Ruby 4.0 Default to Bundled Gems: What Does That Mean, Anyway?

Ruby 4.0 has continued the tradition of moved gems from “default” to “bundled status” - but to many Ruby developers, the exact difference isn’t clear. For that matter, is a default gem the same as a core library? [more inside]

Dynamic Ruby And Hidden Maintenance Costs

I nearly removed a working feature because a dynamic Rails abstraction hid its callers from search. Here’s a look at the hidden maintenance costs of elegant abstractions

The Signals That Predict a Difficult Rails Upgrade

Rails upgrades don’t become difficult because of Rails. They become difficult because systems accumulate structure. [more inside]

Everyday Rails Testing with RSpec updated for 2026

Hello! I’ve just released updates to my introductory Rails on RSpec book for Rails 8 and Ruby 4. It’s available now on Leanpub, and as always a free update for all who’ve purchased it in the past. Thanks for your support over the years!

The Ultimate Showdown: Rails 8 vs Phoenix LiveView

If you are a Ruby on Rails developer, you have definitely heard about Elixir and the Phoenix… [more inside]

Internator now runs on OpenCode (bye Codex)

Internator is still the Ruby CLI that: [more inside]

Ruby 3.2 Is EOL: What You Actually Need to Do

Ruby 3.2 hit end of life on March 31. This covers the practical side: how to triage your actual risk (compliance, insurance, exposure), which Ruby version to target, the sneaky bundled gems breaking change in 3.4, and what to do if you can’t upgrade right now. [more inside]

I organized an AI art competition using ruby-libgd.

Claude was brilliant. DeepSeek made a comeback. GPT showed off. Qwen improved. Then Claude got blocked by payment restrictions. No winner. Just lessons about AI, creativity, and non determinism. [more inside]

Ditch Node.js: A Simple Guide to Rails Importmaps

How Importmaps Work in Rails (And Why You Don’t Need Webpack) When I first started… [more inside]

Planning for the Rails 8.0 EOL and the 8.1 Upgrade

Rails 8.0 is going EOL soon; if you’ve already got it done, great! If you’re stuck with a legacy project and need to plan an upgrade, though, this guide gives details on how you can do that, with some specific pitfalls to avoid. Fortunately, a bunch of the games that were stuck on Rails 8.0 support - like audited and active admin - are now working with Rails 8.0, so if you tried before and had a hard time, you will be pleasantly surprised. [more inside]

Competent vs Incompetent Ruby Devs When Encountering React

Competent vs Incompetent Ruby Devs When Encountering React:

N+1 Driven Development

In this episode, we look at how we can modify our application from a performance aspect to increase our job security. We’ll slow down our application to a still usable level, but then swoop in months later and become the hero.

Hotwire vs Inertia.js: Which One Should You Use in Rails?

For a long time, if you wanted to build a fast, modern web application without page reloads, you had… [more inside]

Rails logs in development: beautiful stack traces, everything in your terminal, life

Rails logs in production three weeks later: zgrep through 30 compressed files and pray. [more inside]

Judoscale on Tour: An Ode To Heroku

Rails Consent — Cookie Consent & Privacy Preferences for Rails

I’ve released Rails Consent, a Rails Engine that provides a simple way to add cookie consent and privacy preference management to Ruby on Rails applications. [more inside]

Turbo Tour – A Ruby on Rails gem for building product tours

I recently released Turbo Tour, a Ruby on Rails engine that makes it easy to add interactive product tours to your Rails applications. [more inside]

The Secret to Fast Web Scraping: Finding Internal JSON APIs

When I first started web scraping, my workflow was always the same. I would use Nokogiri to download… [more inside]

A Global Message Bus with ActiveSupport::EventReporter

A new way to decouple code since Rails 8.1

The Codebase Drag Audit: A Diagnostic Rubric for Legacy Codebases

Five signals that tell you the codebase (not the team) is the bottleneck, turned into an interactive scoring rubric. Covers estimate padding, deploy fear, untouchable files, misleading test coverage, and onboarding friction. Framework-agnostic with Rails examples. [more inside]

GitHub deletes your traffic logs every 14 days. It has changed.

I built a Ruby dashboard that archives them forever, with custom charts using ruby-libgd. Open source. Automated. Your metrics, permanently yours. [more inside]

A Claude Code Skill to Upgrade Rails (From 2.3 to 8.1)

This skill is built on real-world experience, not just documentation: [more inside]

🧵 ruby-libgd: The Modern Ruby Image Library You've Been Sleeping On

After benchmarking against RMagick, the results are surprising: [more inside]

Semantic search in Rails using sqlite-vec, Kamal and Docker

Semantic search for a Rails blog using sqlite-vec, Kamal, Docker and a small embedding service backed by EmbeddingGemma. [more inside]

The Ruby on Rails Job Market in 2026: Why It's Better Than Ever

If you spend too much time on X or Reddit, you might think the only jobs left in 2026 are for AI… [more inside]