The RailsNotes Newsletter 🟥 ISSUE #23

🟥 ISSUE #23 (Rails 8, Ruby 3.3 and more!)

Author

Harrison Broadbent
January 05, 2024

Welcome to 2024! It’s going to be a great year for Ruby on Rails, Ruby itself, and (hopefully) all of us!

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Welcome to The RailsNotes Newsletter — Issue #23! Hello 2024!

I hope you all enjoyed a restful break! I’ve loved getting out for runs and seeing friends and family, plus I managed to sneak in some writing time!

I published two new articles over the break — the first is a short guide to using VS Code to edit Rails credentials, and the second is a breakdown of the upcoming features of Rails 8! We’ll dig more into the second article down below, but rest assured that there’s a ton of great stuff!

One last thing — congratulations to George B. from the US, and Lucas G. from Brazil for winning my POODR book giveaway! Thanks to everyone that entered; I’m planning to do more stuff like that in 2024, so stay tuned!

With all that out of the way, let’s get into it!

~ ✨ FEATURED ARTICLE ✨ ~

Rails 8 probably won’t tell you your fortune, but it’s looking to be pretty great all the same!

Rails 8 is going to be epic! 🔥 The Rails 8 GitHub milestone was created last week, and shared by DHH on Twitter, so I’ve dug through it and summarized all the good stuff in this article (and linked to the relevant GitHub discussions if you want more info!).

There’s too much to cover here, but some of the main new things are — 

  • Solid Queue, Solid Cache, and a new DB-based ActionCable adapter are all becoming defaults,

  • Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are getting first-class support,

  • Default Rubocop, GitHub CI, and LSP,

  • Much, much more!

There really is a lot of interesting stuff; whether you read my article or trawl through the Rails 8 GitHub milestone, it’s exciting to sneak a peek at the great stuff coming our way. There’s no official release date beyond sometime in 2024, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for more information.

As is tradition, Christmas Day of 2023 brought us a new version of Ruby! Ruby 3.3 brings some major performance improvements, courtesy of YJIT optimizations, alongside major improvements to IRB.

There’s also a more in-depth breakdown of the language changes which you might find handy!

In the spirit of looking ahead to future Rails releases, here’s the link to the WIP release notes for the (yet unreleased!) Rails 7.2 release.

As you’d imagine, there’s less going on here than in Rails 8, but it’s interesting to take a peek and see what’s coming. I noticed some improvements to using SQLite with ActiveRecord, and UJS getting removed in favor of Turbo.

→ 😅 Just 2 articles today

There’s a lot do dig into in this newsletter already, and I’m still on holiday, so I’ve skipped the final article 😊 I hope you all had a great break yourself!

~ ⚒️ HANDY TIP ~ 

→ Edit Rails Credentials using VS Code

This tip is completely unrelated to Rails 8, but it is related to the article I published this week on using VS Code to edit Rails credentials. If you just want the command, it’s this — 

shell command to use VS Code when you run “rails credentials:edit”

If you’re interested, my article also included a handy script to save you having to remember the command.

~👀 BEHIND THE SCENES~ 

This is a private section 🔐 for readers with 2+ referrals!

I share behind-the-scenes updates on RailsNotes and RailsNotes UI (think traffic numbers, sales, upcoming updates etc.)

Want access? Learn about the ✨ referral program ✨ down below! 👇️ 

Something I’ve been putting off for ages has been adding an exit intent modal to the main RailsNotes blog. Basically, they’re a popup that get’s displayed when you’re about to close the tab, asking you to do something — in my case, sign up for this newsletter.

Well, over the break I decided to just do it, and …. I should have done it a loooooong time ago. Look — 

subscribers go brrrrr….

And my modal isn’t even that good! It’s just this — 

my super basic exit intent modal (doing very good work 💪)

All I can say is that, if any of you are planning to launch something (now, or ever), don’t sleep on these! It took me an hour to add and has blown my mind 😅 

~ 🌯 WRAP UP ~ 

Thanks for reading! The quick wrap-up for this week is — 

  1. Rails 8 is starting to coalesce (but won’t be out for a while, think second half of 2024)

  2. Ruby 3.3 is out and, as expected, is brilliant.

  3. Welcome to 2024! I hope you had a great break; I’ve got some exciting things planned for 2024 that I think you’ll love.

→ Big thank you 🙏 to trechi7, lsglucas and pedromartins.bsb for referring your friends to the RailsNotes Newsletter!

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Use your unique link below to refer new Ruby on Rails devs to this newsletter (and make me really happy!). I’ll reward you with coupon codes, access to a private section, and a free RailsNotes UI license key 👇️ 

  • [Refer 1] A small feature in the next newsletter (with a link to something you’re working on, or your socials)

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