Ruby Weekly Issue 784: January 22, 2026

#784 — January 22, 2026

Together with

RatatuiRuby: A Fresh Way to Build Terminal UIs in Ruby — Ratatui is a popular Rust library for building fast, modern terminal user interfaces, and RatatuiRuby brings it to Ruby too. Despite being in beta/pre-release, this is an incredibly solid effort and I had fun playing with it (above).

Kerrick Long

💡 This is an active moment for Ruby TUIs with Marco Roth's efforts in bringing Charm's powerful TUI tooling from the Go world into Ruby too.

Stuck on Rails 4.2? Need Estimates for Budget Approval? — Stop postponing your upgrade. Get a thorough action plan and estimates backed by 50,000 dev/hours of historical data. CISOs and CFOs love our Rails upgrade roadmaps. Don’t have the budget for a Roadmap? Get our AI-enhanced Rails roadmap for $0.

The Rails Upgrade Roadmap sponsor

Considering GoodJob, Solid Queue, Sidekiq, and Active Job in 2026 — The Ruby ecosystem is lucky to have many options for running background jobs. Here, Ben, the maintainer of GoodJob, shares his genuine thoughts on choosing between the options, built upon his years of Rails experience. He finds merits in each option, depending on the specific scenario.

Ben Sheldon

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

📕 The 6th edition of Programming Ruby is now in beta. The Pickaxe book, as it is commonly known, is set for final publication in March and covers Ruby 4.0 in depth.
Saroj Maharjan, one of the coordinators of Ruby's participation in Google Summer of Code, wrote in asking us to share the news that the Ruby GSoC team is looking for ideas for projects across the Ruby ecosystem that could join in and accept contributions from GSoC 2026 participants.
Eileen Uchitelle ran into an odd bug in Bundler 4.0.1 when using gems across multiple sources. The fix, in Bundler 4.0.4, may have caused another related issue, though. One to keep an eye out for.
🇦🇹 RubyConf AT is taking place in Vienna, Austria this May 29-31. Ticket sales open tomorrow.

🧶 Building a Ruby Pattern Generator for a Crochet Circle — A delightfully crafty use case for Ruby and a great example of using code to enhance a hobby.

Mary Lee

Ruby 4.0's New Ruby::Box for In-Process Isolation — A quick practical look at Ruby 4.0’s highly experimental ‘Box’ mechanism for loading libraries into isolated execution contexts.

Prateek Choudhary

The #1 Time-Series Database Built on Postgres — TimescaleDB extends Postgres with hypertables, 95% compression, and continuous aggregates. Start building for free.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

📄 Beware the grpc Gem and Ruby 4.0 – If you're seeing very slow bundle times with Ruby 4.0, this might be why. Ryan Bigg

📄 Building Smart Retry Strategies in Rails with Error-Aware Delays Code with Rails

📄 How Active Storage Variants Work to Transform Images Akshay Khot

📄 Getting Started With Vite on Rails Julio Lucero

📄 How I Read a Pull Request Kevin Murphy

🛠 Code & Tools

Puma 7.2: The Fast Multi-Threaded HTTP Server for Ruby Apps — You can now set auto worker count via the DSL (workers :auto) and HTTP parsing has been made 17% faster! Plus the usual bugfixes and refactoring.

Nate Berkopec

From Prompt Engineering to LLM Cost Monitoring. What Can We Do for You? — We identify what's worth building with AI, test prompts against your data, optimize for cost, and ship to production. Let's talk.

SINAPTIA sponsor

POSSE Party: 'Quit Social Media by Posting More' — A source-available (GitHub repo) Ruby app enabling you to “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere” (a.k.a. POSSE) which is a concept for blogging on your own site and having the content pushed out to social networks for you.

Justin Searls

Redis::Objects 2.0: Map Redis Types Directly to Ruby Objects — An idiomatically Ruby interface to the Redis data structure server that avoids the usual mess of ORMs (since ORMs don’t naturally fit with the lighter Redis approach).

Nate Wiger

🤖 RubyLLM 1.11.0 – Unified API for working with AI models and services. Say hello to xAI/Grok in this version.
Sidekiq::Throttled v2.1.0 – Concurrency and rate-limit throttling for Sidekiq. Changelog.
Rage 1.20.0 – Fast web framework for API-first apps that's compatible with Rails.
Shoryuken 7.0 – Efficient thread-based message processor for Amazon SQS.
🎨 Color 2.2 – RGB, CMYK, HSL, and other color space manipulation library.
Listen v3.10 – Listens to file modifications and notifies you about changes.
🤖 MCP Ruby SDK v0.6 – Official Ruby SDK for the Model Context Protocol.
resque-scheduler v5.0.0 – Job scheduling system built on top of Resque.
Byebug v13.0 – Long-standing feature-rich debugger for Ruby.
Phlex 2.4.0 – Build object-oriented web views in pure Ruby.
Faker v3.6.0 – Library for generating realistic fake data.

📰 Classifieds

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📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Some other interesting stories in the broader landscape:

🤖 Whether you agree or not, Ryan Dahl, the original creator of both Node.js and Deno, drew much attention with a provocative post on X where he shared a thought on the changing role of software engineers in an agentic world, namely: "the era of humans writing code is over." Meanwhile, though, DHH says AI isn't ready to replace junior developers yet.
🐘 If you're a Postgres user, you might enjoy this article on alternatives to 'soft deleting' where rather than use a boolean or datetime flag, you could use a trigger to move a row to an archive table or capture deleted rows from the WAL for archival.
🔎 The VS Code team has explained how they implemented a new, fast client-side docs search system for the VS Code site using WebAssembly. You can use their docfind engine yourself too, and there's a live demo showing off its speed on an index of 50,000 articles.
A fun read about the techniques involved in creating an ASCII text renderer for graphics.