Ruby News Brief (Q3 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

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! It will also have a (cheaper) virtual option.

• June 7: Call for proposals has opened and since closed
• June 7: Registration for RubyConf is now open!

Security

• Aug 16: better_errors prior to 2.8.0 did not implement CSRF protection for its internal requests. It also did not enforce the correct "Content-Type" header for these requests, which allowed a cross-origin "simple request" to be made without CORS protection

Projects

Ruby

Ruby, the language itself.

• July 7: Ruby 3.0.2 has been released. Fixes 3 CVEs.

Rails

Rails (or Ruby on Rails) is an open-source framework that popularized Ruby for web development.

• Sep 15: Rails 7.0 Alpha 1 Release!

Trending Topics

Rails 7 (12)

Rails 7 is officially in Alpha, and it brings some very exciting new answers to how we do JavaScript, an awesome approach to at-work encryption with Active Record, SQL query origin logging, asynchronous query loading, exclusive autoloading through Zeitwerk, and much more.

• Previewing Rails 7 upcoming changes

  • Stefan Weinert
  • Stefan walks through some of the upcoming changes in Rails 7.

• Adding support for cross-cluster associations to Rails 7

  • Eileen M. Uchitelle
  • The Github team extracted internal functionality to disable joining queries when an association crossed multiple databases.

• Rails 7 adds change tracking methods for belongs_to associations

  • Swaathi Kakarla
  • Using ActiveRecord to query for database changes.

• Starting with Rails 7, retry failed jobs indefinitely

  • Alkesh Ghorpade
  • Rails 7 comes with an ActiveJob upgrade that lets us specify jobs that should be retried until they succeed, indefinitely.

Testing (6)

Testing code is essential to running production applications at scale, and the Ruby community is very enthusiastic about testing.

• Making Rails run just a few tests faster

  • Jorge Manrubia
  • Rails parallel testing had a significant overhead due to database setup and fixture loading. Jorge has opened a PR in Rails to disable parallel testing by default.

• Understanding Factory Bot syntax by coding your own Factory Bot

  • Jason Swett
  • Jason demystifies Factory Bot as he creates his own implementation of it from scratch.

Javascript, Hotwire, and Rails (5)

Recent Rails releases and releases around the corner have changed the way Rails interacts with Javascript.

• Modern web apps without JavaScript bundling or transpiling

  • David Heinemeier Hansson
  • We no longer need a transpiling step to turn ES6 into something that'll run in the browser. It runs just fine, no changes needed.

• Using Hotwire with Rails for a SPA like experience

  • Mike Wilson
  • Mike explains using Hotwire and Turbo frames for navigation.

• Using Hotwire with Rails

  • Renata Marques
  • Hotwire is a way to build modern web applications without much JavaScript by sending HTML over the wire. In this article, Renata Marques introduces us to Hotwire and walks us through a simple example.

Standout Content

• Sorbet Compiler: An experimental, ahead-of-time compiler for Ruby

  • The Sorbet Team
  • Stripe exposes the code for their ahead-of-time Ruby compiler, which is up to 170% faster than the default.

• Tutorial: How to Send Email in a Ruby App

  • Aydrian Howard
  • A quick walkthrough on adding email functionality to Ruby app.

• Under the hood of the includes method in Rails

  • Paweł Dąbrowski
  • Understand how ActiveRecord implements includes