Together with  FastRuby.io

The Plan for rv and a Progress Update — Inspired by Python’s uv, rv is a fast Ruby install, gem, and project manager built by several prominent Rubyists. v0.6 landed this week, and things are going well. This post shares some history, progress, and where the team is focusing next.

André Arko

⚡ "You can go straight from brew install rv to a Rails app from rvx rails new in 10 seconds flat." – André Arko

Hiring Rails Engineers Takes Months. We Start Next Week! — Since '17, teams have trusted us to upgrade Rails. The same engineers are now available for staff augmentation: shipping features, squashing bugs, and reviewing the AI-generated PRs piling up in your queue. Skip the 6-month hiring slog. Let's talk. 🚀

FastRuby.io® | Staff Augmentation sponsor

Scaling Rails for a Peak Load of 41M Requests/Hour — A retrospective on how a digital photo-frame service scaled its app for peak load at Christmas. As well as splitting a single primary database into eight, a mix of Rails techniques made it work: native multiple databases, disable_joins, and keyset pagination.

Andrew Atkinson

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

How I Think About Tests: Skips — When is skipping a test the right move, and when does it erode the signal skips are supposed to provide? A Shopify engineer shares his approach for keeping skips rare and meaningful.

Hartley McGuire

  • Nandi 3.0 – A Postgres-oriented migration tool for Rails that keeps routine-looking schema changes from taking your database down on large tables.

  • RuboCop 1.88.0 – Adds a new option to check and freeze mutable literals nested in arrays and hashes.

  • HTTPX 1.8 – Featureful HTTP client library gains improvements to SSE and caching support. (Release notes)

  • JRuby 10.0.6.0 – The Ruby 3.4-compatible JVM-based Ruby implementation.

  • rubyzip 3.4 – .zip reading and writing library.

🤩  Yusuke Endoh's Obfuscated C Code

The IOCCC (International Obfuscated C Code Contest) is a competition to "write the most obscure/obfuscated C program" possible within a set of rules. C, being C, makes all sorts of bizarre horrors possible, so the winning entries tend to make for interesting reading.

One of the IOCCC's most successful participants is Ruby committer Yusuke Endoh, who you might know from his Ruby-powered 'quine relay', work on TypeProf, and experiments with ▶️ esoteric and artistic programming in Ruby.

The winning entries of IOCCC 2025 were announced recently and Yusuke won three times with these three entries, all of which are worth checking out.

His third entry (see the code here), written in tribute to Perl creator Larry Wall, is a self-modifying quine chain that hides a diff-style tool inside a patch tool, where the tool patches itself numerous times and becomes a tool that can make diffs.

Excuse this slightly odd way to cap off an issue of Ruby Weekly, but as well as being fun to look at and think about, Yusuke's work is a great reminder of the human creativity still involved in coming up with novel solutions in code!

P.S. This 366-character emulator (not by Yusuke) that can run Linux and Doom is also a bit of a mind bender.