Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

It happens to all of us. As software projects grow, parts of the production code we ship end up without a comprehensive test suite. When you take another look at the same area of code after a few months, it may be difficult to understand; even worse, there might be a bug, and we don't know where to begin fixing it. Modifying production code without tests is a major challenge.

Ruby 4.0 is a major release, launched on Ruby’s 30th anniversary (December 25, 2025) to celebrate three decades of the community, not due to major breaking changes. I was surprised to learn that Ruby doesn’t actually follow semantic versioning! Instead, Matz (Ruby’s creator) increases the major version when changes impress him. This version marks 30 years of Ruby and introduces features to extend the language.

You might have heard about Prism, the new Ruby parser. Perhaps you've heard it's faster, more reliable, and more powerful than what we had before. Or maybe you never took a compilers class and aren't sure about what this actually means. I'm here to tell you all about it, and how it's changing our lives as Ruby developers. Today, I want to take you from square one to writing your first transpiler.

In part one of this series, we started developing a simple Flappy Bird clone game using the DragonRuby game development toolkit. We didn't come very far, though — we stopped after integrating player input to keep our plane afloat. In this second and concluding part, we'll implement the remaining simple game mechanics. We'll also take a brief look at interfacing with an HTTP server and publishing our game on itch.io.

The DragonRuby Game Toolkit is a powerful, cross-platform 2D game engine that allows you to create fun game titles while staying in your favorite developer-friendly language. What's not to love? In this post, we are going to cover the basics of game development with DragonRuby. We will use a "Flappy Bird" clone to explain the fundamental concepts. But before we get started, let's address two initial concerns you might have about DragonRuby right off the bat.

Reading a lot of code from very senior engineers is probably one of the best ways to level up as a Ruby on Rails developer. By doing so, we can learn new tips and techniques that we can reuse in our jobs. Thanks to open source, we can read code written by the best developers from all over the world, and for free! However, reading code from a Ruby gem or a Rails engine for the first time without being guided can be daunting. There are so many files; how do we even know where to start?

Ruby has a robust error handling mechanism called rescue. The way it works is the keyword rescue specifies an exception handler that will catch and handle any exceptions that are raised in the begin block, the code block preceding the rescue block that may cause an exception. Here’s how it looks: When an exception occurs in the begin code block, Ruby transfers control to the rescue block and executes the code within it.

In this series, we will take a close look at the architecture of ActiveStorage for Rails. In this first part, we will examine how ActiveStorage treats uploaded data and how to extend this process. The second part will explore how to augment the presentation of uploaded assets. But first, let's quickly define what ActiveStorage does.

In this post, we'll explore two advanced JIT compilers for Ruby: TruffleRuby and JRuby, looking at their benefits and drawbacks. We'll also briefly touch on the recently announced ZJIT compiler. But before we get started, let's define JIT compilation.

I don't have a degree in computer science, and it's okay if you don't either! Lots of us Rubyists don't have formal computer science credentials. So for a long time, I avoided learning about big-O notation. It looks a little too much like higher math. I mean just look at something like: O(N^2). Come on!