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.
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.
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.
The world is full of linear relationships. When one apple costs $1 and two apples cost $2, it's easy to figure out the price of any number of apples. But what happens when you have 100s of data points? What if your data source is noisy? That's when it's helpful to use a technique called linear regression. In this article Julie Kent shows us how linear regression works, and walks through a practical example in Ruby.
We've all worked with tightly-coupled code. If a butterfly flaps its wings in China, the unit tests break. Maintaining a system like this is...unpleasant. In this article, Jonathan Miles dives into the origins of tight-coupling. He demonstrates how you can use dependency injection (DI) to decouple code. Then he introduces a novel decoupling technique based on delegation that can be useful when DI is not an option.
In today’s post, we’ll look at system tests in Rails 6. System tests are meant to auto-test the way users interact with your application, including the Javascript in your user interface. Minitest, being the default testing framework in Rails, is a great match for system testing. With all the configuration that Rails handles for us, there are just a few steps needed before we have our first tests up and running.
In case you missed it, we released Ruby gem 2.10. It focusses mostly on diagnose and configuration. Though a bit late, here’s a round-up of what’s in the release.
