Ruby Weekly Issue 787: February 12, 2026

#787 — February 12, 2026

Together with

Minitest fast, RSpec slow? Not so fast!

Last week, I included a post about an RSpec to Minitest migration that reduced test run time by 200x. My summary glossed over the reasons for the speedup, and a "RSpec slow, Minitest fast" implication was easy to take away. Thanks to Tyler Ritchie for pointing this out. Mea culpa.

Big tooling migrations force you to drop cruft and rethink things. That causes major speedups, not merely switching frameworks.

In Don't Throw the Specs Out with the Factories, Brad Gessler nails this distinction and, more importantly, takes steps to improve things! He presents FixtureBot, a new approach to getting "the speed of fixtures with the syntactic sugar of factories", and pushes back on why RSpec is getting a bad rap.

– Peter Cooper, your humble editor.

⏰ Heroku Is In Maintenance Mode. Plan Your Migration Now — The longer you wait, the harder it gets. Ready to migrate away from Heroku? FastRuby’s 6-phase migration service moves your Rails app to Render, Fly, or elsewhere. Get a detailed plan before committing.

Heroku Migration Service by FastRuby.io® sponsor

TutorialKit.rb: The ruby.wasm Journey Goes Onward — TutorialKit.rb is a toolkit for building interactive Ruby and Rails tutorials that run entirely in the browser using WebAssembly and WebContainers – here's a live example. A fantastic look at what's possible with Ruby in the browser right now.

Pazderin and Turner (Evil Martians)

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

😬 Heroku has adopted a 'sustaining engineering model' (i.e. gone into "maintenance mode"). This was widely interpreted as 'Heroku is over', though that's not strictly true.
🇺🇸 RubyConf 2026 takes place this July 14-16 in Las Vegas. The CFP has just opened if you'd like to speak - it closes March 15.
An official Ruby dev meeting is taking place today where lead core team members, like Matz, answer questions about features and bugs. A few fun things in the agenda, like autoload_relative and a new API to scan directories efficiently.
If you use the mise version manager, it can now download precompiled Ruby binaries instead of compiling from source each time.
Max Bernstein, who works on ZJIT, shares a brief but super-technical look behind the scenes at just one of many design decisions taking place in the deepest parts of Ruby.

Build a Resumable CSV Import with ActiveJob::Continuable — Rails 8.1 introduced a feature that allows for jobs to be interrupted and resumed, making it easy to break up laborious tasks into multiple steps.

Geetfun

Building AI Agents in Ruby: Why Is It So Easy? — Ruby's power makes AI development a fluid, frictionless experience. Here's why we think it’s a perfect fit for the task.

SINAPTIA sponsor

📉 How We Improved Rails Response Times by 87% – No tricks. Just setting up good monitoring to finally see where performance problems lie. Fast Retro

📄 Use StringInquirer for Readable Predicate Methods – e.g. status.pending? returns true if status == "pending" Andy Croll

📄 The Timezone Bug That Hid in Plain Sight For Months Szymon Fiedler

🛠 Code & Tools

Falcon: A High-Performance Web Server for Ruby — A multi-process, multi-fiber rack-compatible HTTP server built on top of async, async-container and async-http. It’s been a lonnng time since we mentioned this, but it’s now serving most of Shopify’s traffic so you know it can scale. GitHub repo and a getting started guide.

Samuel Williams

EasyTalk: Define, Generate and Validate JSON Schemas in Ruby — Reduce complexity with a single Ruby DSL for generating JSON Schema, validations, and error messages. This week’s v3.3.1 release also integrates with RubyLLM for building structured output schemas.

Sergio Bayona

You Don't Need a Second Database for Analytics — Tiger Data keeps analytics on live Postgres data. No pipelines, no sync lag. Extend Postgres instead. Try free.

Tiger Data sponsor

Ancestry 5.0: Organize an Active Record Model into a Tree Structure — Uses the materialized path pattern to efficiently model tree structures or hierarchies in a model, giving methods like parent, children, siblings, and many more to your objects. Now supports Rails 8.

Stefan Kroes

🎨 A Quick Demo of Ruby-LibGD v0.2.4 — ruby-libgd is a new dynamic image generation library that binds to libgd.

Giménez Silva Germán Alberto

RBS::Inline 0.13 – Embed type declarations into Ruby code as comments.
Dalli 5.0 – High-performance Ruby memcached client. Changelog.
Rumale 2.1 – Scikit-Learn-style machine learning in Ruby.
RDoc 7.2 – Ruby's official documentation generation tool.

📰 Classifieds

📝 Leaving Heroku? We tried the alternatives. Here’s our take.

Stop juggling 5 tools to monitor 1 Rails app — AppSignal handles errors, performance, logs, uptime, background jobs and more. Used by 1,500+ teams. Paid plans from ~$19/mo, unlimited seats. Free trial.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Some other interesting stories in the broader landscape:

Planet Ruby is a prototype we're noodling on that's like a traditional 'planet' site (e.g. Planet PostgreSQL) bringing together items from a variety of feeds in one place, but filtered down to just the Ruby-related items (mostly successfully).
Different ecosystem, but if you ever have to search for or deal with npm packages, npmx.dev is a fresh, fast way to browse the official npm registry.
📊 Data from over 100,000 sites was boiled down into this useful report on modern CSS usage. The median number of CSS rules per site was 2,802, with one page somehow using a whopping 210,695 rules!
😍 Shades of Halftone is a gorgeously detailed walkthrough of creating pixelation, dithering, and halftone printing effects using GLSL and React Three Fiber. So aesthetic.
In personal news, I finally switched from asdf to mise for managing my Ruby (and Python, et al.) versions and wow, what a breath of fresh air. 'Just Use Mise', indeed.