Generating Music with Sonic Pi and Ruby — Sonic Pi is an amazing Ruby-based musical live coding environment (which could do with your support) and if you haven’t yet given it a go, hopefully this will inspire you.

Yadriggy: A Framework for Building 'Hemiparasitic' DSLs — A ‘hemiparastic’ DSL is a type of embedded DSL that uses the host’s language syntax (Ruby’s, in this case) but is ultimately run externally. There’s an example of Yadriggy C, a DSL that can offload computation from Ruby to C.

Long Term Support for Rails 2.3 and 3.2 

Rails LTS provides security patches for old versions of Ruby on Rails. Currently Rails 2.3 and Rails 3.2 are supported.

A Proposal for MRI/CRuby to Get a Second Garbage Collected Heap — MRI uses one garbage collected managed heap and a manually allocated heap, but adding a second GC heap for very short lived ‘transient’ objects could provide significant performance gains.

'Why I Recommend Against Using Cucumber' — Controversy alert! Cucumber is one of those tools that is used wrong more that it’s used right. But even when it’s used right, is it worth using at all? Mike McDermott counters (slightly) in The Real Value of Cucumber.

Under the Hood of “Slurping” and Streaming Files in Ruby — This article focuses mostly on how Ruby’s I/O package abstracts system calls to make streaming files simple.

Why You Too Should Learn Elixir — Though unfortunately we don’t have a newsletter for it yet ;-)

Tutorials

Improving Your Ruby Development Process with Pry — Pry is a neat alternative to the standard IRB Ruby shell. This article walks through some of its features.

A Look at Some Useful ActiveRecord Methods — Including map, pluck, uniq, sum, and update_all with examples and benchmarks.

Write Bash/Zsh Tab Completion Scripts in Ruby

Ruby 2.6 Raises an Exception if 'else' Is Used Inside 'begin..end' Block Without 'rescue'

Top 10 Ruby Errors and How to Fix Them

Queries on Rails: A Tour of Active Record and Arel

Code & Tools