Ruby Weekly Issue 759: July 17, 2025

#759 — July 17, 2025

Together with

How I Spent Months Solving Ruby's Most Annoying Gem Installation Problem — If you’ve sat waiting for bundle install to finish for ages, you’ll have felt Maciej's pain. He set out to see why his gem (rdkafka) took so long to install and if it’s possible to improve: the answer is yes, he took it from taking sixty seconds to install to just three! One for all the gem maintainers!

Maciej Mensfeld

Ruby 3.4.5 Released — A scheduled maintenance update that includes bug fixes and adds GCC 15 support. The next release, 3.4.6, is due in September.

Takashi Kokubun

🚧 Stop Ignoring Tech Debt — Start Tackling It With Bonsai — Wonder what it's like having a part-time upgrade team available to you? No big up-front costs, just steady Rails & Ruby improvements every month. Stay secure, performant, and ready for what’s next — without breaking the bank.

FastRuby.io | Tech Debt Solutions sponsor

Bundler v2.7: The Last Release Before Bundler 4 — The last release before Bundler’s next major release, version 4 (it’s skipping v3 to match RubyGems better) which is scheduled for the end of the year. You can instruct 2.7 to behave like v4, however, in order to prepare for the changes ahead.

Samuel Giddins

IN BRIEF:

Kevin Murphy has put together a fantastic recap of RailsConf 2025 (the final RailsConf, even) which took place last week.
Hanami is in the fifth week of its sponsorship drive and its creator has decided to address the 'elephant in the room', namely Rails and why it's important to have alternatives.
Over on the other side of the fence, Python's Django framework is celebrating its 20th birthday. Work on Django began before that on Rails (here's its full backstory, but they're a similar age and share a similar spirit, so congratulations to them.

Advanced JIT Compilers for Ruby: TruffleRuby and JRuby — If you’re willing to experiment to squeeze more performance out of Ruby, there are options. Both JRuby and TruffleRuby have no GVL/GIL and offer true concurrency, as well as excellent JIT characteristics (an area in which CRuby is catching up, however).

Abiodun Olowode (AppSignal)

🧠 Build Intelligent Applications with Rails — Learn about the strengths of Ruby and Rails in the AI era and why we choose them for AI applications development.

SINAPTIA sponsor

📄 Sitemaps: A Quick SEO Win for New Sites – A reminder of why sitemaps matter and how to generate them, with a focus on Rails, but you could easily use the XML builder code in any Ruby app. Akshay Khot

📄 Solving Docker Compatibility Issues with Kamal and Ruby 2.2.2 – Ruby 2.2? You probably don’t want to be deploying this nowadays, but if you need to.. Jaison Coelho

📄 How to Customize Rails I18n Key Suffixes (Like _md for Markdown) Ben Sheldon

📄 Stop Memoizing Hash Lookups in Ruby Nithin Bekal

🛠 Code & Tools

MiniI18n 1.0: Minimalistic Internationalization for Ruby — Some seven years after we last linked to it, MiniI18n has reached its 1.0 milestone. It’s a simple, flexible and fast i18n library which uses translations stored in JSON or YAML files. v1.0 includes global T() and L() convenience methods and adds built-in localization defaults for common languages (a la rails-i18n).

Marc Anguera Insa

MiniMagick 5.3: A Mini Replacement for RMagick — For when you don’t need the full power of RMagick and just need ImageMagick’s features for resizing, rotating, converting, etc.

Corey Johnson

🔴 Seamless Rails Upgrades: Expert Maintenance. Fixed Price — Upgrade RoR smoothly. We offer expert Rails maintenance at a fixed price. Secure, performant, minimal disruptions. Outdated gems? Breaking changes? We handle it.

reinteractive / CodeCare sponsor

Observability for Rails with OpenTelemetry — A reference repo for instrumenting Rails apps with observability, using self-hosted, open-source tools rather than commercial observability platforms. There’s more background in this post.

Michał Kaźmierczak

Solid Queue 1.2 – Database-backed Active Job backend. Now with Active Job continuations support.
SyntaxTree 6.3 – Tools built on top of the internal CRuby parser to work with Ruby syntax trees.
Ruby-GNOME 4.3 – Bindings for the GNOME libraries to build Linux GUIs with Ruby.
Mission Control Jobs 1.1 – Dashboard and Active Job extensions to operate and troubleshoot background jobs.
AnnotateRb 4.17 – Adds annotations to your Rails models and route files.
Brut 0.4 – A new, opinionated Ruby web framework. (Homepage.)
Omarchy 1.4 – DHH's opinionated Arch/Hyprland setup.
RubyGems 3.7.0

🏎️ DHH on Lex Fridman

It's not quite Ruby news, but David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails, ▶️ appeared on the popular Lex Fridman podcast earlier this week for an epic six hour chat about all manner of topics including Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, how he got started with programming, the future of programming generally, cloud hosting, open source and, naturally, motor-racing.

There's a lot in here, and whether or not you're a fan of DHH, this episode seems to be doing a good job of increasing the public exposure of Ruby and Rails, and the ideas behind them, based on what I've seen on social media.

The video is very well annotated with relevant images, but if you prefer audio to video, the audio episode is here and there's also a full text transcript if you'd rather skim that.