#819 — October 1, 2026

Together with

Lexxy 1.0: Rails' New Rich Text Editor to Replace Trix — Built on Lexical and already powering 37signals' Basecamp 5, it gives you tables, Markdown shortcuts, smart links, syntax-highlighted code and mentions, and it's easy to swap into Action Text in place of Trix.

Jorge Manrubia (37signals)

💡 The Lexxy site has a sandbox demo if you'd like to try it out first.

Switching APM? One Ruby Gem Now Covers Distributed Tracing — Errors, N+1s, Sidekiq jobs, logs, host metrics and now distributed tracing (beta) in one Ruby gem. Every feature on every plan, unlimited users, one predictable bill. See how AppSignal compares to Datadog, New Relic and Sentry.

AppSignal sponsor

▶ Tenderlove Closes Rails World with a Counterpoint to DHH — Aaron's Rails World closing keynote dug into ZJIT, Ractors, Mike Dalessio joining Rails Core, and Ruby 4.0's disappearing Class#new stack frame. He also pushed back on DHH's keynote (which we boiled down last week), saying "I'm going to keep reading my code, and I hope that you will too."

Aaron Patterson

💡 Meanwhile, ▶️ Matz and DHH had a 'fireside chat' hosted by Jeremy Daer, largely covering Ruby's place in the AI era, with Matz discussing Spinel and DHH saying he'll still start all his new web apps on Rails.

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

New Rails 8.2 apps will compile HTML+ERB templates through Herb by default, so an issue like an unclosed tag becomes a compile error. Herb 0.11 is out too, and there's a write-up of Marco Roth's Rails World talk for context.
An adjustable compilation budget has landed for Ruby 4.1's YJIT, letting apps spread warmup overhead over time to reduce latency spikes.
Shugo Maeda proposes letting refinements define && and || for more natural query DSLs.
Rails 7.2.4 was released last week as the final 7.2.x release. Security and bug fixes will now only be provided for 8.0 and 8.1.
Hiroshi Shibata has an open PR bringing YJIT to 64-bit MSVC builds of Ruby on Windows.

Updating C Extensions for the Modern Ruby VM — Ruby's C API is stable enough that ancient C extensions often still run on Ruby 4, but they may not play as well with modern VM features as they could. Ivo has created this handy (and official) document for bringing older extensions up to date.

Ivo Anjo

Hanami, Why? A Maintainer on Building Apps Differently to Rails — A Hanami maintainer begins a series explaining what makes Hanami different to Rails with a tour of its core building blocks.

Aaron Allen

🤖 Ready for Rails Upgrades on Autopilot? Rails 8.0 EOL Nov 7 — Our AI agent opens tiny, reviewable PRs once your test suite passes CI. Starting at $497/mo.

FastRuby.io | Rails Upgrades on Autopilot sponsor

📄 Access Control for AI Agents on Rails: Gating SQL with Action Policy – How to make an LLM's SQL queries obey your Action Policy rules. Platonov and Senkovskiy (Evil Martians)

📄 Why You Should Check a Gem's Lines of Code – A rough measure of complexity when choosing dependencies. Kasper Timm Hansen (Spinel)

📄 Renaming a Rails Job Without Breaking Queued Work Rails Revelry

🛠 Code & Tools

Madmin 3: A Hotwire-Powered Rails Admin Interface — A Rails admin built around scaffold-style views and Hotwire rather than a heavy DSL. v3 adds dark mode, filters on index pages, and replaces Pagy with built-in pagination.

Chris Oliver

rv 0.7: The 'uv for Ruby' Adds JRuby and a Built-In Formatter — The fast Ruby version and gem manager can now install and manage JRuby too, and adds a librubyfmt-powered rv fmt command to format code. Here's how to get started with rv.

Spinel Cooperative

Build Smarter Ruby Applications With Live Search Data — Add search, shopping, maps, news, trends, flights and hotels results with one developer-friendly API built by Ruby engineers.

SerpApi sponsor

Singed 0.4: Get a Flamegraph Anywhere in Your Code Base — Wrap code in flamegraph { } to profile it with stackprof or, new in v0.4, Vernier (which gives per-thread graphs), and view the results with speedscope.

Gusto

Active Search: Pluggable Full-Text Search for Rails Apps — A new alpha gem that gives Active Record models one search API across ten backends, from SQLite FTS5 and Postgres tsvector to Elasticsearch, Meilisearch and Typesense.

Donal McBreen (37signals)

Herringbone: Pure-Ruby Parquet File Reader/Writer Library — Includes full nesting support, filtered reads using statistics and bloom filters, plus Herringbone.write(io, Order.all) for dumping AR relations to Parquet.

Julik Tarkhanov

RDoc 8.1 – Ruby's documentation generator gets faster Markdown parsing and deprecates the Darkfish template. The RDoc site is a good demo of how it looks by default now.
Campfire 1.5 – 37signals' Rails-powered chat app. Bots can now read messages (even when not mentioned), add reactions, and edit their own messages.
Solid Cable 4.1 – Rails' database-backed Action Cable adapter. Adds encrypted messages and batched writes.
gems 3.0 – Official Ruby client for the RubyGems.org API. Adds modernizations including trusted publishing and OTP support.
🖼️ PureJPEG 0.4 – Pure Ruby JPEG encoder/decoder. Now works on Spinel too.
Brakeman 8.1 – Static analysis security scanner for Rails apps.
Mutineer 1.4 – Mutation testing for Ruby code.

📰 Classifieds

💀 Your site is dead, bro! Will you hear it from DeadBro.com or from your users? N+1s, errors, slow SQL, uptime, Slack alerts.

Bring your wild ideas to Mozilla Festival. Gather and connect with other developers and creatives in Barcelona, Oct. 28-30. Get your badge.

👠 A modern rewrite of _why's Shoes

Back in 2007, the mysterious and much-loved _why the lucky stiff created Shoes, a tiny toolkit for building desktop apps in Ruby. It famously powered Hackety Hack, his app for teaching people to code in Ruby.

Over the years, Nick Schwaderer and contributors have been resurrecting Shoes in the form of Scarpe (Italian for shoes!) which runs the same Shoes code rendered to a webview.

As of this week, Scarpe now has an (initial) native renderer written in Rust. "Ruby thinks and Rust draws": your app and its blocks stay in Ruby, while a separate Rust process lays out and paints the window. It can package apps for macOS and comes with a guide for coding agents so you can ask one to build you an app (as I tried, successfully – see the screenshot above).