Rubyland

How do you measure product-market fit for a developer tool? A PMF scoring model from Evil Martians—a product development consultancy for developer tools startups—built on data from 37 devtools companies across AI, infrastructure, and cybersecurity. Five metrics, real benchmarks, and a dual score that tells you whether to invest in product or go-to-market.

Everyone talks about product-market fit. But what does it actually mean for a developer tools startup? "Are we close?" "Getting closer?" "What should we focus on to get closer?" At Evil Martians, we've spent nearly 20 years working with devtools companies—from…

Some English words don’t have a separate plural form. “Staff” is staff, “metadata” is metadata, “feedback” is feedback. Rails doesn’t always know this—it will happily generate a staffs table or a metadatas route if you let it.

Instead of…

…fighting Rails when it pluralises words that shouldn’t change:

"staff".pluralize    #=> "staffs"
"metadata".pluralize #=> "metadatas"
"feedback".pluralize #=> "feedbacks"

Use…

…inflect.uncountable to tell Rails these words stay the same:

# config/initializers/inflections.rb
ActiveSupport::Inflector.inflections(:en) do |inflect|
  inflect.uncountable %w[staff metadata feedback]
end

Now:

"staff".pluralize    #=> "staff"
"metadata".pluralize #=>…

Why?

Can Ruby Read an X-Ray? Building a Medical Image Processor March 23, 2026 Published on RubyStackNews Nobody expects Ruby to process medical images. That is exactly why I tried it. This article is about building a medical image analysis prototype in pure Ruby using ruby-libgd as the rendering and pixel manipulation engine. No Python. No … Continue reading Can Ruby Read an X-Ray? Building a Medical Image Processor →

The Ruby language leans on duck typing rather than formal interfaces. “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.”

bodies = [poem, essay, case_study, user_manual].map(&:body)

These objects come from different classes but all respond to body, so you can treat them uniformly. That’s informal polymorphism: no type annotations, no ceremony.

Duck typing is great, but what I miss is enforcement. If one class implements a method and another forgets to, I want something to complain.

The interface is a living document

In Ruby, interfaces are implicit. They live in the public methods of your classes. Private methods are implementation details and not part of the…

Direct link to podcast audio file

The promise of Breaking Change is that with every major version (this being the 60th episode of the program, but only the 53rd such release), I will break something. Well, I finally did it. I think I broke the show. Find out how by listening for yourself!

Want to be my friend? Drop me a line at justin@searls.co. Want to file a complaint with my supervisor? Forward your concerns to podcast@searls.co.

These links may rot, but alas—death comes for us all:

• Tonal (without a subscription)
• Better with Becky
• My appearance on the freeCodeCamp podcast
• Dual-loop BDD is the new Red-green TDD
• Models are commodities, harnesses are differentiators
• Aaron's puns,…

• Why Latin?
• How I got into Latin
• What’s fun about speaking Latin?
  • Finding words for modern concepts
  • Small talk, elevated
  • Old books as conversation partners
• How can you learn Latin?

This post is an entry for the Spring 2026 Lobsters blog carnival, where participants are provoked to defend the superiority of our favorite language.¹

I accept the challenge, and I step forward to defend the honor of…

Latin.

Specifically, spoken Latin as a hobby language.

Why Latin?

tl;dr: because it has the unusual combination of being:

• no one’s native language, so everyone is a learner.
• a historical language, with texts ranging from two thousand years old to c…

Hi, it’s gregmolnar. Let’s explore this week’s changes in the Rails codebase.

Batch SQL statements when creating tables
This change batches the SQL statements during loading a database schema to improve the performance of the process.

Deprecate require_dependency
require_dependency is deprecated without replacement and will be removed in Rails 9.

Add MySQL lock option and extend algorithm to column Data Definition Language (DDL) operations
This pull request adds:

• lock: option for MySQL add_index, remove_index, and ALTER TABLE column operations (add_column, remove_column, change_column, rename_column)
• algorithm: option support extended to ALTER TABLE column operations on MySQL
• Com…

MySQL supports ALGORITHM = {DEFAULT|COPY|INPLACE|INSTANT} and LOCK = {DEFAULT|NONE|SHARED|EXCLUSIVE} to control how DDL…

On this episode, Andrew’s buried in messy authentication work spread across legacy code, Chris recounts a frustrating GitHub Actions debugging session, and David explains the mental drain of working across both Vue 2 and Vue 3 in the same application. They talk about using workflow run triggers, scheduled builds, and GitHub’s new Agentic Copilot workflows such as CI Doctor, Automatic Code Simplifier, and issue/PR management, while lamenting low-quality AI-generated PRs and paid AI code review tools. Andrew makes a special announcement about Blastoff Rails, they compare LazyVim, lazy.nvim, and Kickstart Neovim, we hear about Ruby 3.4.9 and its bug-fix release, and Marco Roth’s Herb…

Generated automatically by RubyEventsBot using ruby-libgd. Updated every 7 days. Updated by: https://github.com/koxya | Twitter: @koxya

I hopped on IndieRails with Jess and Jeremy (again). We covered a lot of ground in about 90 minutes. Quick business catch up and then dove into how AI has changed pretty much everything about how I work.

Some of the highlights:

Business Updates. Flipper Cloud almost doubled revenue last year, with most of the growth in the last few months. No AI headwinds on docs or conversion. Fireside is stabilizing — we flattened churn and had our first three month stretch of even or growing customers since taking it over. Momentum, the coworking space I invested in, is filling up and becoming a real community in South Bend.

Following the Inspiration. I'm a mood person. I follow the energy. Having multiple…

Managing bulk file transfer to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) can be complex when transferring directories containing multiple files and subdirectories. AWS SDK for Ruby Transfer Manager (aws-sdk-s3 version 1.215) now supports directory upload and download. This feature can help streamline bulk transfers by providing multipart handling and parallelism options.

Previously, uploading directories to Amazon S3 required manual iteration and handling. You also had to manage multipart uploads for large files and implement parallelism for performance. With directory support in Transfer Manager, you can handle this with a single method call that automates the process. In this post, we…

Recently I had to build something using the canvas element. Today I’ll show you how to build an interactive emoji composer using HTML Canvas and Stimulus. Click emojis to add them to a canvas, drag them around and export your creation as an image. It is quite fun (coming from an emoji connoisseur)! 😎👍

Click a face emoji, add some accessories, position everything just right and download your custom creation. All running in the browser with no external dependencies.

View the full code on GitHub

The HTML

Start with a simple layout that divides the screen into a canvas area and emoji picker:

<div data-controller="canvas-composer image-exporter">
  <div class="grid…

Have you ever looked at a VitePress documentation site and felt a little jealous?

The sidebar navigation. The “On this page” outline on the right. The search that pops up with /. The homepage that actually looks like a product page, not a README with a nav bar. Dark mode that just works. Code blocks with copy buttons and language labels. It all looks like someone sat down and designed the whole experience.

Because someone did. VitePress is genuinely great. And Ruby developers know it, because some of the most visible projects in our community are shipping their docs on VitePress. Not on a Jekyll theme, not on a Ruby tool. On a JavaScript static site generator built for Vue.

I don’t blame…

I had a simple index.html page, a marketing site for a client in Spanish. They asked an English version too, so I opened the chat to Claude’s Opus 4.5 model and asked it to create a near-identical en/index.html with content translated. Easy peasy.

I opened both files side by side and skimmed, they looked the same with lines in different languages. But I’m used to testing changes, and agents find things to fix before I start more careful checking. While I had this thought, the client recalled they’d need a version in Portuguese as well. “Sure”.

Now, would they synchronize updates in Spanish to the other two languages? Content and design will surely drift.

The solution

I used Claude’s /…

2D Histograms in Pure Ruby March 18, 2026 Published on RubyStackNews One of the most useful tools in exploratory data analysis is the 2D histogram. Not the bar chart kind — the density map kind. Given a cloud of points, it answers a simple question: where do most of them live? This article shows how … Continue reading 2D Histograms in Pure Ruby →

Intro

Since the post at the end of last year, ZJIT has grown and changed in some exciting ways. This is the story of how a new, self-contained optimization pass causes ZJIT performance to surpass YJIT on an interesting microbenchmark. It has been 10 months since ZJIT was merged into Ruby, and we’re now beginning to see the design differences between YJIT and ZJIT manifest themselves in performance divergences. In this post, we will explore the details of one new optimization in ZJIT called load-store optimization. This implementation is part of ZJIT’s optimizer in HIR. Recall that the structure of ZJIT looks roughly like the following.

flowchart LR
        A(["Ruby"])
        A -->…

The Rails Infrastructure team has been working on making Bundler faster and our work has paid off. A cold bundle install is 3x faster on a Gemfile with 452 gems compared to Bundler 2.7. But “faster” only means something if everyone agrees on what’s being measured. If two people are running benchmarks with different definitions of “cold install” or different cache states, the results aren’t comparable. We needed a shared tool that would give us confidence, both internally and externally, that we’re tackling the right problems and actually making Bundler faster. And along the way we learned when Claude can be helpful and when to not outsource our own expertise and thinking.

What affects…

RubyLLM 1.14 ships a full chat UI generator. Two commands and you have a working AI chat app with Turbo streaming, model selection, and tool call display, in under two minutes. The demo above shows the whole thing: new Rails app to working chat in 1:46, including trying it out.

Why This Matters

RubyLLM turned one last week. 1.0 shipped on March 11, 2025 with Rails integration from day one: ActiveRecord models, acts_as_chat, Turbo streaming, persistence out of the box. 1.4 added the install generator. 1.7 brought the first scaffold chat UI with Turbo Streams. 1.12 introduced agents with prompt conventions. Each release got closer to the same thing: AI that works the way Rails works.

1.14…

Ruby on Rails — Complete Reference of Methods, Classes & Features Not in Ruby March 17, 2026 Rails is much more than a framework on top of Ruby — it adds hundreds of methods, classes, and abstractions that plain Ruby simply doesn't have. This is a complete reference of everything Rails brings to the table, … Continue reading Ruby on Rails — Complete Reference of Methods, Classes & Features Not in Ruby →

Not the usual content on this blog, bnut this is an interesting story to tell I believe. I own a 2015 Chrysler Town and Country minivan. It is a really good car and filled with electric components. The side doors, the booth, there are 2 screens a DVD player and a bunch of other stuff. Awesome when all is good, not so much when something breaks.

Redesigning a Ruby on Rails application is easy on paper. Making it work with real systems is harder. Here’s how Rails teams align design visions with reality.

Continue Reading

At SINAPTIA, we started enforcing a no “AI code in production” directive.

LOL, no. We are not the next tier of Luddites! We started using AI-assisted code generation a little over a year ago, and from the looks of it, we are going to use it even more in the near future. AI is here to stay, and programming will never be the same, what a time to be alive and so on, and so on…

But also, in a couple of years, we’ll all lose our jobs. What a time to be alive, indeed.

We continually ask ourselves: what’s the AI capable of? Can it really replace us? Can it change the way we work? Will it make our problems simpler? Or there will be another kind of problems, more problems? Are we attending the…

Direct link to podcast audio file

Quincy Larson over at freeCodeCamp had me on their podcast to discuss how the rapidly changing software industry is impacting junior developers and what they can do about it. I don't normally spend time talking about this stuff, because I started programming in the 90s and can't claim to know anything about what it's like to just be starting now. I've also always discouraged people from getting into software development unless they're super passionate about it, which has been out of step with the "learn to code" hype train that gathered steam over the last fifteen years only to run into a brick wall recently.

His audience is way larger and composed…

Nothing could make me switch from Keynote to web-based slides. Then, I did! And as a WebSocket geek, I realized it opens up new opportunities! Here's my contribution to making your web presentations beautifully interactive.

Nothing could make me switch from Keynote. I tried. Sli.dev, Google Slides—I'd poke around, appreciate the novelty, and then go right back. Keynote was my home base; ready to express any creative idea with powerful animations and my own muscle memory. Then, about a month ago, something shifted, and it wasn't about the slide tech, but about how I work. This…

Our hosts come together to wrap up season 2 and share some of their highlights along the way.

Our trio expand and recap on some key topics covered over the last few months, Sally and Joël provide updates on their work with typescripts and LLMs, and Aji accidentally stumbles into an idea for a new keynote topic.

—

Your hosts for this episode have been thoughtbot’s own Joël Quenneville, Sally Hall and Aji Slater.

If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page, or check out our website.

Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: hosts@bikeshed.fm

This has been a thoughtbot podcast.
Stay up to date by following us on social…

One of the most frequent code smells in Rails is an excessive use of inheritance. A serious drawback from using inheritance to achieve polymorphism is the implicit coupling it creates between parent and child classes.

Consider the following example, a range of messaging campaigns:

class Campaign
  def deliver
    addressees.find_each do |addressee|
      transport.deliver(to: addressee, body: prepare_message_body)
    end
  end

  private

  def prepare_message_body
    # e.g. process merge tags etc.
  end

  def transport
    raise NotImplementedError, "Subclasses of Campaign must implement #transport"
  end
end

class Campaigns::Email < Campaign
  def transport =…

Ruby 4.0.2 has been released.

This is a routine update that includes a bugfix in YJIT for NoMethodError on Puma. Please see the GitHub Releases for further details.

Release Schedule

We intend to release the latest stable Ruby version (currently Ruby 4.0) every two months following the most recent release. Ruby 4.0.3 will be released in May, 4.0.4 in July, 4.0.5 in September, and 4.0.6 in November.

If a change arises that significantly affects users, a release may occur earlier than planned, and the subsequent schedule may shift accordingly.

Download

• https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/4.0/ruby-4.0.2.tar.gz

  SIZE: 23824654
  SHA1:…

Welcome to Hotwire Weekly!

Welcome to another issue of Hotwire Weekly! Happy reading! 🚀✨

📚 Articles, Tutorials, and Videos

What's new in Herb v0.9 - Marco Roth announces Herb v0.9 with Action View tag helper support, Prism AST node integration for deeper Ruby understanding, a strict parsing mode, 24 new linter rules, and language server enhancements like code folding and document highlights.

Smooth UI animations on server-rendered HTML - Adrien Siami shows how to create SPA-like animations in server-rendered Rails apps by combining Turbo's morphing with the View Transitions API. Adding a single meta tag and view-transition-name properties to elements enables smooth…

htmx Infinite Scroll…

Great Work Partners Keep You on Your Toes

I’ve been trying to pinpoint why some work relationships feel like pulling teeth while others feel like a relief.

And in my reflection, I found it wasn’t about raw skill or ability. For example, I work with some brilliant Data Scientists, PMs, Designers, and Engineers who can still make it feel like I’m working between silos. For example, we’d pass work items back and forth, like “here’s the mockup” or “here’s the query”, but it didn’t ever feel like we were building together.

And then there are those few people who change the trajectory of the work we do, who just make everything click, just because they do three specific things.

1. They are willing to…

Ben Thompson's latest rests on a single load-bearing assumption: that the harness and the model are tightly coupled, the way Apple's hardware and software are.

It follows, then, that if agents require integration between model and harness, that the companies building that integration—specifically Anthropic and OpenAI—are actually poised to be significantly more profitable than it might have seemed as recently as late last year.

This assumption is incorrect. To date, agents have not clearly benefited from proprietary integration to their favored model. I thought this was obvious, but I sometimes forget that not everybody else has made it their full-time hobby to mix and match various…

A lot of Rails’s naming magic comes from its clever use of inflections. user.rb defines the User class, backed by the users table, managed by UsersController, accessible at the /users/ routes.

Every Rails app generates config/initializers/inflections.rb to let you customise this behaviour. Most developers leave it empty. Then one day you namespace a controller under API and Rails starts generating Api::UsersController instead of API::UsersController.

Instead of…

…accepting the wrong casing in your class names:

# app/controllers/api/users_controller.rb
class Api::UsersController < ApplicationController
end

Use…

…inflect.acronym to teach Rails the correct casing:

#…

You may have heard managers describe themselves as having a people first leadership style. It’s so incredibly safe. Who has ever got in trouble for declaring themselves to put people above all else in some vague, detail-free fashion? How could anyone argue against it? Well hold my weave because I’m going in.

Looking at how it plays out in practice, stripped of its emotional appeal, “people first” could be seen as a euphemism for discrimination and plundering the common good. That’s bad.

I’m going to compare and contrast it with something I call people third leadership, which has the following set of priorities:

1. Ethics (Universal Principles)
2. The Business (The Commons)
3. People…

I’m going to argue that by placing…

March 16, 2026 Published on RubyStackNews After the last article, Jupyter proved to be an awesome sandbox for testing code interactively. I spent the entire weekend asking myself one question: can Ruby render a real 3D plot? I started convinced the answer was no. By Sunday night, ruby-libgd had proven me wrong. The question nobody … Continue reading Ruby for Data Science — Is It Possible? →

After the announcement that Heroku is entering maintenance mode, I got wary of the one (1) application I host on there going down. It’s a Rails app for photos for my kid, which has almost 2,500 photos of her since before she was born until the modern day. I created the app to share these photos with my family back in Adelaide.

I was also listening to this Remote Ruby episode Saturday morning that convinced me to go looking abroad too.

For a Rails app that’s nearing ten years old (for a kid that’s nearing ten years old), it holds up pretty well. This weekend-gone I bumped the Ruby and Rails versions to modern ones without much fuss. The biggest thing in that upgrade was moving off…

At one of our productized services for Ruby and Rails maintenance (FastRuby.io), we spend a lot of time thinking making our processes maintainable, efficient, and adaptable over time.

That mindset is what led us to build an internal AI system to automate one of the most important (and time-consuming) parts of our fixed-cost monthly maintenance service (Bonsai): Our quarterly progress reports.

This article walks through how we mapped a very human, manual process to a structured AI-driven workflow and what we learned along the way.

What Is Bonsai?

Bonsai is our signature fixed-cost, monthly maintenance service for Ruby and Rails applications

The idea is simple:

• Gradually pay down…

This one goes out to all the testing neophytes who only recently realized that it's useful to have an automated means of verifying their code does what it claims to do.

For the last month, I've been working on prove_it, a framework for building quality harnesses for Claude Code—primarily via its hooks system. In a recent release, I added TDD enforcement to its default configuration. First, it injects a test-first development approach into every plan Claude generates. Then, a PreToolUse hook follows up with permissionDecisionReason reminders whenever the agent deviates from the one true path (e.g., repeatedly edits source files without touching any tests, never runs a test to see it fail,…

And just like real life, nagging developers works. My…

SimpleCov’s coverage report will tell the coverage of code at a moment of time. You may want to track differences over time though. That’s where the simplecov-compare gem comes in.

Backstory 🔗

I have a project at work where I want to evaluate the impact of changes on the application’s test coverage. I’m using SimpleCov to measure and report the coverage.

There are services that help with this. There’s a GitHub action I could reach for, if we did use GitHub Actions.

But what I had were the results of two test runs. I had the JSON output from the two runs. And I wanted to compare what was different between those two files. No pipelines or external services.

So I somewhat begrudgingly built one.…

I'm still iterating on my experimental Claude Code verification harness, prove_it. This week my focus has been on nudging agents to practice test-driven development. Traditionally, we called this "TDD", but which has recently been renamed to "red-green TDD" as it has been discovered that this is what LLMs interpret as "real TDD".

Anyway, so that I could watch it steer an agent in a fresh codebase in real time, I opened a new directory and asked Claude Code to one-shot a terminal-based tennis game, replete with scoring and an AI that I couldn't beat. In OCaml. And it worked! It actually test-drove everything. Neat!

Plotting Mathematical Functions in Ruby, Inside Jupyter March 13, 2026 ruby-libgd: Scientific Plotting Comes to Ruby The Envy We Never Talked About Anyone who has spent serious time with Ruby and then watched a Python developer type plt.show() to produce a beautiful Matplotlib graph in a Jupyter notebook knows the feeling. It is not quite … Continue reading Plotting Mathematical Functions in Ruby, Inside Jupyter →

For the past twenty years, TitleLeaf has been helping educational book publishers maintain and share their content with industry partners such as reviewers, wholesalers, and distributors. Its robust content management system and handcrafted digital solutions simplify the process of sharing metadata, digital assets, and marketing material for the book industry.

Here was the situation

Tim Peterson, Founder of TitleLeaf, is a solopreneur balancing the challenges of entrepreneurship with a flexible lifestyle. One of his dreams is to have more time and freedom to do what he enjoys most—skiing and biking in the mountains of Northern California while still running his company as efficiently as…

Hi, Wojtek here. Let’s quickly look at a few of this week’s fixes.

Validate URI scheme in Action Text markdown link conversion
Add a Rails::HTML::Sanitizer.allowed_uri? check to markdown_link. When the URI scheme is disallowed, return the escaped title wrapped in escaped brackets (\[title\]) instead of emitting a link.

Example: <action-text-attachment url="data:text/html,PAYLOAD"> previously produced ![Image](data:text/html,PAYLOAD) in markdown output. Now it produces \[Image\].

Restore previous instrumenter after execute_or_skip
Fix by saving and restoring the previous instrumenter value around the EventBuffer’s lifetime. On background threads, this is a no-op (saves nil, restores nil).…

Chris and David welcome back Adam McCrea from Judoscale, to discuss the uncertainty around Heroku after Salesforce’s announcement that it would stop taking new enterprise customers. Adam shares how the news landed in real time during a founder’s retreat, and the conversation expands into what Heroku’s apparent “maintenance mode” means for developers, pricing, autoscaling, platform alternatives, and the broader challenge of building durable developer businesses in the AI era. They also touch on Judoscale’s upcoming “platform tour” and the value of smaller Ruby conferences. Hit download now to hear more! 

Sponsors:

Honeybadger

Judoscale

Links:

Chris Oliver X

Andrew Mason Bluesky

David Hill LinkedIn

J…

"Red, green, refactor" promotes premature abstraction.

I had all the information to come to this conclusion 20 years ago. I'm embarrassed to admit how long it actually took.

What makes me say that? Well, sometime between 2003 and 2005, I met Ward Cunningham at a Seattle Extreme Programming Users Group meeting. There was no presentation that night. Rather, we just sat around eating pizza and peppering Ward with questions. His answer to one question really stuck with me.

The question was, "How do you convince management to let you refactor code?"
Ward answered, "I don't," then paused for effect, and continued, "I give them two estimates: I say, it'll take this long to make room for the feature,…

Choosing the Right Debugger March 12, 2026 A Ruby Developer's Guide to TracePoint, ISeq, and why your choice of debugger affects more than just comfort If you write Ruby, you debug Ruby. Whether it's a subtle off-by-one error in a data pipeline or a race condition buried in a Rails controller, debugging is as much … Continue reading Choosing the Right Debugger: TracePoint, ISeq, and why your choice of debugger affects more than just comfort →

Over the past few months, a few of us at Planet Argon have been experimenting with Claude Code on real client Ruby on Rails projects. Not demos or greenfield apps, but the kind of long-lived codebases where a backtrace can eat forty-five minutes before you even understand the call chain.

The part that surprised us is how often some of those debugging sessions now wrap up closer to ten minutes.

We’re not ready to make big claims. But we’ve developed enough of a feel for when to reach for it, which model to use, and how to keep it from making a mess of your codebase that it felt worth writing down.

The guide covers things like model selection (Sonnet vs Opus and when to switch…

Yesterday I described AI-generated code as “plausible-looking, locally coherent, globally wrong.” Here’s a concrete example from my own codebase.

I needed a cleanup job to close old Slack group DM conversations in my slack-sup2 app. The AI-generated solution looked perfectly reasonable:

def close_old_sups!
  return 0 unless sup_close
  
  old_sups = sups.where(conditions)
  old_sups.each(&:close!)
  old_sups.count
end

def close!
  return unless conversation_id
  return if closed_at
  
  logger.info "Closing DM channel #{conversation_id}..."
  slack_client.conversations_close(channel: conversation_id)
  update_attributes!(closed_at: Time.now.utc)
end

This code looks pretty great and…

Building on the video recording feature from earlier, let’s add a nice touch to the presentation index page: video previews that play on hover. You know the experience—hover over a video thumbnail and get a quick preview of what’s inside. It’s the same interaction you see on YouTube, Netflix and every modern video platform.

The presentations index

After recording presentations, you need a way to browse them. A simple index page lists all presentations with video thumbnails. When you hover over a thumbnail, the video plays a preview. Move your cursor away and it returns to the poster image.

Here’s the basic setup:

<% @presentations.each do |presentation| %>
  <%= video_tag presentation.vid…

We’re very excited to welcome back Mike Perham and Sidekiq as a patron of Hanami (and Dry and Rom) for 2026.

Mike was the very first person to come on board when we opened our sponsorships last year. His early support gave me the confidence to commit a dedicated day per week to this project, which helped us achieve everything we did in 2025: shipping our biggest release yet, growing our maintainer team, and beginning to unify our community and ecosystem.

We're excited to continue our work in 2026. This year you'll see us launch our new face to the world, bring you two exciting releases of Hanami, and more! Thank you Mike for helping make this happen.

We’d love to have you to join Mike in…

Before AI coding assistants, a typical engineering team of 8-10 people might have been lucky to have one or two “10x engineers”, or “workhorses”, the kind of engineer that both keeps project quality and feature velocity high.

AI tools have solved the workhorse half of this equation, enabling massive raw output. Today, almost every engineer can produce a high volume of code with GitHub Copilot, Claude, or Cursor.

But the quality half of the equation has not kept up. Teams are shipping more code, but a greater fraction of it is AI slop: plausible-looking, locally coherent, globally wrong. Code review remains a human activity. Until that changes, AI assistants cannot substitute for the…

Evil Martians is a developer tools consultancy. Founded in 2006, we work with about 40 early-stage startups a year, mostly seed to Series B. We helped bolt.new scale from zero to $40M+ ARR in 5 months. Teleport and Tines reached unicorn status with Martians on their teams.

Established nearly 20 years ago, Evil Martians is a trusted software development consultancy for developer tools startups.

A ideia de reescrever o sistema continua voltando. O impulso desacelera. Este post explora por que futuros indefinidos fazem equipes perderem ritmo muito antes de o código realmente quebrar.

Continue Reading

Almost a year ago, I returned to the Linux Desktop after almost 20 years. I abandoned it a month or so later out of frustration with a surprising lack of configurability and general exhaustion of addressing the myriad papercuts that come with trying to change computing platforms.

In the last few weeks, I’ve revisited it and had a lot more success.

The Core Problems

The main problems that kept me from adopting Linux day to day were:

• Inability to set keyboard shortcuts for apps to provide a Mac-like experience (namely, using Meta or Alt instead of Ctrl so I could have the same common shortcuts everywhere).
• Clipboard Managers didn’t seem to really work.
• Lack of a Dash-like API…

There were some papercuts, too. These were the most painful:

• Inability to configure the Framework 13’s trackpad scrolling speed.
• Global text replacement/text expansion doesn’t work
• PWA support with…

I’ve found solutions for some of these and set…

I joined Jeremy Smith and Jess Brown on the IndieRails podcast to talk about how I managed the transition from stained-glass master to freelance software engineer.

Here are my notes:

The importance of a well-crafted pitch

I already wrote about the differences between my story and my history – or how I had crafted a pitch to present my convoluted professional path – but it bears repeating the benefits of a pitch:

• It allows the people you talk to to verify you’re not a complete fluke.
• It hooks your audience and gets out of the way quickly so you can focus on what makes you a great hire / freelancer.
• It filters out the clients/teams with which you’re not compatible: mindset,…

The pitch came from a place of being tired of faking a competency in software engineering I did not have at the time (circa 2018). So, in a sense, it was a way to own my story…

Introduction

Ruby offers multiple concurrency primitives, and while Fibers have gained popularity for I/O bound tasks, they’re just one piece of the puzzle.

Understanding when to use Threads, Ractors, or Fibers is crucial for building performant Ruby applications.

This post explores Ruby’s concurrency landscape beyond fibers, with practical examples and guidance on choosing the right tool for your use case.

Understanding the GVL

Before diving into concurrency primitives, we need to understand the Global Virtual Machine Lock (GVL), sometimes called the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL).

The GVL ensures that only one thread executes Ruby code at a time within a single process. This design…

Ruby 3.4.9 has been released.

This release includes an update to the zlib gem addressing CVE-2026-27820, along with other bug fixes. Please see the GitHub releases for further details.

We recommend updating your version of the zlib gem. This release has been made for the convenience of those who wish to continue using it as a default gem.

Download

• https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/3.4/ruby-3.4.9.tar.gz

  SIZE: 22456968
  SHA1: 6386200753caf4e336dafceeee165fa73fd234ec
  SHA256: 7bb4d4f5e807cc27251d14d9d6086d182c5b25875191e44ab15b709cd7a7dd9c
  SHA512: ac7147c0e575cf74f669abb991ee8695d4191c919f306f124b3ee85d6b61361e752a4f1afb7bdffb49aee21edace1fcc9bf2b074ada15fa6c1eb611354c1d54b
  

  …

• https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/3.4/ruby-3.4.9.tar.xz

  SIZE: 16682004
  SHA1: 1eb1b0b45b9e9191de9d2f360164e60eedf77012
  SHA256: 4231c54072601a171faed1699f105985e9971c94cd382b78feb4eb44eec2dd1a
  SHA512:…

• https://cache.ruby-lang…

RubyGems 4.0.8 includes enhancements and documentation and Bundler 4.0.8 includes enhancements and bug fixes.

To update to the latest RubyGems you can run:

gem update --system [--pre]

To update to the latest Bundler you can run:

gem install bundler [--pre]
bundle update --bundler=4.0.8

RubyGems Release Notes

Enhancements:

• Use JSON for cargo metadata parsing. Pull request #9373 by hsbt
• Fix NameError in Gem::Request.get_proxy_from_env when requiring rubygems/request directly. Pull request #9362 by afurm
• Installs bundler 4.0.8 as a default gem.

Documentation:

• Unify Compact Index API naming. Pull request #9372 by simi

Bundler Release Notes

Enhancements:

• Add a new…

My favorite tech movement in 2025 wasn’t anything artifical, but rather the resurgence in interest around building terminal interfaces with two new frameworks, Charm and Ratatui, which make developing pure text user interfaces easier than ever before using Go or Rust. They provide a huge set of components and examples showing you how to build various types of functionality.

Mainframe applications ruled the 70s and 80s, providing terminal interfaces for business operations. You might still see a ticket agent using a terminal to check you in at the airport. That’s an interface to a mainframe application, allowing the agent to lookup your ticket and assign you a seat quickly, with just a few…

Hello! My big takeaway from last month’s musings about man pages was that examples in man pages are really great, so I worked on adding (or improving) examples to two of my favourite tools’ man pages.

Here they are:

• the dig man page (now with examples)
• the tcpdump man page examples (this one is an update to the previous examples)

the goal: include the most basic examples

The goal here was really just to give the absolute most basic examples of how to use the tool, for people who use tcpdump or dig infrequently (or have never used it before!) and don’t remember how it works.

So far saying “hey, I want to write an examples section for beginners and infrequent users of this tools” has been…

In 1962, an IBM mainframe computed the flight data for a manned spaceflight for the first time. The astronaut on board that mission, John Glenn, refused to fly until the data was confirmed by a NASA mathematician by hand.

The mathematician? Katherine Johnson. a former human computer whose reputation for accuracy had an astronaut asking for her by name.

The programmers? Dorothy Vaughan’s team of former human computers who’d taught themselves FORTRAN so they could run the machine that took the role of computer away from them.

The words “human computer“ are at best a misnomer. Based on the name alone, one could be forgiven for thinking of them as mere clerical workers operating mechanical…

Released shared partials and ViewComponents across component sets, plus Markdown documentation for each set so LLMs can use focused context when customizing Rails Blocks.

View full changelog →

At Shopify, we want our development environments to be fast. Installing dependencies is slow, especially in an application as large as Shopify. bun and uv have dramatically improved install times for TypeScript and Python dependencies. What if we could do the same for Bundler and the Ruby community?

Our team at Shopify has been working on a series of improvements to Bundler and RubyGems. Bundler downloads gems up to 200% faster. Cloning git gems is now 3x faster in our monolith.

We were also able to decrease the overall bundle install time by 3.5x in one of our applications by precompiling gems thanks to cibuildgem, a new precompilation toolchain we’d love you to try!

Here’s an…

Wire your OpenAPI contract into a Node.js Fastify backend with auto-generated routes, typed handlers, and request validation—no manual route definitions, no type drift, no integration surprises.

Backend APIs usually start the same way: you write route handlers, add request validation, wire up auth. Afterward (if you're disciplined) you generate an OpenAPI spec from all that code. The spec becomes a byproduct of the implementation — not a shared agreement you designed upfront. But what if you wrote the OpenAPI contract first and let it build the server for you?

Aji and Joël get into a flow as they discuss the different diagrams that help guide their thought processes when working.

Together they compare their go to diagrams and why they find them so useful, the different analysis tools a diagram can offer and the alternative perspective on your work it provides, as well as how using diagrams can help communicate your mental models more effectively with your colleagues.

—

Be sure to check out these resources on diagrams and conditionals for some wider reading on today’s episode - BeautifulMermaid Repo - Visualising RSepc - Structuring Conditionals

You can also find our hosts speaking at various conferences over the next few months - H…

At some point of any Ruby on Rails project's life the codebase starts to get messy, and you sense that you have to address this before the tech debt pile reaches unmanageable proportions.

There are a lot of places where this can occur, for example:

• organizing business logic between controllers and background jobs,
• managing database concurrency,
• orchestrating reactive and/or real-time user interfaces,
• etc.

The most likely place where this will bite you, though, is in the domain model layer. As it turns out, a poorly architected, tightly coupled domain model is a huge time and productivity sink. Large-scale refactorings to convert one-to-many to many-to-many associations -…

You are a security concious developer and you follow the advice given by security folks to have strong password requirements, and you set a rule of having at least 10 characters, containing one uppercase, one lowercase letter, at least one digit and special character. Surely, this will result in strong passwords, right?

Ruby-LibGD Reaches 3,000 Downloads: A Milestone in Ruby Image Generation March 9, 2026 Open-source development is often a marathon, not a sprint. Today, ruby-libgd, a Ruby library for image generation, has reached an exciting milestone: 3,000 downloads. This achievement reflects not only adoption but also the sustained effort behind a library that brings dynamic image … Continue reading Ruby-LibGD Reaches 3,000 Downloads: A Milestone in Ruby Image Generation →

I created pwa.support as a way to both examine any website to see if it can be isntalled as a progressive web app, but also to capture in some detail the depressing state of support for this concept across major browsers and operating systems.

I’ve been revisiting desktop Linux since my last attempt, and it involved setting up a lot of websites as Progressive Web Apps. The state of platform and browser support for the “sweet solution” is extremely mediocre. There’s pretty much no combination of operating system and browser that provides a truly app-like experience (except maybe Chromebooks).

I’ve captured it all on pwa.support. The content there is 100% written by me, after trying…

When multiple validations share the same if: condition, or multiple callbacks share the same only: constraint, you end up repeating yourself. with_options groups them together.

Instead of…

…repeating conditions across multiple validations:

class Article < ApplicationRecord
  validates :title, presence: true, if: :published?
  validates :body, length: { minimum: 100 }, if: :published?
  validates :author, presence: true, if: :published?
end

Use…

…the with_options method to group common configurations:

class Article < ApplicationRecord
  with_options if: :published? do
    validates :title, presence: true
    validates :body, length: { minimum: 100 }
    validates :author, presence: tr…

Works well in controllers too:

class AdminController < ApplicationController
  with_options only: [:edit, :update] do
    before_action :…

And associations:

class User …

AI agents are your website’s new visitors. People are already using them to gather information, perform research or even make purchases online. Whether we like it or not, it’s a new way to use the internet. Agents do not care about modern design or fancy animations. They need an easy way to understand and interact with your content. If your website isn’t ready for them, you’re already losing traffic you don’t even know about. Let’s fix that.

What does “agent-friendly” even mean?

An agent-friendly website is one that AI agents can reliably navigate, understand, and interact with. There’s a growing set of standards and conventions that make this possible. Some already exist and just need to…

Direct link to podcast audio file

Today, we're joined by a very special guest, Len Testa! You might know him from The Disney Dish podcast or from his excellent theme park travel planning app Touring Plans. Or you might not know him at all! No wrong answers.

This episode is all about Disney's ill-fated Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser live action role-playing hotel—which we both had the opportunity to experience right when it first launched. It was a life-changing experience for both of us, so why did it fail? Is it true that the top Disney brass learned all the wrong lessons from that failure? And will the CEO-in-waiting Josh D'Amaro ever have the courage to attempt something so…

Hi, it’s Claudio Baccigalupo. Let’s explore this week’s changes in the Rails codebase.

Set read-only permissions for GitHub Actions workflow generated by rails new
The workflow will run with the minimum required permissions, regardless of the GitHub Organization settings.

Don’t guard action_dispatch_request and action_cable load hooks
Removes the load hooks guard for action_dispatch_request in Action Pack and action_cable in Action Cable.

Improve Trix support for Action Text markdown
Adds <del> as a strikethrough alias (Trix emits <del>, not <s>). Also, add a visit_div handler so Trix-style <div> blocks pass through their children’s content, letting <br> tags handle paragraph spacing…

Specify PostgreSQL 9.5 or higher is required
Rails includes array_p…

If you run your own servers, you will surely get a lot of weird hackbot requests, searching for accidentally accessible .env files and such. While these bots are generally harmful, unless you have an issue, I prefer to block them so they don’t spam my logs. If it is a Rails app, I use rack-attack, but I also have some jekyll and other stuff and for those, fail2ban is a great tool to solve this issue. Fail2ban is an intrusion prevention tool, that scans your log files and based on rules, blocks clients on the firewall. It is available on most Linux distributions, and you can install it with your package manager, you can check the installation instructions on the projects documentation. Once…

One exciting thing about this year’s book wrap up, at least to me, is that I wrote mini-reviews all year, so these reviews should have a stronger tendency to sound like I actually read the book. And also this will come out in March and not, like, May.

Another exciting thing, again, for me, is that I think I finally cracked my personal dilemma about How To Rate Books.

So, this is like the nerdiest thing ever, but basically I’ve never quite known what to do with 5 star or 1-10 ratings for books.

I have a pretty good system for finding books I will like, and I do, in fact, like about 90% or so of the books I read at least a little. So on a 5 star scale, basically everything is a 4. Storysite…

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, click here.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you need to know to get your Ruby on Rails application from version 8.0 to version 8.1.

1. 1. Preparations
2. 2. Ruby Version
3. 3. Gems
4. 4. Config Files
5. 5. Rails Guides
6. 6. Notable New Features
7. 7. Application Code
   • 7.1 Railties
   • 7.2 Action Pack
   • 7.3 Active Record
   • 7.4 Active Storage
   • 7.5 Active Support
   • 7.6 Active Job
8. 8. Next Steps

1. Preparations

Before beginning with the upgrade process, we have some recommended preparations:

• Your Rails app should have the latest patch version before you move…

I like Hotwired Turbo like I liked UJS (Unobtrusive Javascript): it adds a few small but helpful tricks to my application’s toolbox. One problem though with adding any javascript is that because the webpage is more dynamic, writing full-browser system tests becomes harder because we need to make sure the webpage is in just the right state to interact with it in tests. It’s annoying to write tests super defensively to avoid flakey tests.

Enumerating states Turbo can be in

Turbo adds some attributes to the webpage DOM that we can look for in our tests to ensure that things are in the right state. But it’s tricky. Let’s start with the trickiest thing first.

Turbo sets …

The New Year often brings a rethinking of one’s habits, future, and identity. For me this year my future identity is more important than it ever was.

Most of you don’t know that 2024 into 2025 was a deeply painful year for me. I wrote my 2024 Rails World keynote while my now ex-husband was moving out of the home we’d shared for 11 years. I put on a brave face and went to the conference. And even though it felt like my life was falling apart, I gave the best damn talk of my career. Being on stage reminded me that I’m strong, capable, and have a lot of support from the community. I’ll never forget the way my friends showed up for me that weekend.

Now that I’m divorced and through the most…

Frequently Played 🔗

I tend to listen to the same songs or albums on repeat that are evocative of how I’m feeling or what’s going on with me. Here is what I’m currently listening to over, and over, and over, and over, again.

Everybody Scream 🔗

I’m very much looking forward to seeing the most powerful and beautiful singing voice I’ve ever heard in concert next month.

Full Lyrics

The witchcraft, the medicine, the spells and the injections
The harvest, the needle, protect me from evil
The magic and the misery, madness and the mystery
Oh, what has it done to me?

Buckle 🔗

Yes, this was featured recently. I’m still listening to it.

Full Lyrics

I wanna call you on the telephone
I made a thousand people love me,…

Chris, Andrew, and David welcome special guest Jeff Dickey (jdx), creator of mise, discussing his background rewriting the Heroku CLI from Ruby to Node due to Ruby distribution/sandboxing issues.  The conversation digs into why language CLIs are hard to distribute, the tradeoffs between shims vs PATH-based version switching, why tasks can be the “clean” solution, and Jeff’s Rust-first tooling philosophy. They also dive into his other projects: usage (CLI docs/completions), Pitchfork (dev daemon runner that starts/stops services by directory), and fnox/Fort Knox (secrets management with encrypted files or remote stores like 1Password), and a big upcoming shift: pre-compiled (portable) Rubies…

If you’ve worked with modern JavaScript, you’re familiar with ES modules and import statements. Rails apps can use esbuild (or vite or bun) for this, but the default option (Rails way) is importmap-rails. It lets you write import { Controller } from "@hotwired/stimulus" without any build step at all.

Ever thought about how this works?

Import maps, just a web standard

Import maps are a web standard that tells browsers how to resolve bare module specifiers. A bare module specifier looks like import React from "react", which isn’t valid ESM on its own. The browser needs an absolute path (/assets/react.js), relative path (./react.js), or HTTP URL (https://cdn.example.com/react.js).

Import maps…

I caught up briefly with Blue Ridge Ruby organizer Jeremy Smith to talk about speaking, blogging, conferences, and why you should come to Blue Ridge Ruby.

I joined Brendan Buckingham and Ryan Frisch on the Rails Business Podcast to talk about how AI has changed my day-to-day as a developer.

John Nunemaker on AI Development - Rails Business

John Nunemaker returns to discuss how fast AI tooling has changed and argues tech leaders should adopt Claude Max (defaulting to Opus), set up agent-friendly local environments, and roll that out to their teams. He shares how his company built an…

Buzzsprout

Here are the highlights:

• Your job as a tech leader is to go first. Get Claude Code with Opus, set up your local dev environment to be agent-friendly, then do the same for everyone on your team. I told everyone to get the $100 Max plan and offered to pay for…

A buffer overflow vulnerability exists in Zlib::GzipReader. This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2026-27820. We recommend upgrading the zlib gem.

Details

The zstream_buffer_ungets function prepends caller-provided bytes ahead of previously produced output but fails to guarantee the backing Ruby string has enough capacity before the memmove shifts the existing data. This can lead to memory corruption when the buffer length exceeds capacity.

Recommended action

We recommend to update the zlib gem to version 3.2.3 or later. In order to ensure compatibility with bundled version in older Ruby series, you may update as follows instead:

• For Ruby 3.2 users: Update to…

The JRuby community is pleased to announce the release of JRuby 10.0.4.0.

• Homepage: https://www.jruby.org/
• Download: https://www.jruby.org/download

JRuby 10.0.4.x targets Ruby 3.4 compatibility.

Thank you to our contributors this release, you help keep JRuby moving forward! @evaniainbrooks, @katafrakt, @mrnoname1000

Standard Library

• The syslog library moves to bundled gems. (#9198)
• The unicode_normalize library is now thread-safely loaded as an internal library (#9231, #9232)

43 Issues and PRs resolved for 10.0.4.0

• #8697 Tracing :call doesn’t work if the traced code is running on a different thread
• #8876 import_methods doesn’t allow calling another refined method
• #…

The second Iraq War started during Spring Break of my sophomore year of university. It was coming. The one international relations class I have ever taken, an honors seminar on US interventionism, had wrapped up several weeks prematurely. The classes’s teacher, Ambassador Barbara Bodine, had been recalled to Washington.

I spent that Spring Break week on campus alone with my thoughts, as any romantic 20-year old I imagine would be. The woman I had just begun dating, who I had met in that same university class, was traveling in Germany. That relationship would last another three years; the Iraq war would last eight.

I did not sign up. My best friend had been exercising…

Image Processing in Ruby with GD: Exploring ruby-libgd v0.3.0 March 4, 2026 Image processing is usually associated with languages like Python or C++, but Ruby can also manipulate images efficiently thanks to bindings for native libraries. One of those libraries is libgd, a well-known C library used to dynamically generate and manipulate images such as … Continue reading Image Processing in Ruby with GD: Exploring ruby-libgd v0.3.0 →

I’ve been running a few experiments to streamline our development workflow, and I keep talking with folks on teams who haven’t been granted the budget or access to this kind of tooling yet. So I’m writing some of these up to help demystify what the experience is actually like.

For this one.. I wanted to see if I could take an AppSignal error and go from alert → fix → deploy without leaving the terminal.

Using Claude Code and AppSignal’s MCP integration, the whole process took under five minutes.

For context, our Rails app is already configured with AppSignal and has been running in production for a while. Like many teams, there are a few low-priority errors that pop up from time to time,…

Thinking about a rebrand? Before you start over, consider whether your marketing needs a rewrite or a second act built on what’s already working.

Continue Reading

A few weeks ago, we ran into an interesting problem in one of our projects. We had a reports table with a reason column that used the classic Rails enum approach:

# db/migrate/XXXXXXXXXXXXXX_create_reports.rb
class CreateReports < ActiveRecord::Migration[7.1]
  create_table :reports do |t|
    t.string :title
    t.integer :reason, default: 0, null: false
  end
end

# app/models/report.rb
class Report < ApplicationRecord
  enum :reason, {
    spam: 0,
    harassment: 1,
    inappropriate_content: 2,
    copyright: 3,
    misinformation: 4
  }, prefix: true
end

Everything worked fine until the client requested the ability to select multiple reasons for a report. A user could report…

We’re excited to welcome Planning Center as a Contributing member of the Rails Foundation - the first new member in 2026!

Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Carlsbad, CA (with a fully remote team), Planning Center builds church management software used by more than 90,000 churches around the world. Their platform helps churches organize the practical details of ministry - service planning, volunteer scheduling, donations, event registrations, check-ins, small groups, and more.

On Rails since day one

If it runs at Planning Center, it runs on Rails, and has for nearly two decades. That includes:

• Customer-facing web applications used daily by tens of thousands of churches
• API…