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What is a sequential scan vs index scan vs parallel scan .... and what is a bitmap heap scan? Postgres scan types explained and diagrammed.

The Fizzy application is a new play on Kanban board and project management. It has a comprehensive test suite focused mostly on unit and integration tests, althought other types of test are also present. The test suite is well-organized and follows Rails conventions with some application-specific patterns for multi-tenancy and UUID handling. Can we find more than that?

The new LLM world is very exciting, and I try to experiment with the new tools when I can. This includes building agentic applications, one of which is my personal accounting and invoicing tool - that I wrote about previously As part of that effort I started experimenting with RubyLLM to have some view into items in my system. And while I have used a neat pattern for referencing objects in the application from the tool calls - the Rails Global ID system - it turned out to be quite treacherous. So, let’s have a look at where GlobalID may bite you, and examine alternatives and tweaks we can do. What are Rails GIDs? The Rails global IDs (“GIDs”) are string handles to a particular model in a Rails application. Think of it like a model URL. They usually have the form of gid://awesome-app/Post/32. That comprises: The name of your app (roughly what you passed in when doing rails new) The class name of the model The primary key of the model You can grab a model in your application and get a global ID for it: moneymaker(dev):001> Invoice.last.to_global_id Invoice Load (0.3ms) SELECT "invoices".* FROM "invoices" ORDER BY "invoices"."id" DESC LIMIT 1 /*application='Moneymaker'*/ => #> Rails uses those GIDs primarily in ActiveJob serialization. When you do DebitFundsJob.perform_later(customer) where the customer is your Customer model object which is stored in the DB, ActiveJob won’t serialize its attributes but instead serialize it as a “handle” - the global ID. When your job gets deserialized from the queue, the global ID is going to get resolved into a SELECT and your perform method will get the resulting Customer model as argument. All very neat. And dangerous, sometimes - once LLMs become involved.

Accidentally committed secrets to Git? Learn how to safely and permanently remove sensitive data from your Git history using git-filter-repo — the modern,...

In this post, we'll build a Markdown editor using Rails.

A step-by-step path to validate your idea fast by defining the problem, testing assumptions, prototyping the critical flow, and shaping a focused MVP you can learn from.

Master Value Objects in Ruby using the modern Data.define class. Learn about immutability, value equality, and how to eliminate boilerplate code for cleaner, safer domain modeling.

A guide to using the ActionMailer after_deliver callback to log emails sent from your Ruby on Rails application

This is my personal site, where I write about Ruby, programming, and any of my varied fascinations.

As Ruby and Rails developers, we often rely on the same familiar set of methods to get things done. The same set of operations are more or…

The post stuck with me. Over the past year and a half, 37signals has released two more products (Writebook and Fizzy) built on the same nobuild philosophy. I wanted to know if these patterns held up. Had they evolved?

Learn how custom elements work in Rails by building an optimistic form. From simple counters to instant UI updates, understand when to use custom elements over Stimulus controllers.

Not a Medium Member read it here…

A code prototype changes everything. When you prototype in code, the thing you are testing is real. It works in the browser. It works on any device. It responds to real-world variables.

Shipping new features on legacy Rails applications requires deep codebase context. The rails-mcp-server gem closes the gap between AI agents and your Rails projects, enabling more relevant code analysis and context aware refactoring suggestions. Whether you're dealing with tech debt in a brownfield application or building new greenfield features, this tool can help you move faster with confidence.

Should a Ruby class do just one thing? Explore the Single Responsibility Principle, cohesion, and when to split classes through practical examples.

Stop waiting for GitHub Actions. Rails 8.1's local CI runs your tests in seconds on your own machine. Here's how it works.

Technical deep-dive into the design decisions that make Broadcast a truly self-hostable Rails application.

A new extension to Minitest Expectations by yours truly is the perfect illustration for this philosophy of programming.

As developers, we’re living in a time where building applications from scratch is easier than ever, thanks to AI tools like Claude Code. Our…

I see some common pitfalls when people try to do Shape Up "by the book." There are things in the book that are Basecamp-specific or often misunderstood, and teams who successfully adopt Shape Up route around them.

Lately, I've been reminded of the heady days of my agile youth by how often I've found myself asking, "how will we test this?" As I've mentioned…

Combining finest craftsmanship with elegant design to ship innovative digital experiences.

Last week, I wrote about my experience working with the team at Cloud Four, and in particular some of their great practices around PR management. Today, I wanted to talk specifically about a habit my friend Gerardo Rodriguez got me into: reviewing your own pull request. It’s pretty simple. When you create a pull request in GitHub, click on the Files changed tab, and scroll through the diff. Anywhere you’ve done something new that’s not already explained by in-code comments, add a comment in the GUI about what you did and why.

Fully functional OTP entry may be easier than you think.

Styling, UX, validation

On the benefits of using the default RESTful actions to prevent controllers from becoming too big and confusing.

Open source maintainers are getting more contributions than ever, thanks to AI-assisted coding. Here's how GitHub Copilot Code Review can help.

A well-designed API feels invisible, it just works. Behind that simplicity lies a set of consistent design principles that make APIs predictable, secure, and scalable.

Fix slow Rails apps in 5 steps. Guide covers N+1 queries, missing indexes, memory bloat, view rendering & asset compilation with real-world examples.

If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go alone too. (mostly)

PostgreSQL 13 is reaching end of life on November 13, 2025. Treat your upgrade not as maintenance, but rather as an investment in security, stability, and innovation.

I've noticed that some of the pushback against using AI to code stems from people not knowing how to...

The majority of us are a bunch of self taught people with rather spotty knowledge and that's fine! Kilian (also self taught) is here to share some of the computer science fundamentals you probably are missing with the aim to improve your code in the long term.

Learn the ins and outs of building a game-based join code feature.

Build multiple products from a single Rails codebase using variants and custom configuration class.

Hi, it’s Claudio Baccigalupo. Let’s explore this week’s changes in the Rails codebase.

The Anchor Positioning API in CSS is very powerful. This is the beginning of a series where we understand it through the perfect use-case: tooltips.

Learn how to integrate MCP Server with GitHub Copilot to transform your Rails app into an AI-powered translation platform with smart automation and speed.

Building an AI Social Media Manager with Ruby on Rails: Architecture, Automation, and Lessons...

Master RSpec testing for LangChain-Ruby with 25 working examples. Learn mocking, VCR, WebMock, and CI/CD automation. Build reliable AI features with 95%+ test…

Nano Banana hides behind Google's chat endpoint. Here's the straight line to ship it with RubyLLM.

I've been thinking about how we approach accessibility in web development. Particularly about trusting the browser to implement things in an accessible way.

How container queries help move an element to the opposite side of its parent container when both have dynamic responsive dimensions.

How the most common type of document maps to delegation

Senior Level Ruby on Rails Developer for Hire

I've been signing my Git commits since 2020, and it's one of those security practices that seems...

The personal blog of Dave Rupert, web developer and podcaster from Austin, TX.

Rails 8.1 represents the work of over 500 contributors across 2500 commits since our last major release. After some weeks of people trying the betas and releases candidates, we are excited to share the final release.

Let’s try to peer behind the curtain and figure out the answer to these questions. Doing so has a couple of important benefits:

Learn how to design and build effective tools to be used by AI Agents

AsterMind-ELM is a modular, Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) library for JavaScript and TypeScript. We speak to its creator.

Build a Kanban board with columns and cards with Rails and Hotwire.

We get attached to code - sometimes to a fault. Old migrations are exactly that. They’re digital hoarding at its finest, cluttering up your codebase with files that serve absolutely no purpose other than to make you feel like you’re preserving some kind of historical record. But here’s the brutal truth: your old migrations are utterly useless. They’re worse than useless - they’re actively harmful. They’re taking up space, they are confusing (both for you and new developers on the project), and they give you a false sense of security about your database’s evolution. If your database is out-of-sync with schema.rb you need to solve that problem anyway, and - if anything - the migrations make that problem worse.

Learn how to orchestrate AI agents in Claude Code to multiply your development output. No frameworks, just folders and markdown that turn one developer into five specialists.

The Rails router's direct method lets you create custom url and path helpers, which is especially useful for polymorphic models and delegated types. This post shows how to use a single custom helper to generate URLs for different models, with a practical example from the open source Maybe project.

Rails 8 is out. And with it Kamal 2, the new default way of deploying Rails apps. But Kamal is hard for the uninitiated. This is a complete tutorial on how to get a Rails app fully in production using Kamal.

Learn how to implement authentication in Rails API-only applications using generators. Step-by-step guide covering setup, configuration, and best practices for secure API authentication.

From basic setup to advanced MCP integration: using Dev Containers for portable development environments that eliminate "works on my machine" problems.

Look through some of the best custom elements on the planet.

Across performance reviews, design decisions, and strategic communication, AI tools can reduce overhead and amplify the impact of strong management. 

Organizational change can rock the foundations of any team. But knowing the reasoning behind the shift can open all sorts of doors.

Learn some ways to help encourage action when you feel unmotivated.

An overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome.

New to Postgres 18, features like asynchronous i/o, uuid v7, b-tree skip scans, and virtual generated columns.

From the very beginning of Slack, MySQL was used as the storage engine for all our data. Slack operated MySQL servers in an active-active configuration. This is the story of how we changed our data storage architecture from the active-active clusters over to Vitess — a horizontal scaling system for MySQL. Vitess is the present…

A better Action Text.

Rails variants are usually used to serve different views for devices — but you can use them for much more, like running a redesign side by side.

Rubular set the standard for regex testing in Ruby. With Ruby 3.2 bringing WebAssembly support, Wubular takes that idea into the browser — no servers, instant feedback, full privacy. It’s not just a remake, but a glimpse of what Ruby + WASM make possible for future apps.

Anchor positioning allows you to place an element on the page based on where another element is.

Accessibility does not limit creativity! Explore six distinct WCAG-compliant yellow and purple palettes and learn how to design your own.

We'll dive into how ActiveStorage handles uploaded data and how to extend this process in the second part of this two-part series.

Documents how to implement the RAG pattern with llm.rb

Startups and scaleups are on a hiring spree for a software engineering role pioneered by Palantir. A deepdive into this role, and why FDEs are so popular in 2025

Create a macOS-inspired stack UI by using powerful Tailwind CSS features and a simple Stimulus controller (with a twist)

While working with a legacy BBj PRO/5 database for a client, we needed to set up a new CMS with multitenancy requirements. We were dealing with a slew of foreign tables representing the PRO/5 data, and each of the tables had a column for designating which tenant they belonged to. Let's talk about how we leveraged ActiveSupport::CurrentAttributes to solve this problem!

A staging environment is a safe replica of production where you can test features before going live. In this post, we'll create a staging environment for the blog and deploy to it with Kamal. It also covers the basics of Rails environments and shows how to configure Kamal for staging deployments.

The whole point of auto-fit and auto-fill is that you aren't saying how many columns to use. But if you knew how many the browser chose, you can make nice design decisions.

Best bet: just always use them. More nuanced take: there is a few situations where using the physical property is still releavant.

This article explores techniques for achieving near zero-downtime during PostgreSQL migrations and upgrades

As an respectable unemployed person must do, I tried to make Postgres as slow as possible

subgrid in CSS is really handy for getting a nice level of design detail in place, especially in terms of maintaining a nice reading line, as Andy shows in this article.

In this continuation of our PWA series, explore how to reduce the service worker boilerplate in your Rails app.

How Ruby's async ecosystem transforms resource-intensive LLM applications into efficient, scalable systems - without rewriting your codebase.

Using ViewComponents that know how to refresh themselves via turbo_streams is a powerful pattern to build complex flows with Hotwire

… and check why 5600+ Rails engineers read also this

This past week, I was having a conversation with a reader and he brought up the example of Rails’ delegated_type. While I’ve never been a fan of the name, because...

The Rails defaults are a good foundation, but it’s still your responsibility to filter sensitive information from logs when using external APIs, services, and tools.

Here's a spicy take: SQLite might be the best database choice for your next SaaS project. Yes,...

Learn when and why to use read replicas in Rails applications, understand the architecture, and implement basic read/write splitting with real-world exa...

Learn how to handle API request versioning in Rails without duplicating controllers, using a schema-based approach that supports OpenAPI documentation and seamlessly maps external API structures to internal models.

Fixing the problems Turbo has when being used to add dynamism to tables in Rails.

It is becoming more and more common to use LLM chatbots for customer support and it is pretty easy to introduce security issues while implementing them. Here is a little story about such thing.

This checklist can help you assess your current Postgres setup and identify steps that can enhance the robustness, security, and scalability of your PostgreSQL deployment.

Three examples of integrating LLMs in Ruby using OmniAI.

How to handle table partitionaing for an already existing table which holds some (probably much) data. How to do table partitioning in Ruby on Rails.

Kamal 2 finally brings the most requested feature to reality and allows people to run multiple applications simultaneously on a single server. Here’s how.

Articles about Generative-Ai in the Custom AI Solutions blog.

Learn how to build offline-first React Native apps with React Query and TypeScript for a responsive and seamless user experience even without internet connectivity.

CSS is evolving quickly and there many really cool new features that can help you craft beautiful web pages.

Introduction In this post, we’ll cover a way to generate short, alphanumeric, pseudo random identifiers using native Postgres tactics.

Learn how to use the new reading-flow and reading-order properties in Chrome 137.

Learn how to generate OpenAPI documentation for your Rails API using OasRails.

A fun little side quest to show you how applying styles to alt text can really elevate your user interface.

A deep dive into how PostgreSQL logical replication works, including WAL, LSNs, streaming protocols, and how replicas stay in sync. We also explain how Springtail uses logical replication to scale reads, track schema changes, and maintain consistency in production.

Los Angeles AI Apps is a digital product agency that builds custom Web applications with AI Integration. Launch an AI MVP in as little as one week.

Learn how to create a reusable, extendable Stimulus controller that enhanced a plain textarea field with markdown features.

Learn how to add custom domains and SSL for local Rails development using the puma-dev gem

Introduction If you’ve created web apps with relational databases and ORMs like Active Record (part of Ruby on Rails), you’ve probably experienced database performance problems after a certain size of data and query volume.

PostgreSQL table partitioning is a great way to improve database bloat but is hard to manage. The pg_partition_manager gem can help you maintain partitions.

Bringing in what we learned from LiteFS

Learn how straightforward it is to add transitions between your pages using Hotwired/Turbo

Postgres 18 Beta 1 just shipped, and it comes with top-requested improvements in performance, migrations, observability, and usability.

We visit the second SOLID principle: the open–closed principle (OCP). Does it still hold up, or is it bad advice in today's agile world?

Learn how to add image uploads to a markdown field using the EasyMDE editor, Rails and Active Storage.

— The personal website of Sara Soueidan, inclusive Web UI engineer

Dumping a SQLite database to a text file can make it much smaller, which means you can download it faster.

Rails' Active Storage makes file uploads easy, but validation errors can cause attachments to be lost when forms re-render. This guide explains why and walks through a step-by-step solution using direct uploads, signed IDs, and Stimulus for an improved user experience.

How to fix the disconnect over generative AI adoption and developer productivity.

A comprehensive guide to securing your Ruby on Rails applications

How I built a seven-figure business with Rails

Modeling your domain as timelines instead of object graphs

If someone tries to steal a penguin, how should you warn them?

Writing code with LLMs is fundamentally different from other ways of programming. LLMs are often non-deterministic and always unpredictable. They have a…

This is my personal site, where I write about Ruby, programming, and any of my varied fascinations.

Instead of leaning into heavy social sharing widgets, you can create a truly user-friendly social sharing component that works for everyone, using built-in APIs and progressive enhancement.

Build, deploy and manage your applications on any cloud or your own servers.

Need to catch N+1 queries without adding any extra dependencies to your project? Strict Loading makes it effortless, but your configurations need to be set up correctly to avoid unexpected behaviors.

Build shiny products on boring tech: proven frameworks, stable infrastructure, and tools that won’t vanish in 3 years.

Improve your design’s accessibility with this quick reference checklist and Penpot plugin.

Implementing an Inventory Module in Ruby on Rails: Handling Concurrency with Database Locks and SKIP LOCKED When implementing an inventory module in a Ruby on Rails application, ensuring consistency in stock levels is crucial. If multiple users try to purchase the same item simultaneously, concurrency issues can lead to overselling. In this post, we’ll explore two approaches to handling inventory management: Using a simple counter with database locks to prevent race conditions. Improving performance using SKIP LOCKED for efficient inventory allocation.

Believe it or not, I don't think that title is clickbait.

I’ve been recently working on a Slack bot and Slack delivers all events (webhooks) to the same URL that you can configure. That means you need to distinguish between different events types based on the payload (request body). In the past, I’ve seen that Rails apps usually reimplement their own “slack routing” within a single controller action. I wanted to share a different solution that I came up with. Let’s do routing in rails routing.

For the past few months I've been introducing sprints into a chaotic startup that's been growing so fast everyone's got whiplash. Since August, 5 engineers turned into 12. I think it's starting to work.

See examples of using Ruby's Data class for creating value objects, removing boilerplate code, and enhancing API response handling

PREMISE Simply breaking an entire document into regular CHUNKs has some...

In this guide I will explain how I configured and deployed a Rails 8.0.2 application using Kamal 2 with a Postgres database running as a kamal accessory on a single Virtual Private Server (VPS).

Authorization framework for Ruby/Rails application

The presenter pattern is a handy design approach that sits between your views and models, helping you keep your code organized by handling view-specific logic in a clean and maintainable way. Let’s explore how to use it you your rails app.

Every Rails app has a breaking point. Follow along and learn how to test your application's performance under load with the Apache JMeter's Rails load testing.

Learn how to seamlessly integrate online presence tracking into a Rails application powered by Hotwire and AnyCable.

Learn to create value objects in Ruby using idiomatic practices, focusing on immutability, comparability, and the modern `Data` class

A quick list of Ruby debugging tips and recommendations from Shopify’s Ruby DX team

Read the previous article to learn how Propshaft and importmap-rails work together to form the Rails 8 Asset pipeline. That article focuses on the interplay between the two and explains more of the importmap-rails side. Now, let’s dive into how Propshaft actually processes the assets.

Sooner than later your Rails app will see spam and bot sign ups. Here are three steps to minimize those sign ups from the day you launch.

A quick look at the search element, a semantic element for search and filtering

LakyAI

There has never been a better time to start building with AI and the state-of-the-art models available to developers everywhere. Building…

Learn how to create animated accordions using only HTML and modern CSS with the details element, interpolate-size, transition-behavior, and the :has() selector.

Discover whether to use integer or string enums in Ruby on Rails. Learn their differences and see real-world code examples.

How to create a multi-view presentation that stays in sync.

Exploring customizable select elements. This series explores styling possibilities. The first article covers the history and provides a guide to building a custom select as a progressive enhancement. Styling selects with CSS for unique and fun experiences.

If you’re deploying with downtime you don’t have continuous delivery, you have continuous downtime.

Discover a fresh spring color palette for your designs! See warm and cool nature-inspired hues perfect for branding, UI, and creative projects

Elements can now know which position they are in the DOM tree (index) and how many other elements there are in total (count).

Hey Rails devs. I learned something new today I wanted to share. So doing OR queries in active record can be complex. For 1, you have to reference a whole query. For example, you can’t do this:  

The right solution isn't always the best technical solution

Learn how to add social login with the Rails 8 auth generator with single and multiple accounts.

Leapcell: The Next-Gen Serverless Platform for Web Hosting, Async Tasks, and Redis A...

This is for everyone: documenting how we rebuild inclusive digital services across government

A quick note about js.

Don't let bias dictate your next hire. Reduce bias and make hiring decisions based on skills, not gut feelings.

Tech debt is often overused as a blanket statement for all manner of engineering issues. What if we reframed our approach?

I almost gave up and it was actually so simple.

"How do I give a 30 min talk without being boring?" Here's the secret. New speakers struggle to keep people engaged, because they don't realize… | 189 comments on LinkedIn

I recently migrated Listomo (my email marketing platform) from Sidekiq to Solid Queue. There are lots of posts out there showcasing how various companies migrated to Solid Queue from Sidekiq but they did not help that much, so hopefully this helps someone else. Migration Steps Install Solid Queue This one is quite self explanatory. The …

This hopefully soon-to-be series was started quite a while ago when I was exploring new Rails features. Especially Turbo and ActionMailer. I finished the demo app and started writing articles while tidying up code. As it happens, I never finished and published the series. Almost two years passed and here you are, reading one of the first two parts that were finished before I abandoned the idea of having a blog. This hopefully changes now with more parts and different topics incoming!

Learn how to implement user confirmation using the Rails Auth generator flow

This article describes how to render an inline camera feed in Hotwire Native

This post walks through backing up a SQLite database inside a Docker container on a remote server, specifically for a Ruby on Rails application deployed with Kamal. We'll begin with the basic commands, then convert them into a reusable shell script and a Rake task for convenience.

Override the to_param method on your object to customize how Rails builds the id to put in the URL.

I’ve been using Turbo Streams a bunch the past few weeks, in two different projects.

Have you ever encountered a model in a Rails app that initially seemed to have an understandable...

Your test suite is slow and flaky because it does too much.

Marksmith is an ActiveStorage-enabled GitHub-style markdown editor for Ruby on Rails

Looking to integrate a WYSIWYG editor into your JavaScript app? This comparison dives into the best frameworks available, including Tiptap, Lexical, BlockNote, and Slate.

Recently, there was an update to asdf which broke my install. I experienced this on macOS, Linux and WSL (which is basically Linux in Windows). This issue was due to asdf being rewritten in GoLang so a lot changed. For those who don't know what asdf is, you can probably

Become the world's top 1% productive developeur.

Convert a self-hosted Rails app into a multi-tenant hosted app using Postgres schemas without modifying original table structures.

I work on the backend team supporting an SNS with 170K users, built using Ruby on Rails. We use...

In any Rails application that deals with large amounts of records, you will most certainly reach for pagination to "window" your data instead of rendering it in one long list.

A well-defined API versioning strategy is crucial for any API expected to evolve. Let’s explore the most common API versioning strategies and develop a flexible one in Rails.

But, no matter what your setup, you are going to need to read through the Tailwind Upgrade guide. Maybe even a couple times.

Learn how to seamlessly integrate React with Ruby on Rails in this comprehensive guide. Covers setup, configuration, best practices, and modern tooling for building powerful full-stack applications. Perfect for both beginners and experienced developers.

Build command-line interface terminal apps in your favorite web application frameworks like Rails, Next.js, ASP.net, Spring, Phoenix, Django, and more.

An update to How to Build a Twitter Clone with Rails and React

I’ve been slowly migrating a client’s Rails app from jQuery and UJS to Hotwire in between feature work. One of the last remaining pieces has been replacing jQuery UI Autocomplete, a pretty common library to see in web applications of a certain age.

The Rails ecosystem has a huge amount of gems to choose from. That doesn’t mean you should add them without thinking. This article lists the carefully selected gems I use in my Rails SaaS apps.

You can get 90% of the way there with server-rendered templates and View Transitions.

Turbo is a great way to build user interfaces, but most Turbo forms have to wait for the server response. Here’s how I am adding a small loading spinner to the submit buttons to improve the UX.

Modern web applications often start simple but quickly grow in complexity as features are added and the domain evolves. Without a clear structure, this complexity can lead to tangled codebases, slowing development and increasing the risk of bugs.

Learn how to use the 'class_variants' gem to simplify your application's CSS and clean up your views

The website of Emily Samp, a software developer and community organizer.

Learn how to implement self-referential associations in Rails 8 for hierarchical data structures. Perfect for building nested relationships in your models.

Thoughts and learnings on writing better software

#25 System Design Interview - Design TinyURL

This article explains why you shouldn't log confidential or user-identifiable information and how to filter it using parameter filtering in Rails. We'll also do a deep dive into the Rails source code to learn exactly how Rails implements parameter filters.

Olly Headey. CTO and advisor. Co-founder of FreeAgent. 37signals alumni.

Learn how to deploy Rails 8 apps using Docker, Kamal, and PostgreSQL on Hetzner servers with Cloudflare DNS. A complete production setup guide.

@seo:excerpt

Where you get to play with an interactive demo to visualize how Enumerator::Lazy helps avoid unnecessary work

Some tips on making sure forms written in Ruby on Rails are accessible

Learn how to implement soft deletion with robust audit logging in Rails applications, ensuring data integrity and compliance in financial systems.

Discover how small businesses can leverage affordable automation solutions to boost efficiency, reduce costs, and compete effectively. Learn practical tips for implementing automation tools and maximizing ROI

2024 was an amazing year for the Rails community and I’d like to share a summary of what changed in the framework. As a TLDR, there were more than 4000 commits from 562 contributors and 55 releases, including Rails 8!

Searching for the most flexible front-end workflows and toolkits, it’s easy to forget how powerful some of the fundamentals on the web have become these days. This post is a journey through new front-end features and what they are capable of.

TIL: `rails credentials:diff --enroll` (and `--disenroll`) Makes local diffs of encrypted credentials files display as diffs of the un-encrypted text instead of diffs of the encrypted gibberish. Helps reduce friction of seeing what changed in credentials when merging or navigating merge conflicts.

Mission Control is a powerful tool for monitoring and managing your Rails jobs in real-time. It offers insights into your app’s performance and errors. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to integrate Mission Control into your Rails app and secure it with Basic Auth.

Part 2 of a multi-part series for moving away from devise to Rails' authentication generator

Part 1 of a multi-part series for moving away from devise to Rails' authentication generator

ActionMailbox has the most underrated fun-to-feature ratio. No suprise here then, that as soon as I had the chance to work with it on Laterbox, I jumped on the occasion.

There's abundant online guidance about refactoring controllers, but resources on model refactoring are less common. In this blog, we'll explore techniques for effectively refactoring models.

If you've worked with Rails forms, you've likely encountered the infamous `.field_with_errors wrapper`. While it's designed to help highlight inval...

Discover how to seamlessly transition from encrypted secrets to Rails 8.0's powerful credentials system.

Scoping an Active Record join

In this article, the author starts a series about Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) in Rails

Getting paying users has never been simpler with Stripe and Rails. Let’s go over the tiny amount of code needed today.

Discover best practices and examples for designing user-friendly and visually appealing UI forms. Aim for enhanced user engagement and improved completion rates.

Ruby on Rails 8 provides `except_on` options for validations! #railstips #rubyonrails

This is my personal site, where I write about Ruby, programming, and any of my varied fascinations.

Recently I was working on implementing dynamic nested forms using Turbo Streams, focusing on handling both new and persisted records without custom JavaScript. Well, mostly for fun, to try something new. And while there are multiple approaches to this problem, including Stimulus controllers or plain JavaScript, Turbo Streams offer a clean, server-driven solution that leverages Rails conventions. The Core Concept: Form Manipulation vs Persistence A key aspect of this implementation that might not be immediately obvious is that the IngredientsController doesn’t actually persist any data. Its sole responsibility is to manipulate the form structure through Turbo Stream responses.

Learn how to implement multi-select enums in Ruby on Rails using PostgreSQL for better performance, type safety, and flexible categorization.

Learn how to add an RSS feed to a Rails app for the site and for single resources with this article.

Many Rails developers don't understand what causes ActiveRecord to actually execute a SQL query. Let's look at three common cases: misuse of the count method...

Rails 8 added an authentication generator, but what if we want to use Google OAuth? I decided to implement it using the oauth2 gem and share what I learned.

Solid Cable in Production with Kamal

A compilation of lessons about what the SQLite database engine can and cannot do, how Ruby on Rails helps you work with SQLite, and why it may, or may not, be a good choice to back your Rails 8 app

How we've redefined the PM and engineer relationship

If you want to host custom domains for customers in your SaaS, you'll need to handle both DNS and SSL. Fortunately, Caddy can help with both.

Here you go: https://gist.github.com/stympy/7a538e3edda1395c89afca968f3c5c97 I'm starting on the blog post now. :) If you have anything else you want me to cover in it, let me know.

Simple form objects for Rails. Contribute to Intrepidd/hyperactiveform development by creating an account on GitHub.

Today I’m going to show you how I managed to migrate from Heroku to Kamal, with a focus on Postgres....

Seamlessly create rollups from rolled-up data (hierarchical continuous aggregates) on your Ruby On Rails application for faster time-series & analytics queries.

Deep dive into Concerns in Ruby on Rails, exploring its role in modular code, comparison with Mixins, security, testing, and its use in Rails 6 and 8.

Stimulus is advertised as a modest JavaScript framework, but packs still quite a few features. Lets explore the lesser known ones.

Learn how to set up WebAuthn in Rails for passwordless authentication, offering a secure and seamless login experience using biometric or hardware-based credentials.

Hotwire, HTMX, and Unpoly for building modern UIs.

Of all the latest and greatest CSS features, the “:has” pseudo-class wasn’t exactly at the top of my wishlist. Once I started using it, however, I kept discovering incredible things I could do with it. It’s now become a core part of my toolkit! In this blog post, I'll show you some practical real-world problems I solved using “:has”, as well as some wild experiments that blew my mind!

This is a weekly reminder that if you want better suggestions for Ruby and Rails projects using LLMs (Large Language Models), you should consider writing more articles (not generated by LLMs) about how you believe...

Create subtle pulsating animations using Tailwind for enhanced menu item visibility. Learn how to build reusable UI components with Phlex

Learn how to do semantic search using SQLite and Rails By: Sergio Alvarez

Semantic search is a transformative approach to searching data, designed to understand the meaning behind the words rather than just exact matches. In this article, we explore building a semantic search feature using Rails, OpenAI, Langchain.

When adding a boolean column to a table in a Rails application, one common question is whether to set a default value for it. Let’s explore why this choice matters, the best practices around it, and how it impacts data handling. Using a real-world example, we’ll take a look at a migration adding a women_only column to a trips table.

Learn how to secure your Ruby on Rails applications with advanced techniques, built-in features, and the latest updates in Rails 8 and Ruby 3.3.6

Find out what makes Rails 8 a unique opportunity to

Learn how to add meta tags including OG tags to your Rails app and what are the best practices around them

It can often feel like we aren't being productive unless we're working at max speed. But slow productivity is here to subvert that idea.

Staff engineers are technical leaders who have deep domain knowledge, balancing the tech and business sides of an org.

Learn how to build a dynamic loading screen without writing a line of JavaScript.

In the Developer Coefficient, a study commissioned by the fintech giant Stripe, developers reported that they spent over 17 hours a week on maintenance tasks like debugging and refactoring—work classified as “toil.”

Up and Running with Hotwire Native iOS 1- Setup

Rails partials have many lesser known features. From counters to spacer templates! Learn all there is to know about partials.

Implement friendly URLs by scratch and using the FriendlyId for your Rails application and improve SEO and user experience

In this second part of the series, let's explore nested attributes how they work and why they are so complex.

Today, I’d like to share my journey while working for a client on implementing an efficient mailing...

Today I want to take a break from the election news and write about something that's been on my mind recently, ViewComponents.

Build, deploy and manage your applications on any cloud or your own servers.

Nearly everyone uses a chat application to send messages and stay connected.

Spoiler: Things wait. A lot. A tale of efficiency, but for whom?

Learn how to serve static assets using a CDN in Rails with a custom subdomain and improve your app's performance and UX.

Learn how to use a CDN to serve Active Storage uploads and improve your application's performance and user experience

Learn how to upload files to AWS S3 with this complete guide: S3 configuration, regular and direct file uploads plus integration with S3 compatible services.

Querying your database across associations can become a bottleneck in your Rails application. Julian Rubisch, our first guest author, explains why and suggests an efficient solution.

I was always curious to see real 37signals code. When they released their first ONCE product, Campfire, I was tempted to buy it but I was not willing to spend US$ 299,00, the release price, and now it’s US$ 399,00. For me, it was too much money.

Time: 10-15 min Level: Intermediate Code: Application Revision: Oct 30, 24

An embedded Web Push demo and deep dive recipe for Web Push notifications for a Ruby on Rails application in advance of Rails 8 Action Notifier.

Rails Way is a software development paradigm that implies sticking to the framework architectural defaults as much as possible. Everyone starts with the Rails Way, but how far can you get without derailing from it? Let's talk about the Rails Way core principles, how they evolved over time, and how you can embrace and enhanced it using the layered design techniques.

What are tooltips, exactly? There's two kinds and the one you use has implications on the user experience, as Zell illustrates in this explainer on best practices.

Hint: you need more than good intentions

Someone asked on Twitter yesterday about the how to add TailwindCSS to a Rails 8 project the easiest way and having hot reload. This is how I believe it is to do so in a few minutes.

Interacting with third-party APIs is common practice in applications. This is where the structural design pattern called facade comes into play.

There are many platforms offering visual page builder. For example, website builders like Wix, Webflow; fundraising platforms like Raisely…

Meeting-free days means more productivity, right? More time for focused work. When should, or should you not, press that big ‘+’ button on your calendar?

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Cloud applications can feel...

Paul shows you how to easily load JSON into Postgres relational format with JSON_TABLE, just released in Postgres 17.

This is my personal site, where I write about Ruby, programming, and any of my varied fascinations.

Sick of flaky Rails system tests? Try blaming Selenium and swapping it with Playwright! I did and it's going great. Here's how

Wondering how Solid Queue works on the inside? Read this article to follow a Solid Queue job from enqueue to completion.

Add custom behavior to turbo:before-stream-render listener to add smooth transitions to turbo stream when adding and removing elements.

Let's explore everything that Rails 8 has to offer.

Lessons from GitLab, Doist, PostHog, and more.

We've all been there: you're working on a website and need to display a row of logos—clients, partners, sponsors—you name it. However, logos come in all shapes and sizes, and making them look good together can be quite challenging. How do you get...

Kevin Andrews shares some useful snippets of markup with handy explainers to help you deliver more accessible components.

ActiveStorage’s DirectUpload feature allows files to be directly uploaded to your Cloud’s storage without touching your app’s server.

The Decide, Evolve, React pattern in Ruby, explained step by step

Ruby is a language that consistently evolves to make code more expressive, concise, and readable. With the release of Ruby 3.4, one of the exciting new features introduced is the use of it as a shortcut for the first parameter in a block. This enhancement aims to simplify code, especially in situations where blocks are used extensively, reducing the need to explicitly declare block parameters.

While we are waiting for the Rails World 2024 conference to start and Kamal 2 to be released, I decided to make some preparations for the upcoming changes in the Rails ecosystem.

A from-scratch breakdown of how Rails' Propshaft system serves up static assets automagically and quickly, with graphics and stories to boot!

Morphs, Presence and Typing Indicators

Explore an easy way to drag & drop images using Stimulus while using the Outlets API to preview the dropped image.

Radan here: this is another guest post by Miha. He was so excited about it that he interrupted my weekend with a brand new post to review. I still found it interesting, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! Back to Miha now.

A question as old as human civilization - when developing on a feature branch, should I rebase or should I merge changes to keep it in sync with the main branch?

The catalog of annotated code examples of all design patterns, written in Ruby.

Why we are excited about PostgreSQL 17 for our Rails applications.

An update to How to Build a Twitter Clone with Rails and Hotwire

How two lines of code made everything smooth

Junior engineers are foundational to whether a team can collaborate and innovate

Over 2,700 members of the Rails community from 92 countries kindly contributed their thoughts on tools, frameworks, and workflows in their day to day development lives. From these responses we hope to get an understanding of where Rails stands as a framework in 2024.

Kamal 2 is coming with a brand new custom proxy that’s replacing Traefik. Let’s have a look at why is that and what it means.

Rails 8 will support Progressive Web Apps (PWA) out-of-the-box but you have all the tools you need to make your Rails app installable today.

Secure your Rails app with Action Policy and Rabarber for effective user roles and authorization. Simplify admin access and permissions

This article demonstrates a short-coming with using RSpec mocks in code which accesses objects out of a database.

In this post, you’ll learn a recipe that you can use to “shrink” a large table. This is a good fit when only a portion of the data is accessed, the big table has become unwieldy, and you don’t want a heavier solution like table partitioning.

A button is arguably the most likely component to find itself in your codebase so I’m going to show you how I approach building one.

Designing Web Components For Morphing and techniques to deal with reflecting attributes

The power of Rails with Turbo and Stimulus.

Rails partials have been around for years, but now strict locals have entered the scene to make things easier for us.

cache_key_with_version is a method used in Ruby on Rails to generate a cache key for a model object that includes its version number. This method is helpful for ensuring cache consistency, as it combines the object’s unique ID, updated timestamp, and a version number to create a unique cache key.

Explore the key differences between sprockets and propshafts in rail systems. Understand their functions, applications, and how they contribute to the efficiency of rail operations.

Explore semantic search with filters and learn how you can implement it with pgvector and JavaScript.

Embracing the digital experience

Embracing the digital experience

Upgrade Ruby using dual boot

Automate your next workflow.

Avoid mixing targetless controllers with those attached to a target.

The browser has some nice built-ins for building a microphone recording component, so you don't have to use third-party libraries!

Learn how to use container units and container queries to enhance an already flexible sidebar layout with some extra design control and full width breakout elements.

What is OpenID Connect?

Guidelines for Maintainable Tests

It's not always clear how to make the most of partials and helpers in Rails and know when to put what code where. Regardless of the methods, we all still...

In episode #95 we focused on parsing text and converting hashtags and mentions into links. Now let's add an @ mentions dropdown to any text field, so that you can select a user that you want to men...

You must have used concerns in Rails. Did you know you can also use concerns for your routes? They allow you to declare common routes to be reused in other resources and routes. This post covers the basics of routing concerns, including what they are, how they work, and when you might need them.

Paul Ramsey has some great examples of Postgres network analysis and graph theory in this sample code for playing the Kevin Bacon game. Both pgRouting and recursive CTE are used to solve graphing relationships.

Since the dawn of computing, humans have sought to estimate how long it takes to build software, and for just as long, they've consistently failed. Estimating even medium-sized projects is devilishly difficult, and estimating large projects is virtually impossible. Yet the industry keeps insisting that the method that hasn't worked for...

Premature returning from a controller action is a common idiom in Rails applications. I asked my followers in Twitter about whether they know or know how to do this correctly, and I am glad to see that most of them gave the correct answer. Let’s dive into the details.

As Rails developers, we often focus on writing clean, efficient Ruby code. However, as the application grows optimizing database performance is equally crucial for creating responsive applications. One of the most powerful tools in our arsenal for database optimization is indexing. Here I will talk about PostgreSQL indexing from a Rails developer’s perspective. The query plan generated by EXPLAIN will help us to make informed decisions about index creation, ensuring our database queries run as efficiently as possible.

Performance issues in the PostgreSQL layer usually start to manifest only when your app reaches a certain scale. In this blog post, I'll discuss easy-to-miss database config tweaks and common problems that I've encountered in multiple Rails projects.

Let's look at a few readily available techniques and tools to gather and investigate issues in your Ruby or Rails app.

Migrating the Miru app from Sidekiq to SolidQueue eliminated the dependency on Redis, reducing costs by utilizing database for job storage.

Rails 7.2 uses the foreman gem for process management, which has serious limitations when it comes to interactive debugging. The run-pty Node package is an excellent alternative.

We'll explore the basics of HTTP caching, cache layers, configuration, and how to cache in Rails.

This article introduces the Ruby test profiling toolbox called TestProf.

Nested forms with Rails can now be done without using any third-party gem! Turbo Stream’s is all you need to add nested fields to any form you want.

Staff+ engineers have years of technical knowledge stored away, but often have their skills overlooked or undermined.

I’ll explain the differences and benefits of Turbo Streams vs Turbo Frames in this HTML-first, test-driven tutorial. Only one line of JavaScript needed!

Snake was one of my favorite games to play on my Nokia cell phone circa 2007, so I decided to rebuild it with modern frontend web tooling.

How to upgrade Ruby on Rails from 7.1 to 7.2, including the deprecations, required configurations, application code changes, and webpacker API changes.

Find out how to test accessibility in your Rails app to make it usable for everyone. Learn simple tools and methods to improve your app’s inclusivity and user experience.

A place to learn Ruby on Rails

Read about the tools, techniques, mindset that got our client 5X faster tests.

We explore several solutions to a common Hotwire problem.

The inspect method on Active Record models returns a string including the model’s class and a list of all its attributes and their values. In Rails 7.2, you can configure which attributes are included in the output of inspect. In this post, I’ll discuss the performance issue that led me to implement this feature. I’ll also talk about how this feature can be used to improve developer experience.

Handling remote data state is one of the most common things we do in React apps, so it makes sense to carefully consider how we model it.

Learn about JavaScript’s FileReader interface to preview user images before they are upload with Hotwire/Stimulus.

After searching for a simple, interactive, and easy-to-use tool to document the APIs I build with Rails, and not finding the right one, I decided to create my own: OasRails.

The daily stand-up was intended to help teammates remove any blockers to commitments. But at many companies, stand-ups have devolved into tedious one-sided status reports.

Rails added the filter option to in_order_of to prioritize the specified values without filtering the results

Rails 8.0 adds a generator that streamlines the process of adding basic authentication to Rails applications

Test doubles likes mocks and stubs can help us with isolating code under test with the rest of the system. Here’s how to mock in Minitest.

A conversation with the CTO and Co-founder of Clara, a recent thoughtbot client, about the strategy behind their decision to build their startup product with Rails and Hotwire.

Discover how to automate the releases and publication of your gems on RubyGems using release-please and GitHub Actions.

The convenience and power of Active Record allows you to interact with your database in a more Ruby-like way, making it easier to write efficient and readable code. However, as with any complex system, performance can sometimes take a hit when using Active Record. One common scenario where performance may suffer is when counting records in your database. In any Rails app, A simple count method call can quickly become a bottleneck, especially for larger datasets. In this post, we’ll dive into some optimization techniques for using Active Record’s count method in your Rails app.

Good software design is - in part - realized by the capability to introduce changes in a way that isn’t painful. (If you’d like to read up on code smells that violate this principle, take a look at this list of change preventers.)

Do you have a web application deployed with Kamal, but want to know how to set up secure HTTPS connectivity to it? In this video, you’ll learn how easy it is...

A hidden Rails feature that can level up your debugging game.

The first professionally designed UI components for Rails. Built with ViewComponent, designed with Tailwind CSS and enhanced with Hotwire.

Learn how to implement semantic search in Ruby on Rails using the Neighbor gem, Anthropic's Claude API for summarization, and OpenAI for text embeddings. Enhance your app's search capabilities with meaning-based results.

Learn how to implement a Todoist-style task creation feature in your Rails app using Hotwire and Stimulus. This step-by-step guide shows you how to create a seamless, JavaScript-free UX for adding new tasks with auto-focus functionality. Perfect for Rails developers looking to enhance their app’s user experience.

GitHub Staff Engineer Sarah Vessels discusses her philosophy of code review, what separates good code review from bad, her strategy for finding and reviewing code, and how to get the most from reviews of her own code.

Adds additional postgres functionality to an ActiveRecord / Rails application - GeorgeKaraszi/ActiveRecordExtended

What is row pattern recognition feature? Row pattern recognition (RPR) is a feature defined in the SQL standard. It allows to search for a s...

A practical guide to understand the new accessibility requirements and get started with your plan to comply.

Event sourcing is a jargon filled mess, but we can build a lean version with just ActiveRecord, callbacks, and a bit of boring code. Learn how to create simple, yet powerful event-driven systems in Rails.

Ruby is such an expressive language. You can often do surprisingly much with just a few lines of code. It’s why I find it so satisfying to think about how to accomplish the same thing in fewer lines of Ruby1. If we accept the claim that that number of bugs correlates with number of lines of code this is not just a fun exercise. There’s real business value in accomplishing a feature with less lines of code. ↩

The only Ruby on Rails newsletter you will ever need!

Hello Devs 👋 I hope everyone's doing great. The landscape of web development is constantly...

This post explores where to access request headers by looking at the Rails source code after unexpectedly accessing the response headers.

When I'm starting a new Ruby on Rails project, these are few snippets that I find helpful

Matthias Ott is an independent user experience designer and developer from Stuttgart, Germany. Besides design practice he teaches Interface Prototyping at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Kiel.

This post details a proof-of-concept for optimistic UI. If you want to just browse the source, check out the optimistic-ui-hotwire-rails GitHub repository.

If you want to try this at home, here's a GitHub link to a demo application that follows the blog post below. Each commit corresponds to a section in the post.

Sometimes you need a custom, semantic order for things, usually statuses, types. Oftentimes this is...

How to use Kamal to backup and restore your Postgres database

Efficiently manages database connections by promptly returning them to the pool after use, enabling immediate reuse rather than holding onto connections until the end of the request cycle.

By default, Rails adds comments to some attributes like `id` (`not null, primary key` for instance.) But now, I can add comments to my own attributes.

Cassidy's current "stack" of task-tracking, calendar, and note-taking apps

For a long time, I thought that using React with Rails was an “all-or-nothing” proposition. I’m now realizing that the two can be integrated on a spectrum.

Learn how to add the “Save and add another” feature in your Rails app

Got a Rails API that needs some love? Learn how to version your API endpoints so that you can introduce new features while maintaining backward compatibility!

A few months ago, Planet Argon kicked off a Rails 2.1 to Rails 3.0 / Ruby 1.8.7 to Ruby 1.9.3 upgrade for one of our clients. The monolithic Rails app contai...

If you’ve been following the changes in Turbo 8, it looks incredibly promising for improving the perception of speed and interactivity on our web apps. A lot of the Stimulus Tutorials could use an update since they were first written, so I thought it would be good to over existing tutorials and rethink them withContinue reading "Hotwire Tutorial: How Do I Drag and Drop Items in a List?"

Undoing an action, like archiving, deleting or even sending an email, is straightforward with Rails and Turbo. Let’s learn how to do it.

The Architects Choice

Ruby and Rails have several features to make your code more performant using async programming. Here’s a list of these tools and how to use them.

Unlock the potential of Rails with multi-database configurations, exploring setup for multiple database settings, whether horizontally or vertically.

Is your testing strategy too top-heavy? Here are some techniques to spread coverage down the testing pyramid.

Practical tips to optimize your web performance by using HTML and CSS instead of JavaScript for common tasks like state management, responsive design, and UI elements.

Modern Web Weekly #18 One area in which developers have always wanted to customize elements is forms. Historically, it has often been hard to style form controls to give them the look and feel you want. The styling options are often limited and to this day, form controls like date

SQL seems like a data science underdog compared to Python and R. However, it’s far from it. I’ll show you here how you can use it as a data scientist.

I've been toying around with Kamal for some time now, and I believe I have come up with a nice setup for a reasonably robust deployment. It includes two servers, one for the application and another for database and caching, a firewall to expose only the ports we need (e.

Work alongside the thoughtbot team as we collaborate with each other and our clients, live. Ask us anything, we're live right now!

The N + 1 problem is common performance issue. Ruby on Rails provides tools and methodology for preventing it from happening in you applications.

I will walk through the steps my team followed to set up a pretty nice Rails development environment using Docker and VS Code Dev Containers.