--- title: "This week's Ruby news, issue 230" publication: "Ruby Weekly" issue: 230 published_at: "2015-01-22" canonical_url: "https://rubyweekly.com/issues/230" --- This week's Ruby news, issue 230 JRuby 9000, MRI's global method cache, the 2015 Ruby Survey, symbol GC, and more.[Read this e-mail on the Web](http://rubyweekly.com/issues/230) Ruby WeeklyIssue 230 — January 22, 2015 JRuby Blog[JRuby 9.0.0.0-pre1 Released](http://www.jruby.org/2015/01/20/jruby-9-0-0-0-pre1)The first (pre)-release of ‘JRuby 9000’ is here representing a reboot of many JRuby concepts. It supports Ruby 2.2 (except Refinements and a few other things) and has a new optimizing runtime based on a traditional compiler design. If you want to learn more, [this talk from RubyConf](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJGVH1XTtSw) covers a lot. Shopify[Tuning Ruby's Global Method Cache](http://www.shopify.com/technology/16777156-tuning-rubys-global-method-cache)Scott Francis noticed something odd when profiling the main Shopify app and dug in deep to work out what was going on. It turned out MRI’s method cache only has room for 2048 entries and it was impacting their app. Lawson Kurtz[Rubyists: Just Use Double-Quoted Strings](http://viget.com/extend/just-use-double-quoted-ruby-strings)In short, using double quoted strings is not much slower than using single quoted ones, so you can get away with sticking with one type. MailgunSponsored[Forget net/smtp, try sending email with the Mailgun API](http://www.mailgun.com/?utm_source=rubyweeklyjan22=email=forgetsmtp)RESTful API abstracts away the messy details of sending transactional or bulk email. No gem installation required. The first 10,000 emails are free each month. [Try Mailgun now.](http://www.mailgun.com/#rubysample) [![Mailgun\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/1bf92eed.png)](http://www.mailgun.com/?utm_source=rubyweeklyjan22=email=forgetsmtp) Hampton Catlin[Hampton's Ruby Survey 2015](http://www.ruby-survey.com/)Hampton Catlin (creator of Sass and Haml) started the Ruby Survey in 2008. It’s a great way to track trends of developers in the Ruby world. Consider filling it out again this year as we can all learn from [the results.](http://www.ruby-survey.com/stats) SitePoint[Symbol GC in Ruby 2.2](http://www.sitepoint.com/symbol-gc-ruby-2-2/)What is symbol GC and why should we need to garbage collect symbols anyway? Richard Schneeman looks at why Ruby 2.2 includes the feature and the benefits it provides. Jim Gay[Ruby Forwardable Deep Dive](http://www.saturnflyer.com/blog/jim/2015/01/20/ruby-forwardable-deep-dive/)The Forwardable makes it easy to delegate specific methods on one object to another designated object. Jim looks at how it works. Twilio[How Patrick McKenzie Builds Twilio Apps](https://www.twilio.com/blog/2015/01/how-patrick-mckenzie-builds-twilio-apps.html)A pretty long and interesting tale of how Ruby and the Twilio telephony service are coupled with one of Hacker News’s most famous user’s business aims, complete with examples. Jobs - [Senior Backend Engineer at Drivy (Paris, France)](https://en.drivy.com/jobs?utm_source=ruby_weekly=ruby_weekly_job#2015-backend)We're building the leading peer-to-peer car rental service (think "Airbnb for cars") in Europe and we're looking for an experienced Ruby developer to helps us tackle some exciting challenges. Drivy - [Senior Rails Developer at Goldstar (Portland, OR or Pasadena, CA)](http://www.goldstar.com/company/developer-jobs?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email)Goldstar is the world’s largest online seller of half-price tickets to live events -- theater, concerts, sports and even things like wine tastings, scavenger hunts and rodeos. We are looking for experienced Rails developers to grow our small but highly productive backend team. Goldstar - [Rails Developer at Unabridged Software](http://unabridgedsoftware.com/come-work-with-us?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email)We are a software consultancy, focused on Rails, serving clients in the US and abroad. Our committed clients want features done yesterday. Come join a small team, wear multiple hats, and learn what it takes to ship successful projects. Unabridged Software In brief - [Rails to Allow '1' or true for validates_acceptance_of Validation](https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/18439?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email) news Rails Repository - [Encryption on Rails – A Primer](http://product.reverb.com/2015/01/20/encryption-on-rails-a-primer/?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email) tutorial A look at encryption with AES, attr_encrypted, and key rotation. Joe Kurleto - [Forcing Recalculation of Counter Cache Columns in Rails](https://www.krautcomputing.com/blog/2015/01/13/recalculate-counter-cache-columns-in-rails/?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email) tutorial Manuel Meurer - [Writing Rails Extensions (or Adding Date-based group_by Methods to ActiveRecord)](http://willschenk.com/dateslice-writing-rails-extensions/?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email) tutorial Will Schenk - [3 Ways to Monkey-Patch Without Making A Mess](http://www.justinweiss.com/blog/2015/01/20/3-ways-to-monkey-patch-without-making-a-mess/?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email) tutorial Justin Weiss - [Why Does Ruby Have Blocks? (One for the beginners.)](http://devblog.avdi.org/2015/01/16/why-does-ruby-have-blocks/?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email) tutorial Avdi Grimm - [Rbkit: A Memory Profiler for Ruby](http://rbkit.codemancers.com/?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email) tools Designed as a low-pause profiler to be used for profiling real world applications. For Ruby 2.1+. readme - [Are you using protection? Make sure your code is 100% covered.](https://coveralls.io/?utm_source=cooperpress%20=email=ruby=2015) tools Software test coverage history and analysis, spot coverage gaps where bugs may be hiding. Always free for open-source projects. CoverallsSponsored - [Hasten: Hasten The Import of Large Tables Into MySQL](http://thirtysixthspan.com/posts/hasten-the-import-of-large-tables-into-mysql?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email) tools Derrick Jay Parkhurst - [Testing and Deploying your apps with Codeship](https://codeship.com?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email) tools Codeship is a hosted Continuous Delivery service that focuses on speed, reliability and usability. CodeshipSponsored - [6 Reasons Jubilee Could be a Rubyist's New Best Friend](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFR0G89WXI8) video Forrest Chang shows off Jubilee, a Rack server on top of Vert.x that gives us easy access to speed, concurrency, easy Websockets support and more. RubyConf 2014 - [Why Is Your Rails Application Still Coupled to ActiveRecord?](https://medium.com/@KamilLelonek/why-is-your-rails-application-still-coupled-to-activerecord-efe34d657c91?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email) Kamil Lelonek - [Neo4j.rb v4.1 Released: Library for the Leading Graph Database](http://neo4jrb.io/blog/2015/01/09/neo4j-rb_v4-1_released.html?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email) code Faster, full support for Neo4j 2.2 added, and more. Chris Grigg - [MailInterceptor: Intercepts and Forwards Emails in Non Production Environments](https://github.com/bigbinary/mail_interceptor?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email) code BigBinary - [Gauguin: Extract The Main Colors from an Image](https://github.com/LunarLogic/gauguin?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email) code Lunar Logic Curated by [Peter Cooper](https://twitter.com/peterc) and [Glenn Goodrich](https://twitter.com/ruprict), and published by [Cooperpress](https://cooperpress.com/). 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