--- title: "A look at back at Ruby in 2018" publication: "Ruby Weekly" issue: 430 published_at: "2018-12-20" canonical_url: "https://rubyweekly.com/issues/430" --- This week's Ruby news, issue 430 #430 — December 20, 2018 [Read on the Web](https://rubyweekly.com/issues/430) Ruby Weekly [![Ruby Weekly\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/xlufoytqdwxinoyvqazq.jpg)](https://rubyweekly.com/) This week we're taking a break from the usual roundup to look back over the top Ruby news and links of 2018 (in which [Ruby turned 25 years old!](https://github.com/ruby-no-kai/ruby25/blob/master/dave_thomas.en.md)) We'll be back in the new year (hopefully with big Ruby 2.6 news!) but before we go just want to take this opportunity to thank you for reading, and wish you a Merry Christmas and a great 2019. — 🔻_Peter Cooper and Glenn Goodrich_ 🗞 Ruby developments in 2018 - [The Ruby Toolbox](https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/) came [back to life.](https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/blog/2018-02-01/lets-push-things-forward) It remains a great way to find Ruby libraries grouped by category. - Many developers began to say [goodbye to Sprockets and hello to Webpacker.](https://medium.com/@coorasse/goodbye-sprockets-welcome-webpacker-3-0-ff877fb8fa79) - The [first preview of Ruby 2.6](https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2018/02/24/ruby-2-6-0-preview1-released/) came out. The final is due next week. - We all got a little excited about Ruby 2.6's [JIT compilation feature.](https://blog.heroku.com/ruby-mjit) - Sidekiq, the background jobs scheduler, turned [six years old.](http://www.mikeperham.com/2018/02/05/happy-6th-birthday-sidekiq/) - [Rails 5.2](https://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2018/4/9/Rails-5-2-0-final/) was released. [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/fc938136.png)](https://www.redisgreen.net/blog/streams-howto-ruby/?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=redis5&utm_content=primary&utm_term=streams) [Modeling Time Series with Redis 5.0](https://www.redisgreen.net/blog/streams-howto-ruby/?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=redis5&utm_content=primary&utm_term=streams) — An overview of using the new streams data type to model time series data in Redis. RedisGreen sponsor - RailsConf 2018 happened and [lots of great videos were released.](http://confreaks.tv/events/railsconf2018) DHH gave [a really good keynote](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKyv-IGvgGE) at RailsConf 2018. As [did Tenderlove](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBFuZivrdT0), of course. - JRuby, the popular JVM-based Ruby implementation, [became Ruby 2.5 compatible.](https://www.jruby.org/2018/05/24/jruby-9-2-0-0.html) - Stripe [revealed their Ruby type checker.](https://medium.com/byteconf/stripe-is-building-a-ruby-typechecker-d6cd7cee6abf) - Matz [pair programmed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEf6iUIkjf4) and [reflected on Ruby's past, present and future.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTNC26BtRFc#t=0m20s) - [Support ended](https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2018/06/20/support-of-ruby-2-2-has-ended/) for Ruby 2.2. I hope you're not still using it in production! - Julia Evans gave us [rbspy](https://github.com/rbspy/rbspy), a new powerful profiler for Ruby. - GitHub [upgraded from Rails 3.2 to 5.2.](https://githubengineering.com/upgrading-github-from-rails-3-2-to-5-2/) It took a _lot_ of work, but it's OK because [Microsoft are footing the bill now](https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-github-for-7-5-billion/). - We got [an update on Bundler 2.0](https://bundler.io/blog/2018/11/04/an-update-on-bundler-2.html) and also learnt it's going to be bundled, itself, as part of Ruby 2.6. - AWS Lambda (Amazon's serverless platform) added [native support for Ruby 2.5](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/announcing-ruby-support-for-aws-lambda/) — we're serverless now! - Phusion released [Passenger 6.0.](https://blog.phusion.nl/2018/11/30/passenger-6-0-generic-language-support/) - [mruby 2.0.0](https://mruby.org/releases/2018/12/11/mruby-2.0.0-released.html) (an official lightweight/embeddable Ruby interpreter that follows Ruby's ISO spec) came out. 💻 Jobs [Backend Ruby Engineer (x 15) - Remote](https://boards.greenhouse.io/gitlab/jobs/4055697002) — GitLab is hiring Ruby on Rails engineers for the different product teams in the backend. GitLab [Love to Pair Program?](https://jobs.lever.co/backerkit/488b7d87-8ead-4ac4-91cb-59a3d1c0f168?lever-source=ruby-weekly) — BackerKit is hiring developers who LOVE pairing to join our agile team. Join us! Learn more about our team values [here.](https://www.keyvalues.com/backerkit) BackerKit [Join Our Career Marketplace & Get Matched With A Job You Love](https://www.hired.com/ruby) — Through Hired, software engineers have transparency into salary offers, competing opportunities, and job details. Hired 📘 Articles & Tutorials [Bringing Proper Pattern Matching to Ruby?](https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/14709) — You're clearly interested in Ruby continuing to add new features as our second most popular link this year followed a [presentation at RubyKaigi](http://rubykaigi.org/2017/presentations/yotii23.html) in proposing a way to add pattern matching to Ruby. [Matz's conclusion](https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/14709#note-9) was that he liked the _idea_ but not the syntax and further suggestions are sought. Victor Shepelev, Brandon Weaver, et al. [Top 10 Errors From 1000+ Rails Projects (and How to Avoid Them)](https://rollbar.com/blog/top-10-ruby-on-rails-errors/) — Analysis of the ten most common errors from over 1000 Rails projects monitored by Rollbar, along with advice on avoiding such errors yourself. Phil Nash [How Fast is Ruby 2.5?](http://engineering.appfolio.com/appfolio-engineering/2018/2/4/how-fast-is-ruby-250) — 2018 was the year of Ruby 2.5 and it's been one of the most stable and impressive major Ruby releases I can remember while offering relatively modest performance improvements. Noah Gibbs [Yo Dawg, I Heard You Like Newsletters, So I Made You Another Newsletter](https://www.honeybadger.io/leveling-up/?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ruby) — Join other kick-ass developers and learn about engineering, DevOps, cloud architecture, played out memes💀, and more. Honeybadger sponsor [Using Lambdas to Simplify Varying Behaviors in Your Code](https://bbs-software.com/blog/2018/08/04/using-lambdas-to-simplify-varying-behaviors-in-your-code.html) — An excellent article on how lambdas are used to remove conditionals and apply design patterns including specific, real-world use cases - and the second most popular tutorial we linked this year. Keith R. Bennett [What’s New in Ruby 2.6?](https://medium.com/tailor-tech/whats-new-in-ruby-2-6-a4774f3631c1) — The final release is just over a week away (hopefully) so here’s a look at what’s in it for you as a Ruby developer. Guy Maliar [Ruby Optimization with One Magic Comment](https://www.mikeperham.com/2018/02/28/ruby-optimization-with-one-magic-comment/) — Mike Perham of Sidekiq fame explains how freezing your strings can help performance quite a bit and how Ruby 2.3+ can help make this easier. Mike Perham [An Overview of Ruby GUI Development in 2018](https://saveriomiroddi.github.io/An-overview-of-ruby-gui-development-in-2018/) — It’s not often written about but building graphical apps in Ruby _is_ a thing, and here’s a comparison of the most popular approaches. Saverio Miroddi [Actionable Tips to Improve Web Performance with Rails](https://www.monterail.com/blog/actionable-tips-to-improve-web-performance-with-rails) — Based on a talk from Wroclove.rb, the tools and tricks listed here will result in better Rails and general Web performance. Radek Markiewicz 🔧 Code & Tools [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/kc2fk5kwhhtvzb3g2vok.jpg)](https://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2018/10/3/introducing-action-text-for-rails-6/) [Introducing Action Text for Rails 6](https://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2018/10/3/introducing-action-text-for-rails-6/) — The most popular link in 2018 was about _Action Text_, a new framework coming to Rails 6 to make it easier to edit and display rich text content. It leans upon Basecamp’s [Trix editor](https://github.com/basecamp/trix) and DHH recorded [a screencast showing how it works.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJZ9TnKrt7Q) David Heinemeier Hansson [Yabeda: A Modular Framework for Instrumenting Ruby Apps](https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/meet-yabeda-modular-framework-for-instrumenting-ruby-applications) — _“Adopt metrics-driven development with an extendable framework that supports Rails, Sidekiq, and Prometheus out of the box.”_ There (remains) a lot to dig into here. Evil Martians [Track Data Once with Segment and Send It to 200+ Tools. Get Started for Free](https://segment.com/?utm_source=rubynl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=ss) Segment sponsor [rb: Turn Ruby Into a Versatile Command Line Utility](https://github.com/thisredone/rb) — Weighing in at a mere 10 lines, `rb` is a clever approach to making Ruby an even handier pipeable command line tool for manipulating and extracting data. Be sure to check the examples. redka [Stimulus: A JS Framework for the HTML You Already Have](https://github.com/stimulusjs/stimulus) — An interesting framework from Basecamp - [full origin story here](https://stimulusjs.org/handbook/origin). Over the year it’s gained [new reference documentation](https://stimulusjs.org/reference/controllers). Basecamp [An Epic Collection of Ruby One Liners](https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processing/blob/master/ruby_one_liners.md) — Ruby isn’t just for building webapps, y’know. It’s an amazing swiss army knife for anyone at the command line and these examples could help you out with a lot of menial tasks. Sundeep Agarwal Curated by [Cooperpress](https://cooperpress.com/) [Change your email address](https://rubyweekly.com/edit_subscription/*|UID|*) or[Stop getting this newsletter](https://rubyweekly.com/leave/*|UID|*) © Cooper Press Ltd · Fairfield Enterprise Centre, Louth, LN11 0LS, United Kingdom