Rails 3 Release Candidate Announced!

Posted at 8:23 | 20 Jul. 2022

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Rails 3 Release Candidate - A closer look

this week 12 years ago the release candidate for Rails 3 was announced. Wow - this was a monumental release and I can't help but thinking how far we've come since then. Strong parameters, ActiveStorage, ActionCable, Rails API mode, webpacker and back, and even Hotwire! But there's no doubting this was a big game-changing release for the Rails community. Click through and read through the exciting announcement here

Ruby 2 Keyword Arguments

On this week eight years ago Thoughtbot put out a fantastic blog talking about keyword arguments that were introduced in Ruby 2.0. Sometimes I take certain things for granted in our ecosystem, keyword arguments definitely is one of those things. Enjoy this great work from Ian C. Anderson!

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Block and Lambda

I'm sorry. I really find it hard to go an issue without sharing some of the great discussions from Why The Lucky Stiff from back in the day. This week is now different. Today SEVENTEEEN years ago _why hosted a great summary and discussion about some of the debates around a new shared block and lambda syntax. If you want to geek out about blocks and lambdas, this is just what the doctor ordered.

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Backgrounded - a background process wrapper in Ruby

This week thirteen years ago saw the initial fanfare for "backgrounded", which was an early background job framework. It provided a simple, elegant approach to invoking background jobs in ruby. Or as the author said in 2009: " I'm going to come right out and say it... Every ruby background job solution sucks. I've used a number of the popular libraries on various projects over the past year, and have yet to find one that "feels right". They took an incredibly complex problem and made and even more complex solution. It really shouldn't be this hard. All I want to do is take a unit of work from my model and kick it off into "magical background job land". I don't want to create separate "Worker" or "Job" classes which only exist to call back into my model object. If your background jobs are doing more work than that, you're doing something wrong! "

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I'd Want to Work on Ruby When I Grow O-o-old

Posted at 8:23 | 15 Jun. 2022

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Matz is here to stay

During his talk this week fifteen years ago at RubyKaigi, Matz responded to questions about his future involvement in Ruby. As you can see, he's fully invested in this language! Slide deck in the link

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Talks from LA Ruby 2009

This is a treat if you've got a day or weekend to kill, and a bunch of popcorn. Linked for your viewing pleasure are 14 talks from thirteen years ago this month at LA Ruby. Which one is your favorite?

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14 year old Ruby Comic

Now for a bit of lolz, here's a popular comic that referenced ruby this week in 2008

The Problem with Rails Callbacks

I like to feature commentary and blogs here from time to time. Here's a good piece by Samuel Mullen talking about callbacks from this week in 2013.

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When RubyKaigi tickets sold out in 60 minutes

Posted at 8:23 | 08 Jun. 2022

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When RubyKaigi tickets sold out in 60 minutes

It was June 2006. After a lot of work, the first ever RubyKaigi came onto the scene. Here we have a journal entry from none other than Why the Lucky Stiff, giving us all the juicy in-person details.

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Speeding up Rails in Ruby 1.9.3

Okay, so it wasn't called Ruby 1.9.3 *yet* - but this week in 2011 Xavier Shay was showing off some impressive ruby improvements that saw some Rails apps enjoying a _30%_ speed boost. Wow!

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Rails Edge Docs - in 2007

There wasn't a formal Rails Edge docs site yet, but the folks at *caboo.se* put a little something together so folks could have a peek. This link will let you explore edge docs from this week fifteen years ago. Look around now and see if you notice anything surprising!

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Planet Argon 2016 Hosting survey

This week six years ago Planet Argon released their famous hosting survey. I won't spoil the surprises, you'll have to click through and see for yourself!

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ActiveRecord is Released!

Posted at 8:23 | 01 Jun. 2022

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ActiveRecord is Released!

DHH was pretty excited about the 200 downloads activerecord got in its first week 18 years ago this week. In this long-forgotten corner of the internet we get a young DHH's reaction to the unveiling of this new gem that would unwittingly underpin billions of GDP's worth of ORMs.

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ASCII to Midi Morse Conversion

This week seventeen years ago Daniel Berger dropped a link to some off-the-wall ruby scripts. And what's more, these were lost to the archives and not available on rubygems or github! So I'll share one with you (why not) - a ruby script that will convert your ASCII text to a midi morse file. The future is now.

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Active...Heart?

Ruby's birthplace is Japan, and I don't think we give enough love to historical Japanese content. This week we share a rails plugin from seventeen years ago, ActiveHeart! This gem sought to take english-default validation methods and translate them to Japanese (along with some other Japanese-friendly features)

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RubyManiac Quiz

This week in 2005, Ruby legend Koichi Sasada published this daily RubyManiac Quiz. Can you guess what it returns?

other

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Ruby tools roundup

Posted at 8:23 | 12 Oct. 2021

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Ruby tools roundup

Now this is a treat. Here's a blog with a Ruby Tooling roundup thirteen years ago this week. See anything familiar? Anything new you'd like to discover?

Remember Merb?

This week in history we have a blog from Yehuda Katz talking about Merb and developments with it. If you aren't familiar with merb, you really should check it out! It has a big presence in the history of the ruby community.

RailsXLS is dead, long live RailsXLS?

RailsXLS let you write and render excel with rxls views. Nifty. It received new life this week in Ruby history. How do you render *your* excel?

Fragment caching tests

This week in history we also get to dig through a neat blog going over testing considerations for fragment caching. Some of these Rails strategies feel so new to me but really they've been around quite a while.

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The second oldest Rails podcast?

Posted at 8:23 | 06 Oct. 2021

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The second oldest Rails podcast?

The first ever episode of the Ruby on Rails Podcast was published July 11, 2005. (And is still running today as the longest-ever ruby/rails podcast!) As an unofficial RubyHistory aficianado, it is *hard* sometimes to find old podcasts. 16+ year old audio files aren't guaranteed to be found. I believe this gem is the *second* oldest rails podcast you'll find. This week fourteen years ago saw the creation of the railsenvy podcast, with the fantastic Gregg Pollack and the late Jason Seifer <3. I can't get an audio file on the first podcast but if you go far enough forward (I can confirm for ep 75) the audio is still available! This resource was a great discovery for future RubyHistory research as they shared a *lot* of links to other resources in the community at the time. (This may help surface other big blogs and releases that I don't currently have archived).

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String#chars comes one step closer to being a thing in 2006

We take String#chars as so fundamental it's hard to believe there was a time when it was unavailable in STDLIB, let alone Rails. (Who else loves the quiz where you have to guess what methods are Rails and what are Ruby?) But this week in 2006 it came one step closer with the introduction into rails. For those keeping score at home `chars` became official in Ruby 1.8.7_72.

DHH reflects on RubyConf 2004

RubyConf 2004 was big, and it happened this week seventeen years ago. DHH reflects on the conference here.

Matz is on a Plane, Weighing Dots and Arrows

Why do I share so much _why here? Well, if you count other blogging sites, for about 7 years he was the Herodotus of his time. Not only did he frequently blob about community happenings and link elsewhere; but he actually blogged about rubytalk debates! RubyTalk is *deep* - and confession - it's so deep that I don't even parse it for this newsletter. Though I imagine if it kicks around for a couple years, I could probably fill a few more decades of issues just focusing on RubyTalk. (and RailsTalk) Anyway, here's a nice commentary about a ruby debate happening this week in 2005, and Matz's oath to solve it on the plane while flying to a conference.

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Running every version of Ruby ever released with All-Ruby

Posted at 8:23 | 29 Sep. 2021

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Running every version of Ruby ever released with All-Ruby

Now this is a real treat. I love digging into old Ruby, and I think if you do to, I will occasionally share with you pertinent tooling in this area. As you know, I recently spoke about Ruby Archaeology at Ruby Kaigi. Afterwords this tool, that only has 50 stars on Github (let's change that!), was shared with me. It's heavily used in Japan and called All-Ruby. It let's you run *every single version of Ruby that has ever been released*. I'm not joking! All the way back to 0.49. Use it well, and go have fun!

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_why interviews Nobuyoshi Nakada

I love this. Nakada has been a Ruby core committer since 1999 and was awarded Ruby Hero status in 2015. Enjoy this interview from 2005.

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Strong Parameters Introduced

This week in 2012 folks were all excited and talking about the merge of strong_parameters into Rails edge branch. This feature replaced `attr_accessible`.

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Given: A new Ruby specification framework from Jim Weirich

This week in 2009 Jim Weirich was actively hacking on a new ruby spec framework. He wanted to take much of the Given-Then-When style folks had gotten used to in cucumber. I've intentionally linked this to the exact commit from the time so you can browse the files as they were then.

code

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Ruby Multithreading

Posted at 8:23 | 22 Sep. 2021

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Ruby's multithreading: on processes and threads

In 2007 this week Manuel Holtgrewe authored a fantastic blog post digging into processes and threading in Ruby. Does it inspire any thoughts/queries about how we approach this today? 🤔 (Note: If you are reading this in the newsletter and not archived elsewhere, you're always welcome to reply to these emails. I do get them! If anyone has a thought provoking comment or question about something shared I might include it in an upcoming issue!)

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Matz talks about Ruby 3.0 in 2015

This week six years ago Matz spoke at FullstackFest and dug through the upcoming work on Ruby 3.0 (which we very much enjoy now today). It makes you think about what priorities or goals have shifted over the last six years. Great talk!

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SOLID Principles: Timeless

Ten years ago this week Gregory Browne published this blog post on SOLID design principles. SOLID first came to us in a paper in 2000 and since grew in popularity; being introduced to many in the Ruby Community by Sandi Metz. Gregory's discussion here is a helpful walkthrough of his work and experience with the principles; and is very applicable these days.

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Ruby 1.9.3 Preview Released

Peter Cooper has been, and will often be, mentioned in work I do. I see him as the Herodotus of Ruby history. Many have come and gone, but Peter was there documenting Ruby happenings in 2005 and is still doing so with RubyWeekly today. (Have you subscribed to that yet? If not, you should). ANYWAY, here's Peter's fantastic breakdown ten years ago this week about Ruby 1.9.3, 1.9.4, 2.0.0 and the expected changes. Check it out!

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Indexing database columns in 2009

Posted at 8:23 | 14 Sep. 2021

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Indexing Rails DB columns, better, in 2009

This is a fun set of scripts you could use on Rails 2. This uses the common flow of the time of `rails plugin install`. After running `rake db:find_query_indexes` you would receive a migration displayed telling you what indices you "ought" to have. Cool!

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#yerdoinitwrong with Bryan Liles

Also in this week in 2009, Liles dropped a new video podcast series called, well, "yerdoinitwrong". Here is the first video released talking about tailing and logging in Rails.

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The Humble Little Ruby Book

This week in 2006 Jeremy McAnally (also known as Mr. Neighborly) released the Humble Little Ruby Book. This was a real treat to stumble upon as it's a book from the era that I do not have. Do you have a copy or have you read it? If so, email back!

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RailsRumble 2012 announced

Holy cow, RailsRumble. Remember that? There's a few repos sitting out there somewhere with my hacking. I think one was a https://camelcamelcamel.com/ tracker that you could drop an amazon product into and get notifications for certain pricepoints. Anyway - this week in 2012 the latest RailsRumble of the time was announced! Let's see if we can navigate our way through some cool entries.

rails other

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Matz talks mRuby at Barcelona Ruby Conf 2014

Posted at 8:23 | 30 Sep. 2020

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Yukihiro Matsumoto - mruby: AltRuby

Ruby is in satellites. Ruby is being used in hardware. A lot of this work is built off of mruby (embedded ruby) and affiliated projects. Here's a great talk Matz gave six years ago this week about a fair few things including mruby. :)

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Using Rust with Ruby, pair programming with Yehuda Katz in 2015

Book out some time to sit down and watch this. We get to see *two hours* of pair programming with Yehuda Katz this week five years ago using Rust with Ruby

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Ruby with BetaBrite in 2007 with Aaron Patterson

This week THIRTEEN YEARS AGO Ruby hero tenderlove released a new version of the ruby BetaBrite sign library, allowing you to compose ruby to control betabrite signs. This was ruby in the IoT space many years before the phrase IoT existed! Write in if you get the code up and running. :)

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Making Javascript more Ruby-esque with JsClass in 2008

Twelve years ago this week people were turning their heads towards JsClass; which takes a lot of elements we love about ruby and implements them in Javascript. Note here in the screenshot that yes, that includes an Enumerable implementation! I would love to see if we could get this running on today's javascript.

code ruby other

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Github: Scaling on Ruby with a nomadic tech team

Posted at 8:23 | 02 Sep. 2020

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Github: Scaling on Ruby, with a nomadic tech team

Github is one of my favorite Ruby scaling stories (along with Shopify!). In this article they talk about their experiences up to this week in 2015.

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Proposal for a new Ruby concurrency model

This proposal and slidedeck came out this week on the heels of Ruby Kaigi 2016.

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Turn your Android phone into a remote spy camera in 15 minutes (with Ruby)

A full *decade* ago this week this nifty little tongue-in-cheek guide/article came out... I wonder how much of this you could get away with now...

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Ruby Committers using Basecamp!

This week in 2005, _why noted that core committer work was being dished out by Matz on basecamp. I wonder how long that lasted? Would love some additional info from DHH and Matz on this era.

ruby

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22 Ruby and Rails Jobs for August 2011 (With Even Some Junior Ones)

Posted at 8:23 | 26 Aug. 2020

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22 Ruby and Rails Jobs for August 2011 (With Even Some Junior Ones)

I've never done this before but I think this might be an interesting historical tidbit. From Peter Cooper's RubyInside, here are a list of 22 Ruby and Rails Jobs that were going in 2011

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A spike for researching Rack 2.0

This week six years ago Aaron Patterson, new maintainer for Rack, published a spike researching Rack 2.0. Have fun looking through the code!

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2006 Slashdot Interview with DHH

This was a candidate to be our top-fold story this week. Here's a full length interview of DHH by slashdot this week in 2006.

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2015 language trends on Github

The first five years in Github's history saw Ruby as the number one language. Of course JavaScript took over in 2013 (but I mean, when you're client-side and serverside....), but you can almost see the proliferation of front-ent and web focus starting with CSS jumping on to the scene as well!

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The schedule for Madison Ruby 2011

Posted at 8:23 | 19 Sep. 2020

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The schedule for Madison Ruby 2011

Madison Ruby was a great annual conference in Wisconsin, enjoy a look at the schedule from the conference occurring this week nine years ago!

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DHH on hunting for great names in programming (2016)

This week four years ago saw DHH publish a very thought-provoking blog post on one of the trickiest topics in programming: naming

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String literals will be immutable in Ruby 3 (2015)

Ruby 3 ain't here yet, but this week five years ago we saw the announcement from Matz that string literals would be frozen by default in Ruby 3.0. The link is to the minutes of the developers meeting then in Japan where this decision was reached.

Tenderlove takes over as maintainer for Rack this week in 2014

Here's the full announcement from this week six years ago when Tenderlove (Aaron Patterson) took over as the maintainer for Rack.

article release

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What to expect in Ruby 1.9 (2008)

Posted at 8:23 | 12 Aug. 2020

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Ruby 1.9: What to Expect

This here's a great slide deck from Sam Ruby at OSCON 2008 detailing what folks during this week twelve years ago could expect in Ruby 1.9.

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Understanding Ruby Symbols

This was a very popular blog post on the Gluttonous blog that came out this week in 2005. The detailed discussion about symbols was so popular it ended up being translated into Spanish and Korean! Be sure to check out the comments at the bottom for and extra treat.

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Running Camping on the JVM!

Wait, you've never heard of *Camping*? How dare you! Camping is a core part of Ruby history knowledge, a nice and quirky lightweight web framework from the times of _why. Check it out! Here's a post from this week in 2006 using the library with JRuby.

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The Least Surprised #7

Let's wrap up this week with an eclectic comic from our favorite historical Rubyist.

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Matz speaks at OSCON

Posted at 8:23 | 05 Aug. 2020

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Matz speaks at OSCON 2005 - and we have the slides!

I love a good conference. A win is finding the speakers list, but it's so hard to get content from 15+ years ago. We're very lucky that there's an archive of Matz's slides from his talk in OSCON 2005 and we have them here to share with you! Enjoy! Note - youtube would have only been a few months old at this point, so "uploading to youtube" would have been an unlikely expectation at this point.

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2014's Ruby Web Benchmark Report

I love a good benchmark because its data stands the test of time. We can compare current frameworks and Ruby versions to these old standards! This week six years ago so a nice hearty benchmark from Brian Knapp. Enjoy those numbers!

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Ruby-prof turns 15 years old!

We can't believe it! After 14 years of active development and love, ruby-prof released 1.0 one year ago this week. That means our beloved ruby-prof is now 15! Congratulations and thank you to all the OSS maintainers over the years

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More OSCON 2005 fun

I can't help myself. OSCON 2005 was so amazing I'm referencing it three times in two weeks! Here is the late and great Jim Weirich's talk details for "10 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know About Ruby". For even MORE fun, here are the available additional bits of information for all other speakers that I could find.

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How to profile your Rails application in 2007

Posted at 8:23 | 29 Jul. 2020

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How to profile your Rails application in 2007

There's certain concepts and workflows that just feel- well- so *new*. It's hard to believe that we had robust Rails profiling solutions thirteen years ago. Here's a great article that came out this week (and is still up, no archive link!) discussing using ruby-prof and friends to profile your Rails application.

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Make your test suite UNCOMFORTABLY FAST!

This still-live article from Thoughtbot's Jason Morrison originally published eleven years ago this week is a great introduction into test parallelization. I love using parallel tests wherever I can, it feels like the cheat code we can rely on to speed things up whether you're a one-person outfit or Shopify!

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MacOS app development with Ruby

There was a fantastic, in-depth guide making the rounds in the Ruby community this week in 2006. The guide walks step-by-step showing you how you can build desktop MacOS applications using Ruby! From Shoes to Rubymotion to this, I love any excuse where I can spin up Ruby to write up a native application.

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The pros and cons of Ruby refinements

Refinements are interesting. Available since 2.0, they allow a more limited scope approach to reopening classes than monkeypatching. However sometimes I feel it's a segment of the native DSL that would be more the purview of seniors and metaprogrammers. There are definitely some considerations to be had here for everyone!

code article

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A Starry Afternoon, a Sinking Symphony, and the Polo Champ Who Gave It All Up for No Reason Whatsoever

Posted at 8:23 | 22 Jul. 2020

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A Starry Afternoon, a Sinking Symphony, and the Polo Champ Who Gave It All Up for No Reason Whatsoever

15 years ago this week O'Reilly hosted OSCON 2005. This was the conf to be at at the time, and it was the tech who's who of the time. There were (wait for it) FIFTEEN simultaneous tracks, with up to 25 talks that you could see over *FIVE DAYS*. Wow. Of course legends like (a very young) DHH spoke there, but his section is titled from the talk I wished I could have seen the most. Can you find it?

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Ben Orenstein: Tell, Don't Ask

Ben Orenstein's Ruby work informed a lot of the mantras that permeate my mind today. Code smells, this "Tell, Don't Ask", even proper public speaking are all products of Ben's generous work. He has also been a ubiquitous podcaster for what feels like a decade now. (The Code Quality Challenge & Refactoring Rails artifacts are also amazing). This week in 2012 he released one of his fantastic posts, "Tell, Don't Ask". Great stuff.

Ruby.inspect by Koichi Sasada

Here is a fantastic talk released this week in 2014 from Koichi Sasada at RedDot Ruby Conf!

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Matz looking into Block and Lambda in 2005

Here we have a great collation from _why looking into a series of blog posts from Matz about blocks and lambdas - this is particularly helpful as all these posts at the time were in Japanese. enjoy!

code

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RubyFringe: the three-day, $650 Ruby party of 2008

Posted at 8:23 | 15 Jul. 2020

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RubyFringe, the three-day, $650 Ruby party in 2008

Looking through the annals of Ruby history, you see how things rise and fall, and it makes one quite sad sometimes. A big podcast fan, it tweaks my heart to see a podcast go on for 5-10 episodes then cease to exist. Additionally, conferences that seem to be a hit but are unable to continue for more than a short time. Honestly, sometimes I wonder if that will be the fate of some things I work on! But nothing can last forever. Perhaps RubyFringe hit the nail on the head with one expensive, attendee-oriented, sponsor-free three-day bash in 2008. It appears there was a cap at 150 attendees, with the first 75 paying $650 a ticket and the next paying a higher amount. (For those keeping score at home, that would be a $100,000 budget). Peter Cooper's RubyInside covered it pretty well and is our main link, but there are also some interesting links at an archive of the original page: here, and also a nice chunk about it on twitter at the time here (note: Jeff Atwood!) It was notorious at the time for apparently being not just expensive but a great all around Ruby party. Were you there? Write in and let me know what your experience was like if so, bonus points if you have any pictures or selfies!

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RSpec 3 Announced

We're still on RSpec 3.x today, which is a testament to this announcement *seven years ago* this week from Myron Marston about the plan for RSpec 3 as RSpec 2 was heading towards deprecation. Check it out!

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High level languages, Ruby, garbage collection in 2006

Alright, if you have 10 minutes and actually want to put your nerd glasses on for a minute, this one is *great*. Here's an email from Rick Nooner in 2006 about when it's appropriate to use garbage collected languages like Ruby. These are debates that we rarely have or even think about now, particularly as computing power seems to be outpacing any programming language limitations. This is a fantastic discussion about the benefits of language that is useful to the programmer over unnecessary premature performance optimizations. Hope you enjoy!

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SD Ruby Releases 100th Episode!

This week in 2011 SDRuby released it's 100th Episode! As a major podcast fan, I think this might be one of the longer running now-defunkt Ruby podcasts that you may *not* have heard of. If you give it a listen you may get some neat insight into the world of Ruby from 2009-2011 era!

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Using AWS with Ruby in 2007

Posted at 8:23 | 08 Jul. 2020

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Using AWS with Ruby in 2007

This one is a bit of a treat. Normally I capture blog posts, articles, releases or talks. But this week I've found an AWS-with-Ruby tutorial archived from the AWS site this week in 2007! It is easy for us to think of AWS as new-ish tooling, but it really has been a part of our tooling for a tremendously long time. (And no, they do not sponsor this newsletter!)

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Parkaby: speeding up HTML generation in Ruby

In the early days the Markaby library was heavily relied upon to generate HTML with Ruby. Most folks nowadays have enjoyed a mostly "settled" problem with the use of erb, haml, or . This week in 2009 saw the rising popularity of Parkaby, which maintained most of the Markaby DSL but up to 20 times faster. Woah!

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Sydney, alternative to Ruby 1.8, released

We've heard of a slew of Ruby interpreters over the years. One I never heard of before, Sydney, had a developer preview release this week in 2005. The interpreter branched off of Ruby 1.8 and included a slew of interesting features at the time such as native Binding.of_caller and native OS threads. I wonder if we can still get our hands on this Ruby today....

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Self destructing Ruby methods

In here was have an interesting discussion this week in 2006 about writing methods in Ruby that self-destruct (with a tiny bit of MetaProgramming involved). Take a look at the comments, Ruby legend MenTaLguY chimes in with a few alternative examples as well. Try this out in your terminal!

code

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RubyConf 2005 Agenda Release

Posted at 8:23 | 01 Jul. 2020

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RubyConf 2005 Agenda Released

This week in 2005 saw the release of that year's RubyConf agenda. I always find these as a gold mine for really interesting information about what was going on in the Ruby Community at the time! I was tempted to make this week just highlighting the talks of the time but think you'll enjoy parsing the agenda as much as I did. Familiar faces included DHH and Matz, and other legends such as the late Jim Weirich and Ryan Davis. Would have loved to have been there!

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Converting Ruby to Javascript (fourteen years ago!)

In 2006 this week London's Paul Battley had written a Ruby-to-JS converter in under 200 lines of Ruby code. It's hairy, and I didn't even try to run it nowadays. However it's a real treat to see folks looking at these issues when even JavaScript still feels so young sometimes. If you play around with the code let us know! (But I'm unsure how much use you'd get out of 2006-JS these days...)

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Let's collect some garbage

Now if you want to dig into the real, REAL nitty gritty of Ruby history, it can be a lot to parse but the `ruby-talk` community is great. It's something I'm going to try to feature more. Today's `ruby-forum` only goes back to 2008, but you can still get back into the 2000's with some gumption. (Which we all have, right?) This week in 2005 we say an interesting post that piqued the Ruby community, having a dig into the GC and finding weird failing edge cases. I think sometimes it's too easy to just think of the Garbage Collector as a there be dragons area of Ruby and never play around with it. This thread and following discussion is a *great* example of that.

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Web spidering back in the day

If _why is the Herodotus of Ruby circa 2003-2009, then Peter Cooper is the Tacitus of Ruby 2006-present. We are so grateful for all of his work the last decade to effectively chronicle the goings on of Ruby. Here he shares a neat tool of the time, Anemone, to manage your own spiders and configure your own web crawling. Neat!

code guide

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_why interviews DHH [PastRubies #9]

Posted at 12:45 | 18 Dec. 2019

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_why interviews DHH

Christmas Eve 2004 (!) saw our favorite why the lucky stiff interviewing DHH. They cover Instiki, the future of Rails, music and skyscrapers.

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Peter Cooper's RubyInside releases the ultimate Ruby advent calendar

What a treat for our readers to peruse over the Christmas Holiday break. As hinted last week, here is Peter Cooper's amazing Ruby advent calendar released back in 2006. You have interesting Ruby snippets, cool links, and even shnazzy wallpaper. If you're a Ruby history buff like me, this is a gold mine

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Why Rubinius matters to Ruby's future

This post released 11 years ago this week by Reg Braithwaite goes into the importance of Rubinius. At that time Engine Yard had five full time staffers working on Rubinius. Pretty interesting discussion in the comments below.

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What makes Rails a framework worth learning in 2017

Once in a while I'm allowed to treat myself to a link *not* on this week in history, right? We are likely to take a break during the festive season so it feels appropriate to wrap things up with this post from DHH. Enjoy!

rails opinion

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Rails 1.0 turns 14! PastRubies #8

Posted at 16:14 | 12 Dec. 2019

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10 more features in Ruby 2.5

It's Christmas which means new Ruby time! But I think it's all too easy to forget the new features of recent versions so we can utilize the latest Ruby goodness! Here's a great writeup published this week in 2017 on those features in Ruby 2.5

code article

A pagination helper for Rails in 2004

Well would you look at that! A little cheeky banter between Ruby legends _why and DHH this week fifteen years ago. This is a neat little peek into Rails pagination in 2004, a year before 1.0 was released! (Yes, it's that old of a problem space)

article rails

What are events, why you might care, and how EventMachine can help

This is a great little writeup on the EngineYard blog by Kirk Haines on events and event machine (published this week in 2011)

ruby

The 2005 Ruby Advent Calendar

Who remembers reading the Tucows blog back in the day? It was a massive source of info for Rubyists in the early coding days. Here's a glimpse into the Ruby Advent Calendar they were hosting in 2005 (note: the famous PeterC also had a few that may yet get featured this month!)

code article

Neat Ruby snippets 2004

Gosh, I haven't hustled through the RubyTalk archives yet... That changes this week! Here's a pleasant fifteen year old (this week) thread on interesting Ruby snippets that accomplish cool things. (We're talking servers in six lines)

code article ruby

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The Ruby on Rails Whitepaper - Past Rubies #7

Posted at 14:55 | 04 Dec. 2019

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The Ruby on Rails White Paper, 10 years later

This was actually released in the *autumn* of 2009, but was making the rounds on blogs a decade ago this week as more people discovered it. InfoEther and Mark Gardner released a very comprehensive Ruby on Rails whitepaper which covered everything from the current state of the framework, estimated developer population, to the community and ecosystem. For those of us who have been around a while or even fancy ourselves a bit of a "Ruby Historian", this is an unrivaled snapshot into the "State of Rails" in 2009.

ruby rails guide

It's time for... SCIENCE!

This week five years ago we got to see Jesse Toth give a talk about their work on Github's Scientist. This allows developers to compare, via the lens of 'science experiments', old code and refactored code. Enjoy the talk and the code!

ruby release

Snakes and Rubies Conf

A whopping fourteen years ago saw Snakes and Rubies Conf, a collaborative conference between the Ruby and Python programming communities. You can check out a wrapup here, and plenty from DHH and crew at the link above. Since I run everything through the wayback machine, most of the old links SHOULD work.

other

In memory of Ezra Zygmuntowicz

In a massive loss for the Ruby community, we found out about the passing of Ezra five years ago this last week. To honor his memory, we have this very kind tribute from Mike Perham back in 2014. There is also this magnificent talk from Ezra himself where he goes through a lot of his journey.

other other

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Speeding Up Rails with Aaron Patterson - Past Rubies #6

Posted at 11:20 | 24 Jul. 2019

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Speeding Up Rails with Aaron Patterson (2014-07-24)

We lead this week with a great 2014 talk from Tenderlove on work being undertaken at the time to speed up Rails and a look at what we can do to improve our app benchmarking. Timeless!

rails benchmarks

We got our Shoes (2007-07-30)

Unceremoniously, _why unveiled his landmark library Shoes to the world twelve years ago this week! I don't know about you, but some of the most fun I had in my early days was building GUI native apps for my Mac in Shoes. Maybe it's time to go back....

code release guide

Playing Music with Ruby on Bells (2008-07)

Hey, who says you have to be a Java pro to play with Arduino? Since at least 2008 we've had these fantastic projects using Ruby to operate hardware, as seen in this video of the Ruby on Bells project. To see the code and the walkthrough, check out the explainer here.

ruby other

Old School Tabbed Navigation (2006-07-23)

We may be used to throwing up tabbed navigation with Bootstrap or any other major libraries today, check out a Ruby approach to tabbed navigation from thirteen years ago this week.

code guide

My Favorite Parts of Ruby (2018-07-19)

Wrapping up this week with another "one year ago" more recent segment, we are honored to share Ilya Bylich's fantastic post going over their favorite ruby bits. This is definitely an article that you want your IRB open for. See you next week!

code article ruby

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Building a Ruby Gem with Steve Klabnik - Past Rubies #5

Posted at 14:29 | 17 Jul. 2019

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Building a Ruby Gem with Steve Klabnik (2014-07-10)

Half-a-decade-ago this week famous Rubyist Steve Klabnik put together a fantastic guide for building a Rubygem. If you've built many gems or never ventured into this territory before, it really is a fantastic read.

article ruby

Getting Your Feet Wet With Ruby on Rails (2005-07-15)

Paul Adams, then columnist for webmonkey (if you remember that!), walks us through setting up a Ruby on Rails application this week in 2005. Once in a while we give you a really good peek into the past, this article does not disappoint!

article rails

How to Build a Ruby on Rails Engine (2006-07-14)

I'm sure you've heard about the benefits of using Rails engines to extend your Rails superpowers and also how well they mesh with Rails gem development. Enjoy this fantastic guide that came out this week in 2006 on just how to get it done.

code article

Another Great Ruby Shootout (2010-07-19)

Remember when we shared that 'Ruby Shootout' article about a month ago? Well, here was a July 2010 version, showing how the various Rubies on different hardware compared agains each other. Neat!

code article

Redcloth 4.0 Released (2008-07-17)

Ah, RedCloth, the Ruby gem for converting good ol' Textile into HTML. This is a gem we've gotten to see used a lot parsing through our resources for PastRubies. Well, eleven years ago this week it got its last major release (though there have been further releases since)

release

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