#492 — March 12, 2020

Read on the Web

Ruby Weekly

TableSmith: A Simple Terminal Table Renderer — An easy way to create ASCII-rendered console tables for Array, Hash, and ActiveRecord. It can also convert tables to HTML or CSV if needed.

Chris Morris

25 Reasons to Switch to Webpacker — Is it worth the effort to migrate JavaScript compilation from the Rails asset pipeline to Webpacker? Ross thinks so, and takes quite some time to outline the reasons here.

Ross Kaffenberger

Get to the Bottom of Performance Issues FAST with ScoutAPM — ScoutAPM cuts through the noise by taking you straight to the root of the issue as soon as they appear. Get back to coding and see how ScoutAPM can help you save time and headaches. Start your Free trial today.

ScoutAPM sponsor

'Fear-Free' Postgres Migrations for Rails — The ‘fear-free’ element here is knowing how to deal with schema migration problems that can break future queries. The good news, GoCardless have released a new tool called Nandi to help you write safer migrations.

James Turley (GoCardless)

RailsConf 2020 Cancelled — RailsConf 2020, an always popular conference where big Rails news often gets released, was due to take place in May in Portland. Due to the continuing COVID-19 emergency, Ruby Central has decided to postpone the event.

Ruby Central

rack-mini-profiler 2.0: Profiler for Your Rack Apps in Dev or Production — A new major version of a popular piece of middleware that can add a ‘speed badge’ to your app to profile database, memory and call-stack performance/statistics.

Sam Saffron et al.

A Visual Explanation of What's New in Kiba ETL v3Kiba ETL is a popular Ruby solution for data processing in the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) style.

Thibaut Barrere

💻 Jobs

Principal Engineer - Zendesk Talk (Dublin, Ireland) — Set technical priorities, innovate & problem-solve across teams with company-wide impact. Great work-life balance and culture.

Zendesk

Full-Stack Engineer (React.js / Rails) (f/m/d), Berlin, Germany — Role with Impact. Exciting projects. Benefits + Relocation. Building the world’s leading talent platform. Join the Heyvolution.

HeyJobs GmbH

Find a Dev Job Through Vettery — Vettery is completely free for job seekers. Make a profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers.

Vettery

📘 Articles & Tutorials

How We Migrated From Timecop to Rails 5.2's Time HelpersTimecop is a long standing Ruby library to do ‘time travel’ or freezing time for testing purposes in Ruby, but Rails has added some helpers that mean you might not need it anymore.

Igor Springer

▶  Cypress vs. Capybara: A Three Part Tutorial Series — Justin wasn’t entirely satisfied with his browser tests so he decided to face-off two popular options, Capybara and Cypress, against each other. There’s a lot to enjoy here if you have the time.

Justin Searls

Does Your App or Gem Need an Upgrade? — If you need to upgrade your Rails Application or dependencies and need a skilled partner, reinteractive can help. Ask for a free quote.

reinteractive sponsor

Ruby's Bitwise Toolbox: Operators, Applications and Magic Tricks — Working with data at the bit level is mostly useful when creating clients for certain protocols or doing networking, etc. but it’s worth being aware of Ruby’s features in this area. I did a video on this topic for Ruby Tapas several years ago that I’d still recommend too, if you prefer video.

José M. Gilgado (Honeybadger)

Getting Started with Elasticsearch and Ruby — A very basic intro but if you want to roll your own self-hosted search features, Elasticsearch is a powerful, open source option.

Molly Struve

▶  Discussing Rails Upgrades and Using Skunk for Scoring — A chat between Brittany Martin and Ernesto Tagwerker about blockers in upgrading Rails, tech debt and Ernesto’s ‘code smell’ scoring library, Skunk.

Ruby on Rails Podcast podcast

eBook: Best Practices for Optimizing Postgres Query Performance

pganalyze sponsor

(Make Your Tests) Necessary and Sufficient — In a concept first put forth by the late Jim Weirich, applying these two heuristics is difficult at first, but will make your tests more effective in both coverage and design.

Justin Searls

🛠 Code and Tools

Barcharts: Simple Terminal Barchart Rendering — Can use basic ASCII or Unicode block elements to turn arrays or hashes of keys and quantities into basic horizontal bar charts. gem install barchart to get it installed, BTW.

Gerald Bauer

dry-schema and dry-validation 1.5.0 Released

Piotr Solnica

kt-paperclip: A Maintained Fork of Paperclip — Paperclip was once a popular file upload plugin for Active Record but it was deprecated two years ago in favor of Active Storage. If you still really need Paperclip, though, a company called Kreeti is maintaining a fork.

thoughtbot

dyndnsd.rb: A Small, Extensible DynDNS Server Powered by Rack

Christian Nicolai

Delivery Boy: A Simple Way to Publish Messages to Kafka — Apache Kafka is a popular stream processing platform.

Zendesk

Version Cake 4.0: An Unobtrusive Way to Version APIs in Rails or Rack Apps — Lets you version views via their filename and provides helpers for use in controllers. Rails 6 support has just been added.

Ben Willis and Jim Jones