#498 — April 23, 2020

Read on the Web

Ruby Weekly

Credit: Divina Epiphania / Shutterstock.com

Mining for Malicious Ruby Gems: 700+ Gems Affected — Breathe easy as this was all resolved a month ago (and was too obscure to pay off for the hackers anyway) but a security research team recently found over 700 malicious Ruby gems that were subtle typos/adjustments of more popular gems (e.g. atlas-client vs atlas_client – could you tell which one is real?)

Tomislav Maljic

You Can Now Sponsor Matz on GitHub — I appreciate these are challenging times, but if you’ve ever wanted to give a big thank you to Matz, the creator of Ruby, here’s one way to do it. We’re sponsoring Matz now as without him, this newsletter wouldn’t exist! 😄 Alternatively, if you have little to spare, maybe send him a thanks on Twitter?

GitHub Sponsors

Ruby Performance Tips — Here’s a collection of practical tips for improving Ruby performance for better user experiences, brought to you by Raygun. Read the tips here.

Raygun sponsor

Full Text Search in Milliseconds with Rails and Postgres — If you’ve never played with full text search with Postgres and Rails, this is a fine place to start. It covers LIKE/ILIKE, trigrams, and ‘proper’ full text searching. We also get to see how Leigh took a query from taking 130ms down to 7ms.

Leigh Halliday

▶  Introduction to Stimulus Reflex — Stimiulus Reflex makes SPA-type interactions very simple by using ActionCable to render pages and then diffing them on the client.

GoRails

Rails Performance: When is Caching the Right Choice? — Before you say “always”, understand that caching is not free and, if done incorrectly, can even make things worse.

Jonathan Miles

💻 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

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

ℹ️ Interested in running a job listing in Ruby Weekly? There's more info here.

📘 Articles & Tutorials

How to Customize Webpack in Rails Apps — How to go about configuring webpack when tweaking webpacker.yml just isn’t enough.

Ross Kaffenberger

RSpec Given/When/Then with Symbols — An interesting, alternative way to structure a BDD feature in RSpec. I think I prefer the underscores but YMMV.

Caius Durling

Looking Inside a Ruby Gem — Piotr decomposes a .gem file which turns out to just be a collection of gzipped and tarred files, only some of which are the code.

Piotr Murach

eBook: The Most Important Events to Monitor in Your Postgres Logs — In this eBook, you will learn about the Top 6 Postgres log events for monitoring query performance and preventing downtime.

pganalyze sponsor

Passing Rails Controller Params to SidekiqActionController::Parameters can give Sidekiq issues.

Prathamesh Sonpatki

Catchup Subscriptions with Rails Event Store

Miroslaw Praglowski

Logic-less Ruby Templates with Mustache

David Santangelo

▶  Discussing Ruby for Good with Sean Marcia — Sean talks about founding Ruby For Good (an event about philanthropic Ruby development) and some of the projects it has been responsible for creating.

Ruby Rogues podcast

🛠 Code and Tools

Impressionist 2.0: A Plugin to Log Impressions in Rails Apps — Impressionist tracks page views and impressions. v2.0 has just dropped but they’re also are looking for new maintainers, so contact them if you want to get involved.

Charlotte Ruby Group

acli 0.3: A Command Line Client for Action Cable — Interesting on two fronts.. first, because it’s an mruby app, and we don’t see many of those, and second, because it lets you play with Action Cable channels in any easier way.

Vladimir Dementyev

Undercover: A Tool to Stop You Shipping Untested Code — It’s like RuboCop but for code coverage rather than code style.

Jan Grodowski

How to Monitor Your Host Metrics Automatically

AppSignal sponsor

Bridgetown: A Modern Ruby (JAMstack) Web Framework — Bridgetown is a new Ruby-based static-site generator based on a fork of Jekyll. It supports plugins and Webpack, so you can use your front-end framework of choice.

Bridgetown

net-ssh 6.0: A Pure Ruby Implementation of the SSH2 Client Protocol — Yes, you can write programs that invoke and interact with processes on remote servers, via SSH2, all in Ruby.

Buck, Fazekas, et al.