Ruby Weekly
Plus RubyGems.org has a new look, 37signals' Lexxy rich text editor, and a Ruby events roundup.

#​808 — July 9, 2026

Read on the Web

Together with  ParadeDB

Ruby Weekly

RubyGems.org Gets a New Design — The RubyGems site has received a major lick of fresh paint, much like the official Ruby site several months earlier, with a new theme in both light and dark modes. You can see the work that went on in these pull requests. I like it, though 𝕏 not everyone is a fan.

Rubygems․org

📊 The new stats page links to ClickGems, a site by ClickHouse that aggregates gem statistics and provides visualizations of gem download data (example).

Full-Text Search in ActiveRecord Without a Second System — The official ParadeDB gem brings BM25 full-text search to ActiveRecord. Query your live Postgres tables with the speed and relevance ranking of Elasticsearch. No ETL, no sync jobs.

ParadeDB sponsor

Getting Mastodon Running on Spinel — Two weeks ago we featured Sam's work on compiling a basic Rails app to run on Spinel, Matz's AOT Ruby compiler. But what about a real and large app? Work to get Mastodon running on Spinel is underway and has already yielded some neat byproducts including Spinel Redis and Postgres clients.

Sam Ruby

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

  • 🇺🇸 The SF Ruby conference is back in November, complete with an 8-bit-inspired site and a rebranding to "San Francisco Ruby Startup Conference" with Y Combinator's Garry Tan keynoting.

  • 🌐 Not keen on San Francisco? We've included a global Ruby and Rails events list at the end of the issue! RubyEvents.org also provides a good list.

  • Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson proposes adding a new YARV instruction to CRuby to let the VM allocate 'right-sized' strings without the overhead of String.new's method dispatch.

  • Meanwhile, Jean Boussier proposes that Ruby 4.1's Symbol#to_s should return frozen strings.

🤖 How to Audit a Rails Project with Thoughtbot's Audit Skill — A developer runs Thoughtbot's Rails Audit skill against a mature Rails app and shows how to turn the final report into labelled, prioritized GitHub issues.

Daniela Baron

The Tale of Moving a Ruby App from Heroku to Render — A case study of moving a high traffic Ruby app. Compute costs fell but egress fees sent the bill up significantly. Render's founder replied on X saying the post offers a "good overview" and confirmed improvements are on the way.

Jon Sully (Judoscale)

💡 This is the first in a series of "Judoscale on Tour" posts with Railway, Fly, Northflank, DigitalOcean, and AWS ECS getting the same treatment soon.

💬 Once a Maintainer: Mike Dalessio — A popular interview series catches up with Rails committer and Nokogiri maintainer Mike Dalessio on how AI has changed security work, plus maintainer burnout.

Allison Pike / Once a Maintainer

Rails, Django or Laravel: Which Is Cheapest to Vibe Code? — AI-generated Rails code hides N+1s until production. We tracked the real token costs of vibe coding.

AppSignal sponsor

📄 A new official Rails tutorial: Product Reviews – Covers adding a reviews feature to the e-commerce app built in Getting Started with Rails. Chris Oliver

📄 Writing a Linter is Fun: Introducing Marcdouane – Using dry/cli, dry/configurable, dry/events and inkmark. Stéphane Maniaci

📄 Cinnamon Buns and Commit Bits: A RubyConf Story"I still think being a Rubyist matters and going to events like RubyConf matters." Richard Schneeman

📄 Surviving Rolling Deploys When Sidekiq Meets a Class It Doesn't Know Yet Dmitry Tsepelev

🛠 Code & Tools

Lexxy: A Modern Rich Text Editor for Rails — 37signals introduced Lexxy as a replacement for Trix a year ago. It's matured significantly since, is the main editor in Basecamp, and now has a homepage of its own. It comes with Markdown support, smart links, code highlighting, and integrates with Action Text.

37signals

Extralite 3.0: A Fast, Featureful SQLite Wrapper — The "Ruby on SQLite, but better" library is now.. betterer? It adds many things sqlite3-ruby lacks, has good concurrency options, supports advanced SQLite features, and with v3.0 supports object graph transforms too, as demonstrated in this post.

Sharon Rosner

Behind on Your Product Roadmap? Scale Your Rails Team, Fast — Vetted Rails engineers embedded in your team in weeks, not months. They ship from day one. Flexible terms, no lock-in. 🚀

FastRuby.io® | Rails Staff Aug sponsor

PL/Ruby 2.5: Ruby as a Procedural Language for Postgres — Lets you write functions, triggers, event triggers, and procedures for Postgres in Ruby. Intrigued what you could do? There's a 'cookbook' covering things like email validation, triggers, and token generation.

Joshua D. Drake (Command Prompt Inc.)

💡 If you're a Postgres user, check out our Postgres Weekly newsletter.

AASM 6.0: Add State Machines to Ruby Classes — Started life as the acts_as_state_machine for Active Record, but AASM now supports plain Ruby classes as well as other libraries like Mongoid and Sequel. Ruby 2.x and Rails 6.x support are dropped in v6.0.

Barron, Böttger, et al.

phlex-reactive: Reactive Phlex Components for Rails — Get Livewire-style actions and live cross-tab updates without writing Stimulus controllers or hand-picking Turbo Stream targets.

Mikael Henriksson

  • 📱 Hotwire Native 1.3 – A big release for the framework that turns Hotwire-powered, server-rendered apps into native iOS and Android apps.

  • Turbulence 1.4 – Visualize Ruby code churn versus complexity, now with improved visualizations and a data recorder for your flight logs.

  • Lograge 0.15.0 – Tame Rails' default policy to log everything. Now fully tested up to Rails 8.1 and Ruby 4.0.

  • Tilt 2.8 – Generic interface for Ruby template engines.

  • Nori 2.9 – Long-standing Ruby XML-to-Hash parser.

📰 Classifieds

🔌 Connect AppSignal to Claude Code, Cursor & Copilot. Get Rails errors, traces & metrics in your AI editor.


🔺 Made a library? Written a blog post? Found a useful tutorial? Share it with the Ruby community on RubyFlow, the Ruby and Rails community linklog.

🗓 Upcoming Ruby Events

ℹ️ Note: This list isn't exhaustive, but we'll continue to mention and promote other events over time.

Issue 807 #808