#813 — August 13, 2026

🗓️ A scheduling note: We're taking a summer break next week, so we'll be back on August 27. Catch you then!
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Your editor, Peter Cooper

Together with

Ruby 2D 1.0: SDL3, WebAssembly, and a Comeback Story — After three years dormant, Tom Black's "Square.new-and-it-appears" graphics gem gets a rewrite with SDL3-powered GPU rendering and the ability to compile experiences to WebAssembly (live examples). Learn how to use its DSL here or read Tom's story of resurrecting the project.

Tom Black

😅 I tested it out by making a little Mario Paint-inspired paint app (above) and I learnt I can't draw the Ruby logo at all!

🚨 We Audited 137 Rails Apps. 98% Had a Critical KEV — Rails 7.2 went EOL this week, so it's a good time to look at what’s running in production. We map your images, runtimes, and K8s workloads against CISA's KEV catalog and write the verdicts up as VEX.

FastRuby.io® | Infrastructure Assessments sponsor

json 3.0.0 RC1 Released for Testing — A big, intentionally breaking release of Ruby's default JSON gem that Jean wants you to test before its release next month. create_additions is gone, so JSON.load and JSON.dump are safe by default, but beware that unknown options now raise instead of being ignored.

Jean Boussier

💡 Jean has also just dropped Speeding Up (small) Ruby Hashes.

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

👀 Lucas Dohmen has announced Amiko, a community-run fork of Rails 8, arguing Rails' core has changed little since 6.0 and that DHH's view of the world is incompatible with his own. Ryan Bigg is unconvinced by the idea and thinks Hanami is the way forward.
Matz has proposed letting String#tr accept character replacement options in a hash style.
As of August 9, Rails 7.2 no longer (officially) gets security support, and Rails 8.0 reaches a similar end on November 7. More details here.
🇨🇿 Euruko 2026 is taking place next month (September 17-18) in Brno, Czechia, with speakers including Matz, Koichi Sasada, Hitoshi Hasumi (the creator of PicoRuby), Charles Oliver Nutter, and Benoît Daloze.
🇺🇸 Matz is keeping busy next month as he's also going to be at Rails World 2026 doing a fireside chat with DHH. The event's full agenda is now up too.

🔒 A Guide to Security for Gem Authors and Users — RubyGems' guide to protecting your account, hardening your gems, and reporting vulnerabilities has been updated for 2026 to cover MFA, Trusted Publishing, lockfile checksums, and cooldowns.

RubyGems Guides

Ruby and Rails Performance Roundup: The Backlog Edition — A followup to Maciej's recent look at PRs which sped up Ruby, this time tackling 40 more Ruby and Rails perf-related PRs, complete with the numbers.

Maciej Mensfeld

Blog Post: Now Watching Your Cron and Sidekiq Jobs: AppSignal Launch Week Recap — Process monitoring for Sidekiq & cron, hosted MCP, a new CLI, sharper log queries, and dark mode.

AppSignal sponsor

Fair by Design: Orchestrating Background Jobs in Ruby — What to do when one tenant's giant job batch starves everyone else's queue. Compares four strategies and why no Ruby job processor handles it out of the box.

Alexander Baygeldin (Evil Martians)

🤖 One Week of Building and Reviewing Code with LLM Agents – Hard numbers from a week of agent-driven Rails work showing that diversity of checks and tests beats throwing more agents at a problem. Lucian Ghinda

📄 How to Use Playwright in Ruby for Scraping and Testing Jakub Zielinski (ScrapingBee)

📄 What Active Record Transactions Actually Protect Syed Aslam

🛠 Code & Tools

DragonRuby Releases a 'Free to All' Jam License — DragonRuby is a Ruby-powered 2D engine built on mruby and SDL. It's a commercial product, but there's now a free option for building games to distribute on the Web (even commercially). Desktop, Steam and mobile use remain paid.

DragonRuby Team

Solid Objects: Cloudflare Durable Objects for Rails — Durable, addressable actors (a la Cloudflare's Durable Objects) for Rails backed by your existing database, with a reactive ERB helper that live-updates every browser without writing channels, Stimulus or JavaScript.

Lucas Carlson

AI Shouldn't Cost More Than It Saves — We can find where LLMs pay off, validate with real data, and tune for cost/effectiveness. Need help? Let's talk.

SINAPTIA sponsor

RubyLLM::Schema is Now Schematist: A JSON Schema DSL for Ruby — A general purpose JSON Schema DSL, spun out of RubyLLM and now covering the full Draft 2020-12 vocabulary. Values can be procs resolved at render time, and to_json_schema finally returns a real schema document.

Carmine Paolino

Dentaku 4.0: Math and Logic Formula Parser and Evaluator — Allows run-time binding of values to variables referenced in user supplied formulas. Intended to safely evaluate untrusted expressions.

Solomon White

Haml 7.3 – The templating engine that simplifies writing HTML by using indentation and elegant syntax now replaces Ripper with Prism.
Reline 0.7 – Official pure-Ruby library with the same API as readline.
Delayed 4.0 – Multi-threaded, SQL-driven Active Job backend.
✉️ Ahoy Email 4.0 – First-party email analytics for Rails apps.
Brakeman 8.0.6 – Vulnerability scanner for Rails apps.

📰 Classifieds

Analytics on your Rails data without a second database? TimescaleDB extends the Postgres you run.

💎 Is your Rails app fine? Probably. AppSignal tells you for sure — errors, N+1s, Sidekiq jobs, host metrics, one gem.

We'll be back in two weeks on August 27 – see you then! Unless you're a Go Weekly or React Status subscriber too, then we'll see you tomorrow ;-)