build spreadsheets in an idiomatically Ruby way.

AngelList

🤖 RubyLLM 1.9 – A significant release for the powerful LLM library with much improved JSON schema support for tools, a helper for prompt caching on Anthropic/Claude, a transcribe method for turning audio into text, and more.
sqlite3-ruby 2.8.0 – Ruby bindings for SQLite 3. Now using SQLite 3.51.0 which was released just this week.
🤫 Top Secret 0.4 – Filter sensitive information from text before passing it to externa services (like LLMs).
SmartTodo 1.11 – Shopify's library for bringing structure to handling TODO comments in teams.
openapi_first 3.0 – Validate requests/responses against an OpenAPI description.
uri 1.1 – Core Ruby module for handling Uniform Resource Identifiers and URLs.
Astronoby 0.9 – Astronomy/astrometry library for astronomical data and events.
parallel_tests 5.5 – Run RSpec, Test::Unit and more in parallel on more cores.
Textbringer v15 – An Emacs-like text editor written in Ruby.
rack-oauth2 2.3 – OAuth 2.0 server and client library.
Sequel 5.98 – Popular database toolkit. Changelog.

📰 Classifieds

🛟 Tech debt consuming your dev time? SINAPTIA's Ruby experts join your team on demand to handle maintenance, fix legacy code, and tackle issues.

Tuple: what 4 out of the top 10 contributors to Ruby use to pair on code. Tired of dull tools? Discerning developers choose Tuple.

🤖 For Ruby devs using AI - Scout Monitoring's MCP makes your AI assistant the teammate who actually reads the logs.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Some other interesting stories in the broader landscape:

Ruby's RDoc documentation generation tool now has a new theme called 'Aliki'. It's similar to Darkfish but with several enhanced frontend features. You can, temporarily, see it in action here (as above).
A look into how JavaScript source maps work under the hood and how all the pieces fit together to make them useful.
Git 2.0 was released over ten years ago, but Git 3.0 is on the way in 2026 and you can learn a little about what the upgrade will entail.
🤖 Filippo Valsorda is well known for his extensive work on cryptography in the Go world and I was intrigued to read his latest post about how Claude Code managed to help him debug a low-level cryptography bug. On AI tools: "I think it’s a fantastic case study for anyone who’s still skeptical about their usefulness," he says.
spoilerjs is a neat new web component for putting Telegram-like 'spoiler effects' into your web apps. You get a particle effect over elements which users can then click to reveal.