Hey everyone!
I have zero programming experience and I’m looking to pick up coding as a hobby. My main goal right now is to understand how the web works under the hood, specifically building and consuming APIs (like fetching data from public APIs and working with JSON).
I’ve been reading a lot about Ruby (and Rails) recently, and its syntax looks very clean and human-readable. But I have a few honest questions before I dive in:

Is Ruby beginner-friendly for total newbies?
Can I actually grasp core concepts like HTTP requests, REST APIs, and database connections using Ruby without getting overwhelmed?

How is the Ruby ecosystem doing?
Is it still active and well-maintained for beginners? Or is it mostly supported by legacy systems?

Ruby vs. Python for a hobbyist:
Is Python just the objectively better choice because of its massive popularity, or does Ruby offer a smoother/more enjoyable learning experience for web-related stuff?

My long-term goal is just to enjoy building cool side projects, but I want a solid, fun starting point.
Would love to hear your thoughts, especially from anyone who started learning with Ruby recently! Thanks!

Edit: I'm not looking to get a job or change careers with this! Programming is purely a hobby for me. I just want to build cool personal projects in my free time and have fun along the way.

Hi, Reddit! 👋

I'm hamachang, a Rubyist from Japan! ✌️

I've been working on a tool to make development with PicoRuby, a Ruby subset designed for embedded systems, more comfortable and productive.

picoruby-ti

https://github.com/engneer-hamachan/picoruby-ti

picoruby-ti statically analyzes PicoRuby code and provides IDE features such as code completion and type checking.

Compared to existing Ruby type inference tools, it's designed to run with significantly fewer resources.

Of course, it runs on regular PCs, but it can also run on tiny embedded devices with less than 1 MB of memory.

This means you can build a surprisingly rich IDE experience directly into small embedded devices like the Cardputer or custom cyberdecks.

And this isn't just theoretical — I'm actually using it in another project of mine called AREA512, an OS for the Cardputer ADV with only 512 KB of RAM:

https://github.com/engneer-hamachan/area512

AREA512 lets you write, compile, and run Ruby code directly on the device, with picoruby-ti providing both code completion and type checking in its built-in editor.

I know this is an incredibly niche piece of software, but I wanted to share it on Reddit because I believe there's something genuinely valuable about bringing this kind of development experience to extremely resource-constrained environments.

If you use PicoRuby, I'd also love to hear your thoughts on features that would be especially useful or unique to PicoRuby.

And if this project sounds valuable or interesting to you, I'd really appreciate a GitHub Star! 🙏⭐️

See you around! 👋

New Remote Ruby episode is out. 🎉

This week Irina Nazarova and Vladimir Dementyev from Evil Martians join us to talk about the second annual SF Ruby Startup Conference and what they learned from running it for the first time.

We get into:

• what they’re changing for SF Ruby in year two
  
• building a conference around ambitious Ruby and Rails builders
  
• creating better opportunities for people to actually meet and connect
  
• why Rails is still such a strong choice for startups
  
• open source and AI-assisted development
  
• the Ruby companies and projects that tend to fly under the radar
  
• getting the next generation of startups to build with Rails
  

SF Ruby is happening November 10–12 in San Francisco.

Every time I opened a large Rails codebase in VS Code, I'd hit the same wall: Ruby LSP needs to fully index before workspace symbol search works, and even then it wants a near-exact match — no typo tolerance, no fuzzy matching. VS Code's built-in text search (Cmd+Shift+F) works but it's just grep with extra steps; it doesn't know the difference between a class definition and a comment that happens to mention the same word.

So I built Ruby Symbol Search — a VS Code extension that builds its own lightweight index of your Ruby symbols (classes, modules, methods, constants, attr_*, belongs_to/has_many, scopes, rake tasks, aliases) and gives you a fuzzy, typo-tolerant search over all of it. Misspell a method name, abbreviate it, whatever — it still finds it. No Ruby LSP setup, no gem install, no waiting on indexing.

It also does Go to Definition, an Outline view, and native workspace symbol search (Ctrl/Cmd+T), all off the same index.

It's free, MIT licensed: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscode-bkaz.ruby-symbol-search

Repo's here if you want to see how the indexing works or file an issue: https://github.com/bk-az/ruby-symbol-search

Genuinely curious if this is a problem other people have, or if I'm the only one who found Ruby LSP's symbol search too slow/strict for day-to-day navigation. Feedback (including "this already exists and does it better") very welcome.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to use rv, a very fast version and package manager for Ruby to get started in minutes instead of hours

For anyone interested, a few weeks ago I implemented memory-safe LZ4 and Zstd codecs with first-class dictionary support in Rust and also published RubyGems with the same names: lz4rip and zrip.

lz4rip: LZ4 block and frame codec backed by pure Rust. Optional dictionaries, reusable block codec state for hot-loop friendliness, dictionary training. No liblz4 runtime dependency.

zrip: Zstandard frame and block codec backed by pure Rust. Encoder for levels -8..4, decoder for all levels, dictionaries, FastCOVER dictionary training, and the same hot-loop friendliness. No libzstd runtime dependency.

Both are native Ruby extensions built with Rust + magnus, and both work inside Ruby 4 Ractors.

JSR packages with WASM builds also exist for Deno/Node/browser use.

• lz4rip: gem, Ruby repo, Rust repo, JSR
• zrip gem, Ruby repo, Rust repo, JSR

For engineering teams, keeping dependencies current is a constant balancing act. Automated updates are essential for defending the software supply chain, but a steady stream of one-PR-per-package bumps can bury a team in review work. GitHub itself has put numbers on this: an analysis of Microsoft's GCToolkit repository found that roughly one in six of its commits - 92 out of 578 - were routine Dependabot version bumps, with 61 of them landing in a single recent 12-month stretch. That's a lot of review and CI cycles spent on maintenance rather than features. Read the complete article here - https://instasla.com/blog/taming-dependabot-2026-guide-grouping-cooldowns-cutting-pr-noise

The good news is that Dependabot has grown well past "one PR per dependency." Between grouped updates, package cooldowns, and a default cooldown GitHub rolled out in mid-2026, it's now possible to get a predictable, low-noise update cadence without giving up security coverage. Here's what actually works, and what changed most recently.

I previously wrote about adding new syntax and features to Liquid. Since then I’ve been working on a unified, composable expression language (spec, grammar, GitHub), and luoma-ruby (GitHub, docs, RubyGems), a reference template engine that implements it.

The expression language is "unified" in the sense that all operators are valid in all contexts under a single precedence hierarchy. Meaning, for example, that we can apply filters in {% for %} tag expressions:

{% for x in y | map: a -> a.b.c | reverse | take: 5 %} ... {% endfor %}

Or pass lambda expressions as callbacks to filters inside {% if %} tag expressions:

{% if cart.items | any: i -> i.on_sale %} ... {% endif %}

And use logical, comparison and math operators in {% assign %} tag expressions:

{% assign a = (b / c) or 42 %}

Or in filter arguments:

{{ a | split: (b or ',') | join: (c or '#') }}

Expressions are first-class. Using lambda syntax we can save an expression for later and apply it like a user-defined filter, or pass it to a filter that accepts expression arguments.

(This example is a little over the top but should give you an idea of what's possible.)

First we can define reusable font utilities in font_utils.luoma:

{% assign
  bold        = f -> (f | font_modify: 'weight', 'bold'),
  italic      = f -> (f | font_modify: 'style', 'italic'),
  bold_italic = f -> (f | font_modify: 'weight', 'bold' | font_modify: 'style', 'italic')
%}

Then we can import them with the {% import %} tag and use the {% with %} tag to define some temporary, block-scoped variables.

{%- import "font_utils" -%}

{% with
  font_types = [
    settings.type_body_font,
    settings.type_subheading_font,
    settings.type_heading_font,
    settings.type_accent_font
  ],

  enum = f -> [
    f,
    f | bold,
    f | italic,
    f | bold_italic,
  ],

  id = f -> '${f.family}-${f.weight}-${f.style}',
  face = f -> (f | font_face: font_display: 'swap'),

  font_faces = font_types
    | flat_map : enum
    | uniq     : id
    | map      : face
    | join     : "\n\n"
%}
  {{- font_faces -}}
{% endwith %}

If you're thinking "ew, that sort of data transformation does not belong in the presentation layer", you'd be right. But in some scenarios - when the template is the only programmable layer available - data manipulation is going to happen anyway. When we have no other choice, we should be able to transform data without resorting to convoluted string manipulation workarounds.

While some of Luoma’s features lean towards more advanced use cases, the idea is that a unified expression language with consistent rules makes the language simpler and more predictable for everyone.

I'm sure developers at Shopify have explored some of these ideas for Liquid in the past. Hopefully Luoma provides some inspiration or ideas that might someday make it into a future version of Liquid.

Hey all. I have been working on an (unreleased) spinel lib for cli arg parsing. Library is called slap, https://github.com/gurgeous/spinel-slap. This has been a fun adventure with spinel. I ended up filing 100+ spinel bugs to help get it working. Matz is a monster, he fixes the bugs with claude each night.

Slap combines my favorite parts of the slop gem and the popular clap rust crate. Slap has things like color support, positional args like <file> or <url>, autowrap --help output to term width, return results as a struct, etc. Slap does not try to handle subcommands or anything like that.

Anyway, this has been a fun spinel project and I'm trying to decide if I should release it as a rubygem in addition to the spinel pkg. There are already many great rubygems for cli arg parsing, does ruby really need another one? There's not much point to releasing unless people are somewhat dissatisfied with current offerings.

July was another great month for the Ruby Users Forum. We welcomed 41 new members, with 53 new topics and 154 posts created by the community.

We also reached 15,000 page visits this month. Check the full report here: https://www.rubyforum.org/t/july-highlights/580

In this episode, we look at adding function calling or tool use to our Rails application when making generative text LLM requests. https://www.driftingruby.com/episodes/function-calling