A Fresh Getting Started with Rails Tutorial — By way of the Rails Foundation, investments have been made in Rails 8.0 learning materials, starting off with this revamped ‘getting started’ guide, covering building a complete site using all Rails 8 has to offer — including the built-in authentication generator, Solid Queue, Solid Cache, and Kamal. Numerous Rails Guides have also been updated with new Rails 8 features – explained in more detail here.

Chris Oliver et al.

WorkOS: Sell to Enterprises with a Few Lines of Code — The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, offering flexible, easy-to-use APIs to integrate SSO, SCIM, and FGA in minutes instead of months.

WorkOS sponsor

Optimizing Ruby’s JSON — The new maintainer of Ruby's json gem decided to focus on performance and shares the tale of how a little profiling led to relatively straightforward tweaks yielding improvements for all of us. (This is a two parter, for now, with part two here.)

Jean Boussier

🎄“All I Want for Christmas Is a Boring, Slow, & Steady Rails Upgrade” — Top engineering teams rely on Bonsai for 0-downtime upgrades—making technical debt remediation feel delightfully boring.

Bonsai by FastRuby.io sponsor

1. A Decent VS Code Setup for Ruby and Rails Development — A demonstration, if any were needed, of how popular VS Code is in the Ruby space now. “Setting up VS Code for Ruby on Rails development can be tricky, so I wrote this article to help. In it, I share different VS Code extensions for things like autocomplete, linting, formatting and more.”

Harrison Broadbent

2. 'VSCode + WSL Makes Windows Awesome for Web Development' — Amazingly popular despite being a brief link at the time. In early 2024, DHH was doing all sorts of experimentation with his dev setup and was enjoying a brief Windows phase (before ultimately falling in love with Linux and releasing Omakub.)

David Heinemeier Hansson

3. The Rails Renaissance — Rails 8 got a lot of folks feeling bullish about Rails’ future again. Long-time Ruby firm Hashrocket gave its reasons for getting excited here.

Jack Rosa and Matt Polito (Hashrocket)

4. How Does Sidekiq Work? — Sidekiq remains the most heavily used background job system in the Ruby world (though Active Job is giving it a run for its money in Rails 8) and this post went deep into how it works, its architecture, and what’s going on under the hood.

Mike Perham / Dan Svetlov

5. A Cookbook of Ruby One-Liners — Ruby is fantastic for one-liners, whether in IRB or from the command line. We’ve linked to this cookbook before but it continues to prove very useful and is always a popular item.

Sundeep Agarwal

eBook: Best Practices for Enterprise-Scale DevOps — Learn how to improve software quality, lower support costs, and effectively enable DevOps teams.

Datadog sponsor

14 Tools and Gems Every Ruby Developer Would Love — Fine, it's a bit of a cheat, but this was the most clicked link relating to code and tools ;-) Joé rounded up his favorite tools and gems as of early 2024, covering areas from email and databases to performance monitoring and analytics. All solid recommendations.

Joé Dupuis

37signals' Open Sourced Thruster — Thruster, first seen as part of the Campfire app, is a minimal HTTP/2 proxy for production Rails deployments – it runs alongside Puma but offers HTTP/2, Caching, SSL via LetsEncrypt, and static file serving with compression, filling a similar role to Traefik or Caddy. It ended up becoming a key part of Rails 8.0.)

37signals

CrystalRuby: Embed Crystal Code Directly in Ruby — Crystal is a Ruby inspired programming language that boasts a lot of great features. One benefit is its performance, and this gem lets you write Crystal code, inlined in Ruby, giving you a potential performance boost without a huge shift in syntax.

Wouter Coppieters

Transformers.rb: State-of-the-Art Transformers for Ruby — It's early days for Ruby in the machine learning space but Andrew has been working hard to change that. Widely known for his work on pgvector, he shipped a way to use Torch.rb to use transformer models from Hugging Face directly from Ruby.

Andrew Kane

Cyperful: An Interactive System Testing UI for Capybara — One developer’s side project to offer a Cypress-like experience, but for Ruby developers. You can visualize assertions/commands as they happen, view all API requests, errors, and logs in the timeline, etc. No updates in months, but maybe this mention will encourage the developer to pick it up again..? 🤞

Stepful

Vernier: A Next Gen CRuby 3.2+ Profiler — A sampling profiler that can track multiple threads, GVL activity, GC pauses, idle time, etc. It’s just reached v1.5 which now records fiber activity too.

John Hawthorn