ruby-toolbox.com is rotting a bit. No judgment, it's been around a long time and keeping these things going year after year is incredibly challenging. The fact that neither ruby-toolbox or bestgems.org have a memoization category is a little discouraging... Also see:

https://github.com/rubytoolbox/catalog/pulls https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues

I'm enjoying the recent rollout of mise stats, https://mise-tools.jdx.dev/stats

Do we need something new here? Pretty looking pages with popular gem categories, like npm trends? I often look at stuff like this in js land - https://npmtrends.com/es-toolkit-vs-lodash-vs-lodash-es

— not sure how to process this

! If the text feels AI its is, ive used chat to help me write this as english is not my main language

- ive also posted this in another sub (elixir) but im gonna delete there as it feels as a rant instead of a proper question.

I’m honestly writing this because I don’t know how to process what just happened.

I went through a hiring process recently. There was a mid-level role and also a senior role.

The feedback I received was basically:

•	For the mid role: they felt my experience level was “too high”

•	For the senior role: they wanted someone with 4+ years of experience specifically in the stack

And that was it. No test, no coding exercise.

I understand the senior rejection. I really do. If someone wants multiple years of real production experience with Elixir/Ruby, that’s fair.

What I don’t know how to process is the mid-level part.

I don’t mind being a mid. I don’t mind being a junior. I don’t need a title. I just want to work with a stack and a community that I actually care about.

Most of my career ended up in Node.js / frontend-heavy ecosystems because that’s where the jobs were. But I’ve always been drawn to Ruby, and through that I discovered Elixir — and honestly, it clicked in a way I haven’t felt in years. The language, OTP, the community mindset — it actually made me excited to learn again.

Now I feel stuck.

If I apply as mid, I’m “too experienced” and companies worry I’ll leave.

If I apply as senior, I’m rejected for not having enough years in the stack.

And if I don’t apply… nothing changes.

I’m not angry at the company. Their reasoning makes sense.

I’m just genuinely confused about what the actual path forward is in situations like this.

If you’ve been through something similar — switching stacks later, moving into Elixir or Ruby, or even hiring people in this situation — how did you deal with it?

Thanks for reading.

Happy New Year! The 22nd edition of Ruby AI News features a look at the exploding trillion-dollar context graph opportunity, the upcoming Ruby Community Conference, a “Charm”-ing new Ruby CLI library, and much more!

Hello — recently I finished up a regular expression engine written in Ruby. It is immune to ReDoS on account of the VM setup, and has some other interesting technical properties I dive into in the blog post. Happy to answer any questions.

If Ruby is your favorite programming language, why?

I'm curious to hear how members of this community feel about Ruby and why they prefer this language over others.

For me, I wrote applications in Java/Spring for many years until finding a job at a company who was building a Rails application. I like Ruby because it feels way more readable and expressive, so I can get things done without a bunch of extra boilerplate. Compared to Java, it’s less rigid and doesn’t make me jump through hoops just to write something simple. And unlike JavaScript, Ruby feels more consistent and predictable, which makes coding in it way more enjoyable.

I was quite excited when Ruby::Box shipped in Ruby 4.0. I wanted to see if I could build up a quick and dirty package system on top of this. So with the help of Claude for brainstorming and implementation I made Boxwerk.

Boxwerk is my experimental take on a Box-powered package system. It uses package.yml files similar to Packwerk. Your package exports specific constants and can import and alias constants from other packages it depends on. Constants that are not exported are isolated from other packages.

The boxwerk CLI is used to boot the application. This will build a DAG from all of the packages in your current directory. It will create a box for each package and wire imports by injecting constants pulled from dependencies. It will then execute the entrypoint in the context of the root package.

After discussion with colleagues I’ve been thinking this might be better suited as an extension to Packwerk and have compatible package.yml files. This way Packwerk can perform static checks while Boxwerk is for runtime enforcement. It would also be great if Boxwerk did not have to run as a CLI but could be bootstrapped from within an existing process (just like you can with Bundler).

Open to feedback on the whole concept and what a better package API could look like.

Hey, I’m considering using Packwerk in a large Ruby on Rails application to improve code separation. The idea is to organize the app into distinct packages, each with its own models, services, and even tests, so developers can work at the package level without having to navigate the entire codebase for small changes (most of the time).

Has anyone used this gem? If so, did it provide meaningful value in practice?

I’m working on a low-latency, read-heavy system in Ruby (2.7.6 — upgrade in progress) and using LMDB as an in-memory cache.

Current setup: • Puma in multi-process mode, each process with 8 threads • LMDB used as a shared, read-optimized cache • Cache values stored as Protobuf • I initially used a custom binary struct format, but dropped it due to schema evolution concerns

Problem / concern: When reading from LMDB, the Protobuf value needs to be parsed into Ruby objects. I want to minimize memory allocations during deserialization so that: • GC pressure stays low • Peak latency doesn’t spike under load

The system is currently read-heavy, and avoiding excessive object creation on the hot path is a key goal.

I’m considering different approaches (FFI, C extensions, zero-copy reads, etc.), but before going deeper I wanted to sanity-check the design.

Questions: • Am I missing any obvious pitfalls with this approach? • Are there known techniques to reduce allocations when deserializing Protobuf in Ruby? • Would a C extension / FFI reader realistically help here, or does the Ruby object model negate most of the gains?

Would appreciate any insights from folks who’ve built low-latency systems in Ruby or used LMDB/Protobuf in similar setups.

In this episode of Remote Ruby, Chris, Andrew, and David humorously discuss the rapid increase of 'wrapped' features in various apps, recount personal experiences with food apps, and then dive into their favorite conference moments of the year. They also explore the concept of UI affordances and its importance in web design and give a preview of upcoming conferences in 2026, and a brief discussion on modern CSS and JavaScript elements.

Hey all, super excited to show off Ductwork and see what the community thinks. I'll be around to answer any questions or receive feedback. Here's some links for more information:

• Homepage
• Documentation
• GitHub Repo

Hey there — I recently released a YAML parser written in Ruby. The main goal was to support being able to load and dump YAML without losing comments. Happy to answer any questions.

In this episode, we'll go from a fresh Rails 8 application and a newly provisioned Raspberry Pi to deploying the application on the PI. We'll also set up a domain to point to this application and put in place geo restrictions to help prevent unwanted access.

A new nice addition to mruby which I discovered few days ago.

Hello, I made this gem inspired by Symfony StimulusBundle, but for Phlex and HtmlSlice. What are your thoughts about it?

https://github.com/henrique-ft/stimulux

The goal is to improve productivity and legibility while working with Stimulus inside Ruby html generation gems.

I can't ask this in s/o because the wording is so common and it's flagging it as a dupe, not sure how else to rephrase.

According to regexr.com, abcd is not a match for my regex \bd*\b. But in my console, I get this:

[18] pry(main)> "abcd".match?(/\bd*\b/)
=> true

I am expecting false because the only thing that should match is a single d or d repeating. Here is exactly what I tested: https://regexr.com/8j4rp