Ruby Weekly

The final report on the 'RubyGems fracture'

Thu, 2 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#794 — April 2, 2026

Ruby Weekly

The 'RubyGems Fracture' Incident Report — A postmortem of the Ruby Central vs Bundler story in late 2025 which resulted in the Ruby core team taking stewardship of RubyGems and Bundler. The timeline of events is laid out in detail, but it’s unlikely to resolve the matter entirely (as demonstrated in this Reddit comment by Mike Perham).

Richard Schneeman (Ruby Central)

💡 The Register also has a good independent take on this update factoring in some of the responses to it.

How a Solo SaaS Founder Stopped Worrying About Rails Maintenance — "FastRuby.io is the steady baseline behind everything. They've simplified my life and freed me up to focus on what's important." See how Bonsai's fixed-cost monthly maintenance helped Tim go from chasing contractors to peace of mind.

Bonsai by FastRuby.io® sponsor

Ruby Native 0.4: Your Rails App in the App Store — Think Hotwire Native but without ever having to touch Swift, yet you still get native controls, navbars, menus, and iOS 26 styling. It’s now free right up to using TestFlight with your first 100 users. You only pay once you want to go live in the App Store.

Joe Masilotti

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

Ruby 3.2.11 has been released to fix the recent zlib vulnerability, much as Ruby 3.3.11 did last week. Note that Ruby 3.2 is now EOL (End of Life).
🔠 Looking for a new editor font? CodingFont helps you find a good choice visually using a bracket-style faceoff.
🤖 The Ruby AI News newsletter is celebrating its first birthday and is absolutely packed with stuff.
Rubysyn is an interesting attempt to 'clarify Ruby's syntax and semantics'.

🤖 Rails Upgrade Methodology as Claude Code Skills — I actually used the raw MD files last weekend to upgrade a Rails 6 app to Rails 8 and it went well.

Ernesto Tagwerker (FastRuby)

Using Perfetto in ZJIT — The ZJIT team has added Perfetto tracing support to visualize and query slow events in Ruby's next-gen JIT. Deep technical content from the people building Ruby's performance future.

Max Bernstein (Shopify)

CI was designed for 2015. Your deploy frequency wasn't. — Depot CI: 2-3s job starts, parallel steps, SSH debugging. Run depot ci migrate to move your GitHub Actions in minutes.

Depot sponsor

📄 Migrating 9,000 Tests from RSpec to Minitest with AI Agents Viktor Schmidt

📄 Improving on Sandi Metz's Gear Class from POODR – *gasp!* Jason Swett

📄 Handling Uncountable Words in Rails Inflections – Like staff, metadata, feedback.. or maybe sheep? Andy Croll

📄 Teach Rails Irregular Plurals with Inflections — So criterion becomes criteria, say. Andy Croll

📄 Fixtures on Purpose: From Accident to Artifact Mike Moore

🛠 Code & Tools

🏖️ Holidays 9.0: Methods to Deal with Those Special Days — Just in time for Easter! Days off, vacations, public holidays.. whatever you call them, your app might need to know about them. Holidays covers such days the world over using its YAML-based definitions.

Holidays Team

Your Rails App and Your Analytics Belong in One DB — TimescaleDB extends Postgres so analytics runs on live data. No second database, no pipeline, no sync lag. Try free.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

Safely 1.0: Rescue and Report Exceptions in Non-Critical Code — The idea is that while you may want to know about exceptions in certain blocks of code, they might not be serious enough to require crashing out. Sends exceptions to a variety of services out of the box.

Andrew Kane

re2 2.25: Ruby Bindings to Google's RE2 Regex Library — A safer alternative to backtracking regular expression engines. v2.25 adds a variety of new features including RE2.extract which does a match-and-reformat in one step (so you provide a source text, regex, and the desired output format including backreferences).

Paul Mucur

📰 Classifieds

🧐 A cheaper Heroku? Our cost comparison calculator puts the PaaS alternatives head-to-head.

SerpApi is a Web Search API that gives developers real-time, structured access to search engine results. Try SerpApi for free.

Become an AI-first engineer. Gauntlet is a full-time fellowship, no cost. $200K+ roles. Next cohort starts 4/27. Apply Today.

Inertia.js 3.0 – Provides glue between React, Vue and Svelte SPAs and non-JS server-side frameworks like Rails and Django. More on v3.
🔎 rbspy v0.45 – Sampling profiler for Ruby processes that can be used without restarting them. Now supports Ruby 3.2.11 and 3.3.11.
ruby.wasm 2.9.0 – An official collection of WebAssembly ports of CRuby. Here's a handy cheat sheet.
ActiveHash 4.1 – Use hashes as a read-only data source for ActiveRecord-like models.
Gemstash 2.8 – Run your own local gem server and caching proxy for RubyGems.org.
Bunny 3.0/3.1 – RabbitMQ client library. Here's what changed in v3.0.
The Twitter (X) Ruby Gem 8.3 – Ruby interface to the official X API.
Parallel 1.28 – Run code in parallel processes, threads, or ractors.
Ruby-LSP 0.27 Beta 1 (now using Rubydex)
Rack 3.2.6, BigDecimal 4.1

How to install a Ruby gem the hard way

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#793 — March 26, 2026

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Ruby Weekly

How to Install a Gem (It's Harder Than It Sounds) — As one of the people behind Bundler 1.0 and a former maintainer of RubyGems.org, and now working on gem.coop and rv, André knows a few things about how gems tick (big understatement). This post is full of ‘aha’ moments as he walks through installing a gem by hand, giving us an idea of what tools like gem and rv do for us.

André Arko

A Solo Founder Story: 'I Got Fed Up Chasing Contractors' — Tim tried hiring and outsourcing, but nothing fit. Then he found Bonsai. Now he gets reliable monthly Rails maintenance with almost no oversight. "FastRuby.io works independently. I can trust their work without worrying if something will break."

Bonsai by FastRuby.io® sponsor

Building Browser-Based Ruby Tutorials with Tutorialkit.rb — TutorialKit.rb is a toolkit for building interactive Ruby (and Rails!) tutorials that run in-browser with WebAssembly. This post tours building your own experiences, shares working examples right in the post, and explains the tech behind it all, including a custom Ruby WASM build that can run Rails.

Pazderin and Dementyev (Evil Martians)

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

Ruby 3.3.11 has been released with a fix for the recent zlib vulnerability. This is the final normal maintenance release of Ruby 3.3, so it's time to plan an upgrade to 3.4 or 4.0.
Early-bird tickets for RubyConf 2026 (taking place this July in Las Vegas) are available. Dave Thomas is one of the keynoters.
Lots of minor Rails releases this week: Rails 7.2.3.1, 8.0.4.1, and 8.1.2.1 to fix a variety of security issues, and 8.0.5 and 8.1.3 as regular bugfix releases.
🏴 Haggis Ruby 2026 is a Scottish Ruby conference returning this April 23-24 with a fantastic lineup.
JetBrains released RubyMine 2026.1, the latest version of its Ruby IDE.

Meet Duck Typer: Your New Duck Typing Friend — Duck typing gives us polymorphism for free, but what if you want the interface to be enforced? Duck Typer does just that, asserting that a set of classes share compatible public interfaces, catching signature drift and missing methods without fuss.

Thiago Araújo Silva (Thoughtbot)

AI Shouldn't Cost More Than It Saves — We can find where LLMs pay off, validate with real data, and tune for cost/effectiveness. Need help from experts? Let's talk.

SINAPTIA sponsor

📄 Ten Ways CSV.read Can Silently Corrupt or Lose Your Data – Pitches SmarterCSV (a library of 14 years' maturity) as the solution. Tilo Sloboda

📄 Transfer Manager Directory Support for AWS SDK for Ruby – The AWS SDK for Ruby Transfer Manager now supports directory uploads and downloads. Juli Tera (AWS)

📄 Deploying a Rails 8 App with Kamal on Hetzner – An exhaustive step-by-step walkthrough of the process. Mooktakim Ahmed

📄 Migrating from Devise to Rails' Authentication Generator Nithin Bekal

🛠 Code & Tools

Nokolexbor 0.7: A Faster Drop-in Replacement for Nokogiri — A Lexbor-based HTML5 parser that’s multiple times faster than Nokogiri. Ruby 2.7 is dropped, but Ruby 4.0 is supported and gets precompiled gems (installed in <4 seconds on my machine).

SerpApi

wreq-ruby: An HTTP Client with Real Browser TLS/HTTP2 Signatures — Uses the Rust-powered wreq under the hood to make HTTP requests that appear as if they come from mainstream browsers by using the same headers, TLS extension and cipher suite ordering, HTTP/2 frame settings, etc.

SearchApi

Your Rails App Has an N+1 Problem. AppSignal Will Show You Where — Auto detect N+1 queries, slow ActiveRecord calls, and memory leaks in your app. One gem, and you're monitoring in minutes. Free 30-day trial, no card required.

AppSignal sponsor

Rubyx-py: A New Way to Call Python Code from Ruby — A Rust-powered bridge between Ruby and Python’s C APIs that brings Python into the same memory space as Ruby and shuttles objects back and forth (with no IPC or serialization) and uses uv to manage dependencies.

yinho999

💡 rubyx-py is clearly experimental, so I gave it a try. Segfaults-a-plenty till I used Ruby 4.0.2 compiled with --enable-shared, but it works! I'll blog about this soon as it opens up some interesting capabilities.

simplecov-compare: Compare Coverage Reports Over Time — SimpleCov reports show the test coverage of code at a point in time, but this will help you track changes over time.

Kevin Murphy

🤖 ruby-mcp-client 1.0 – Ruby Model Context Protocol (MCP) client, now with latest spec support including support for audio content, OAuth 2.1 enhancements, and a full RubyLLM integration example.
🤐 Top Secret 1.0 – Filter sensitive information from free text before sending it to external services or APIs.
🖼️ pure-jpeg 0.3 – My pure Ruby JPEG encoder/decoder library is now much faster (0.2s on a 1024x1024 image) thanks to some third-party contributors 🎉
The Ultimate Turbo Modal for Rails (UTMR) 3.0 – Tailwind or vanilla CSS modal dialog implementation for modern Rails apps.
Chewy 8.0 – A high level framework for Elasticsearch.
💬 telegram-bot-ruby 2.6 – Ruby wrapper for Telegram's Bot API – now supporting Bot API 9.5.
Avo 4 Open Beta – A popular framework for building Rails apps for internal tools.
💳 Stripe Ruby Library 19.0 – Stripe's official library.
RubyGems 4.0.9

📰 Classifieds

🙋‍♂️ What’s next for Heroku? Jon has some thoughts.

♦️ Build Ruby apps that never lose state, even when things fail. Learn by building an app from scratch in a free Temporal Ruby SDK course.

Help us save the German healthcare system - Develop the leading healthcare stats platform with a small dedicated team in a stress free environment (Cologne based).

💎 Hiring Senior Ruby on Rails Engineers at EverAI: 50 million users, fully remote. Not used Ruby lately? That's okay, you can still apply!

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Four years ago, we first mentioned Thanos, an experimental Ruby to Go transpiler. Its author has recently wielded AI to 'finish the job'. I took it for a spin and it's very cool, but type inference demands and a lack of metaprogramming make many potential use cases a no-Go...? 😅
37signals made its Fizzy Kanban app, built in Rails, 'source available' a few months ago but maintained the paid, SaaS version. That paid version, however, is now entirely free to use.
🤖 GitHub has announced that, starting late April, data (including inputs and snippets) from Free, Pro, and Pro+ Copilot users will be used, by default, to help train future AI models. You can, however, opt out.
🔒 More than ever, it's essential to ensure no secrets have snuck into your repos. Secretlint is a linting tool dedicated entirely to the task. It's written in Node but can be used with Docker against projects of any language.

RubyGems' maintainer proposes cooldown feature

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#792 — March 19, 2026

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Ruby Weekly

Should RubyGems/Bundler Have a 'Cooldown' Feature? — RubyGems’ maintainer reflects on the idea, quickly gathering steam with other package managers (e.g.), of having a waiting period before newly released packages are installed. Hiroshi says yes, but as an opt-in feature, as it's no silver bullet.

Hiroshi Shibata

No AI Code in Production Directive — Have you heard Amazon now requires senior engineer approval for all AI-generated code after several severity-0 incidents? Should you ban it, too? We say: there's no such thing as AI code. There's just code.

SINAPTIA sponsor

Ruby 4.0.2 Released to Fix a Tricky YJIT Bug — A routine update with a fix for a YJIT bug that crashed processes. It was noticed when running Puma in cluster mode but affects any app where YJIT is enabled lazily and where local variables had escaped to the heap before YJIT started observing (there’s a proof of concept in YJIT’s test suite). There's also a fix for a GC-related perf regression.

Takashi Kokubun

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

jemalloc, the malloc implementation, has long provided an interesting performance remedy in the Ruby world but it became unmaintained last year. Well.. Meta's investing in jemalloc and bringing it back.
RBS 4.0, Ruby's type signature language, has been released with experimental inline syntax support so you can write type annotations directly in Ruby code, a la RBS::Inline.
Should Ruby get its own built-in CPU time profiler?
🇮🇹 Rubycon Italy, taking place this May 8, has just unveiled its schedule, written in Ruby itself!

How ZJIT Removes Redundant Object Loads and Stores — ZJIT, optionally available in Ruby 4.0, is a new, alternative JIT compiler with the potential for being faster and easier to work on than YJIT over time. This article shows off some of how that potential is now bearing performance-shaped fruit.

Jacob Denbeaux

How Much Time Could Your Team Save with 10x Faster CI? — We took a Rails 2.3 app to 8.1 and cut CI from 40 to 4 minutes. Ready for steady upgrades and faster CI? Contact us 🚀

Bonsai by FastRuby.io® sponsor

📄 I Quit Rails Core 4 Years Ago: Here’s What I’ve Been Up To – What happens to core members when they leave the core? Kasper Timm Hansen

📄 How to Declare Acronyms in Rails Inflections – For when you don’t want "api".camelize to be "Api" but "API". Andy Croll

🤖 Claude Code for Semi-Reluctant Rails Developers – Helpful advice from a long-time Rails developer. Robby Russell

🛠 Code & Tools

Herb v0.9: The Modern HTML + ERB Toolchain — Herb is an HTML+ERB toolchain (linter, rendering engine, LSP, formatter) supporting numerous languages (not just Ruby). v0.9 is a huge release with Action View tag helper support, a new Herb.parse_ruby API, a new default ‘strict’ parsing option, better error messages, and more. Herb's site has a new Prism playground which supports both Ruby and HTML+ERB. It's a great time to see what the Herb ecosystem offers.

Marco Roth

HTTP.rb / HTTP 'The Gem!' 6.0: The Flexible HTTP Client — I love the http gem and its flexible, easy-to-remember API. v6 is the first major release in years, and adds RFC 7234-compliant HTTP caching, instrumentation hooks, thread-safe request building, a base_uri option, and more.

http.rb team

AppSignal Monitors Your GVL (Yes, Really) — With 21 Ruby libraries instrumented out of the box, including Solid Queue, Puma, and ViewComponent. Written in Rust, so it stays out of your app's way. Free for 30 days. No credit card.

AppSignal sponsor

Ruby Native: The Tool I Wish I Had 25 Apps Ago — Ruby Native is a commercial tool for turning Rails sites into iOS apps (think Hotwire Native but without having to touch Swift). It’s currently in preview but you can try it out.

Joe Masilotti

💡 If you're interested in Rails, iOS, and Hotwire Native, Joe's newsletter has a lot of high-value content, though only a limited amount can be read for free.

📕 37signals Open Sources Its Writebook Rails App — Launched in 2024 in ‘source available’ form, 37signals has now opened up its Markdown Web book creator / renderer with the MIT license. GitHub repo.

37signals / ONCE

📈 TestProf 1.6 – Collection of tools to analyze and optimize Ruby test suite performance. Adds a TPS (tests-per-second) profiler and a GC profiling mode.
⚛️ React on Rails v16.4.0 – Integrates React and Webpack with Rails, including server-side rendering of React.
🔎 rbspy v0.44.0 – Sampling profiler for Ruby processes. Adds Ruby 4.0.2 support, a macOS binary for Apple silicon, and a --duration parameter to record for a specified number of seconds.
SmarterCSV v1.16 – Performance-focused CSV reading/writing library. The recent CHANGELOG entries are very thorough.
🧊 Refrigerator 1.9 – Freezes Ruby core classes/modules to prevent runtime modifications. Now supports Ruby 4.0.
🌐 RouteTranslator 16.0 – Manage the translations of your Rails app's routes.
Rails::Diff 0.7 – Compare Rails-generated files with those in your repo.
Brut 0.20 – Raw, standards-based, HTML-first web framework.
Devise 5.0.3 lands an important security fix.
ruby-duckdb 1.5 – Ruby client for DuckDB.

📰 Classifieds

💥 Are your job queues resilient? Our Ultimate Guide To Scaling Sidekiq and Solid Queue shows you the way.

🔬 "Absolutely essential for AI agent-written PRs." Undercover CI shows untested methods, right in your pull requests.

Help us save the German healthcare system - Develop the leading healthcare stats platform with a small dedicated team in a stress free environment (Cologne based).

💎 Hiring Senior Ruby on Rails Engineers at EverAI: 50 million users, fully remote. Not used Ruby lately? That's okay, you can still apply!

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

🤖 The Node.js community is wrestling with the role that LLM-produced code should play in its implementation, with the former creator of the io.js fork starting a petition to say 'no' to contributions built with AI assistance.
Remember back in December when WIRED published the widely-panned Ruby Is Not a Serious Programming Language? They're back at it, this time calling COBOL the 'Asbestos of Programming Languages'.
;? Some analysis of how different programming languages (including Ruby) handle a lack of mandatory semicolons.
One from the Postgres world: how a single query blew up and consumed 2 terabytes of memory before being taken down by Linux's OOM killer.
🎂 Amazon's Sébastien Stormacq reflects on the ubiquitous AWS S3 cloud storage system turning 20 years old.

Shopify's push to make Bundler and RubyGems faster

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#791 — March 12, 2026

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Ruby Weekly

Building a Faster Bundler — The Shopify team has been working on improvements to Bundler and RubyGems with the goal of reducing bundle install times. Increasing the HTTP connection pool size, parallel git clones, and optimizing hotspots in the codebase provide big wins, but they seek our help with another area in particular: precompiled gems.

Edouard Chin and Eileen Uchitelle

🛠️ As part of the above, Shopify has released cibuildgem, a tool to help gem authors release precompiled gems that can be installed faster.

Leaving Heroku? Plan Your Migration with FastRuby.io® 💸 — FastRuby analyzes your Rails app, add-ons, and infrastructure to map a migration to Hatchbox, Fly, or elsewhere. Get a step-by-step plan with cost estimates before you commit. Migrate confidently with our team of experts.

PaaS Migration Plans by FastRuby.io® sponsor

mruby 4.0 Enters Release Candidate Stage — mruby is a lightweight, embeddable subset of Ruby to run in constrained environments and that, like CRuby, is led by Matz. v4.0 adds support for pattern matching, many GC, memory and VM improvements, Cosmopolitan Libc support, a mirb overhaul, and more.

Matz and Team

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

⭐ Ruby 3.4.9 has been released including a fix for the zlib vulnerability we mentioned last week.
🤖 With this commit, the Rails homepage adopted a 'fresh pitch for the agentic age' focused on selling Rails' benefits for agentic development.
We recently mentioned that the mise version manager can now download precompiled Ruby binaries. Jeff Dickey, the creator of Mise has ▶️ gone on the Remote Ruby podcast to talk about the feature and Mise in general.
🌐 RubyEvents.org has shared a monthly update that includes future Ruby events and currently open CFPs.

How I Audit a Legacy Rails Codebase — A methodical walkthrough of how to approach an inherited codebase, including checking versions, scanning the Gemfile for red flags, reviewing the schema, and identifying perf hotspots.

Ally Piechowski

🤖 Mistral's Attempt to Put Rails Testing on Autopilot — A post from France’s best-known AI shop detailing an autonomous agent they’ve built to work on RSpec suites in Rails apps. The end result is called Mistral Vibe.

Langelier and Grosmaitre (Mistral)

AI Shouldn't Cost More Than It Saves — We can find where LLMs pay off, validate with real data, and tune for cost/effectiveness. Need help from experts? Let's talk.

SINAPTIA sponsor

🤖 How to Enable Ruby LSP in Claude Code – Claude Code has official support for Ruby LSP meaning it can navigate Ruby code more efficiently. Lucian Ghinda

📄 How Gem Namespaces Work on gem.coop Kasper Timm Hansen and David Rodríguez

📄 Your Chat Bot Needs a Better Rate Limit Strategy – “Don’t let one ambitious user trigger a denial of service.” Steve Polito (Thoughtbot)

📄 From 40 Minutes to 4 with Tests Parallelization Ariel Juodziukynas (Ombulabs)

🛠 Code & Tools

Kiq: An Official TUI Admin Interface for Sidekiq — Citing renewed interest in TUIs, Mike has created kiq where you can monitor and (mostly) manage Sidekiq in the terminal. It’s built on top of RatatuiRuby.

Mike Perham

You Picked Postgres for a Reason. Don't Leave It for Analytics — TimescaleDB extends Postgres so analytics runs on live data. No second database, no pipeline. Start for free.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

🖼️ PureJPEG: A Pure Ruby JPEG Encoder and Decoder Library — Yes, this is one of mine! I wanted a pure Ruby way to work with JPEGs, including messing around with how they're encoded (to get some crunchy late 90s effects). There’s a little behind the scenes story of its development in the README.

Peter Cooper

WSDL 1.0: A WSDL Toolkit for Ruby — WSDL (Web Services Description Language) is an XML language that describes, most commonly, SOAP-based web services, and this library provides full WSDL 1.1 support. It’s from the creator of Savon, a well-used SOAP client library, so the author knows the space well.

rubiii

Rubydex: A Static Analysis Toolkit for Ruby — A new high-performance Ruby indexer with an MCP server designed for LLM tooling.

Shopify

🚦 Stoplight 5.8 – Ruby implementation of the circuit breaker pattern to gracefully handle failures in external dependencies.
Falcon 0.55 – High-performance Ruby web server. Used in production by Shopify, this is the first release in some time.
Typhoeus 1.6 – libcurl-wrapper optimized for parallel HTTP request use cases.
FactoryTrace 2.0 – Finds and reports unused FactoryBot factories and traits.
FixtureBot 0.3 – The speed of fixtures with the syntactic sugar of factories.
Rage 1.22 – High-performance fiber-based Rails-compatible framework.
AArch64 3.0 – Tenderlove's pure Ruby ARM64 assembler.
Async 2.38.0 – The popular asynchronous I/O framework.
Active Admin 3.5 – Admin engine for Rails apps.

Plus there have been updates to a few core tools and libraries including RubyGems 4.0.8, JSON 2.19, curses 1.6 (which now supports the ncurses extended colors API), and Timeout 0.6.1.

📰 Classifieds

🧐 Heroku alternatives? Our cost comparison calculator puts them head-to-head.

Learn proven reliability patterns at Replay 2026 for distributed systems, scale, and Durable Execution. Save with code RUBY80.

Help us save the German healthcare system - Develop the leading healthcare stats platform with a small dedicated team in a stress free environment (Cologne based).

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Difftastic is a tool that can diff code files, not merely on a line-by-line basis like diff, but based on syntax. It supports all popular languages including Ruby, natch. Marco Roth has a Ruby wrapper for it, as well as Minitest::Difftastic for using it to show diffs in test runs.
GitHub addresses its recent availability and reliability issues of which there have been quite a few…
JSLinux is Fabrice Bellard's JavaScript-powered Linux VM that runs in the browser. It's not new, but it now supports x86_64. I was happy to see Ruby is ready to go, too, if you drop into this full Alpine Linux environment, though irb is broken, alas.
Ruby core contributor Hiroshi Shibata is working to eliminate RubyGems' dependency on libyaml.
The Hanami project thanks Mike Perham and Sidekiq for their continued support in 2026.
Homebrew 5.1.0 has been released.