Rails World 2024 Recap: All Talks Now Online — Rails World was a resounding success (save for a fire alarm that woke everyone up at 2am, we hear!) and while it’s great to hear what a good time everyone had, it’s even better to finally get to enjoy all the great talks for ourselves. I’ve been watching for hours and point out some highlights below.

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🙈 CRuby's Monkey Patch Detection — CRuby includes many optimizations to allow core classes representing essential concepts like numbers, arrays, and strings to operate as quickly as possible. If a core class is monkey patched, however, these optimizations might need to be dropped, but how does Ruby detect this and ‘de-optimize’ itself?

Aaron Patterson

Leveraging Falcon and Rails for Real-Time Interactivity — A thoroughly educational history of the Async gem, its influence on Rack 3, real-time interactivity in Rails, and how the integration of Async 2, Rack 3, Falcon, and Rails ‘provides a powerful foundation for building highly interactive and scalable web applications.’

Samuel Williams

RubyGems.org Gets a New Design — A new design is gradually rolling out to improve support for a wider range of devices, as well as adding a much-needed ‘dark mode.’ You’re encouraged to help review the update and report any usability issues.

Martin Emde (RubyGems)

Wikidata is a Giant Crosswalk File — Wikidata is the Wikipedia of structured data. Here we see how to use DuckDB and Ruby to create ‘crosswalks’ from Wikidata to map identifiers in the data to third party services. Neat to see an example of using Ractors in a blog post, too.

Drew Breunig

Awkward Alert: How to Ask “Why Are You Building This?” 😨 — Everyone wants to know *why* the thing is being built. But it’s hard to ask. Practical tips to avoid seeming critical.

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Denko 0.14.0: Electronics / GPIO Programming in Ruby — lgpio is a wrapper around the access Linux provides to GPIO features and Denko and denko-piboard use it to let you program electronics devices in Ruby (think LEDs, buttons, sensors, etc.) Here’s a list of the microcontrollers supported.

Vickash

sequel-activerecord_connection 1.5: Let Sequel Reuse Active Record Connections — An extension for the popular Sequel database toolkit to enable reusing of an existing Active Record connection rather than setting up a new one.

Janko Marohnić

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ActiveAdmin v4 Beta: New Features, Upgrades, and How to Migrate — ActiveAdmin is one of the most popular Rails administration tools. It now supports Rails 7, bringing Hotwire support and improved performance, and includes better CSS theming and batch actions, so it’s worth a look.

BestWeb Ventures

recursive-open-struct 2.0: OpenStructs in OpenStructs in OpenStructs? — An OpenStruct subclass that returns nested hash attributes as RecursiveOpenStructs.

Various Contributors

InvoicePrinter 2.4: Super Simple PDF Invoicing — A server, command line program and pure Ruby library to generate PDF invoices. It’s been around years but continues to get updates.

Josef Strzibny