Text encoding is fundamental to programming. Web sites, user data, and even the code we write are all text. When encoding breaks, it can feel like the floor is falling out from under you. You're cast into a dimension of bitmasks and codepoints. Logs and backtraces are useless. You consider trading your text editor for a hex editor. But there's hope! In this article, Jose Manuél will show us how encoding errors happen, how they're expressed in Ruby, and how to troubleshoot them.

Ruby may be over 25 years old, but it remains popular in the software community for its focus on programmer happiness. Building software with Ruby often involves leveraging one or more popular frameworks for the purpose of increasing productivity by relying on existing solutions to common problems. Ruby frameworks generally fall into two categories: web-facing frameworks and background job frameworks.

Whoever first said that "the fastest code is no code" must have really liked memoization. After all, memoization speeds up your application by running less code. In this article, Jonathan Miles introduces us to memoization. We'll learn when to use it, how to implement it in Ruby, and how to avoid common pitfalls. Buckle up!

Running software uses computer memory for data structures and executable operations. How this memory is accessed and managed depends on the operating system and the programming language. Many modern programming languages manage memory for you, and Ruby is no different. Ruby manages memory usage using a garbage collector (also called gc). In this post, we’ll examine what you, a Ruby developer, need to know about Ruby’s gc. Use the links below to skip ahead in the tutorial.

Last year, the Skylight team gave a talk called Inside Rails: The Lifecycle of a Request. In that talk, we covered everything that happens between typing a URL into your browser to a request reaching your Rails controller action. But that talk ended with a cliffhanger: Once we are in the controller action, how does Rails send our response back to the browser?

Sidekiq is a Ruby framework for background job processing. Developers can use Sidekiq to asynchronously run computationally intensive tasks—such as bulk email sending, payment processing, and data importing—to help speed up the response times of their applications. If you’re using Sidekiq Pro or Enterprise, Datadog’s integration helps you monitor the progress of your jobs and the applications that depend on them, all in a single platform.

These days fewer and fewer web developers get to specialize in a single language like Ruby. We use different tools for different jobs. In this article, Ayooluwa Isaiah argues that Go is the perfect complement to Ruby. The developer who knows both is in a great position to handle almost any back-end challenge.

Lambdas are a powerful feature of the Ruby language. They allow you to wrap logic and data into a portable package. In this post, we’ll cover how and when to use lambdas. You'll also learn about the difference between lambdas and Procs, and the performance profile of lambda functions. The code examples have been tested with 2.6 and 2.7 and should work with most modern Rubys.

Over the last few years, more developers have taken Ruby as their staple programming language. Who can blame them? It certainly has a lot of appealing features. For one, the syntax is easy to read and debug. A default MVC architecture within most Ruby frameworks is another alluring factor that may have had you using it as well.

We've all been there. You're clicking around your Rails application, and it just isn't as snappy as it used to be. You start searching for a quick-fix and find a lot of talk about caching. Take your existing app, add some caching, and voila, a performance boost with minimal code changes. However, it's not this simple. Like most quick fixes, caching can have long-term costs.