Ruby News Brief (Q2 2021)

Honeybadger's quarterly briefings keep you up to date on the most important developments in your programming communities. We curate the news so you can spend more time focusing on what's really important.

• Events: Conferences and meetups. Upcoming and recently completed.
• Security: Recent vulnerability reports
• Projects: News about major community projects
• Trending Topics: Summaries of the big topics everyone's talking about
• Standout Content: Content that didn't fit in other sections, but that was too cool to leave out.

Events

RailsConf 2021 on Apr 12 - 15

RailsConf is the world’s largest and longest-running gathering of Ruby on Rails enthusiasts, practitioners, and companies. For Rails developers, RailsConf is a chance to catch up with their peers, as well as get a read on what the current and future status of Rails development is from leading voices in the community.

• April 12: RailsConf already happened, and this is an official playlist of the top 10 recordings.

RubyConf 2021 on Nov 8 - 10

RubyConf is the world’s largest and longest-running gathering of Ruby enthusiasts, practitioners, and companies. It will be in Denver, in-person this year!

• May 6: RubyConf will be in person this year!

Security

• April 21: REXML gem in certain Ruby versions doesn't properly address XML round trip issues

Projects

Ruby

• Ruby 3.0.1 Released: Fixes two security issues.

Rails

• Apr 27: Basecamp's Employee Speech Policy Controversy. Basecamp, the company from where Rails originally blossomed, recently enacted some controversial policies seen by many as curtailing the rights of its employees, many of who were disappointed in the change.
• May 5: The Rails Core Team has issued a statement on its governance stressing that no individual has 'sole control' over Rails and no policies can or will be enacted unilaterally. This seems to be in response to the above controversy.
• May 5: Rails versions 6.1.3.2, 6.0.3.7, 5.2.4.6, and 5.2.6 have been released! These releases contain important security fixes.

Trending Topics

Testing (6)

Testing code is essential to running production applications at scale, and the Ruby community is HUGE on testing

• Why Write Rails View Tests
  • Nikola Đuza
  • Pragmatic Pineapple 🍍 post on the importance of writing tests for Rails views.
• History of RSpec
  • Steven R. Baker
  • Steven writes about the history of RSpec. His perspective is valuable, having been active in the industry both in the creation of RSpec and Rails.

Containers (5)

Docker, Kubernetes, etc. Containers let us standardize our environments and dependencies to more consistently develop software.

• Kubernetes Single Sign On - A detailed guide
  • Ben Dixon
  • talkingquickly blog post about implementing a single sign on system when using Kubernetes.
• Containerizing Ruby on Rails Applications
  • Michael Orr
  • The Doximity blog. The company is in the process of transitioning to a container-based platform, and they're writing about the things they learn along the way.
• How and Why to Dockerize Your Rails App's Database
  • Jason Swett
  • Jason runs a popular Rails blog and is influential in the community. He describes dockerization of databases pretty well.

Standout Content

• Ruby 3.0 changes how methods of subclassed core classes work.
  • Vasiliy Ermolovich
  • The author explains Ruby 3.0's changes to how inheritance from Ruby core classes works. He explains that this generally shouldn't be done. This is a very short article.
• A Story of Rails Encryption
  • Jorge Manrubia
  • he ‘nerve wracking’ story of adding database encryption to HEY (right before launch), Rails, and then to HEY again (well after launch) that shows how Rails gains from production projects like this.
• Github Copilot
  • Github Team
  • This is an announcement rather than a post, but Github has released a beta tool that will help autocomplete your code using artificial intelligence trained on it's hosted repositories. This is all the buzz in the last week or so.