Hey folks, in this week’s episode, I sat down with the incredible Ridhwana Khan — a South African technical writer for the Rails Foundation and lead engineer at Circle. We had a fantastic chat about all things Ruby on Rails, but especially the underappreciated art (and science!) of writing documentation.

In this episode of Ruby Rogues, Charles Max Wood and Ayush Nwatia welcome back guest Stephen Margheim to dive deeper into the evolving world of SQLite. Stephen explains that with Rails 8, SQLite has reached a major milestone: it now supports a fully production-ready, server-driven web application experience with no compromises. He walks us through the big improvements, like better transaction handling and SQLite’s integration with Rails, which now supports background jobs, caching, and WebSocket messaging—all powered by SQLite without additional configuration. These enhancements mean that deploying a Rails app backed entirely by SQLite is not only possible—it’s efficient, stable, and simple.

In this episode, David Henner, a member of the Zendesk Ruby scaling team, talks about his experience for RailsWorld. He emphasizes observability as a key, yet often overlooked, area for improving Rails app performance, suggesting cost-effective methods for toggling observability layers. The conversation also explores the complexity of database index management at scale, introducing the concept of invisible indices as a safe way to test performance impacts. David explains how Zendesk manages thousands of queries and plans to offload many to Elasticsearch for efficiency.

In this episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast, we dive deep into the world of Hotwire Native with our special guest, Joe Masilotti. Hosted by Charles Max Wood, along with panelist Ayush Nwatiya, we explore the evolution from Turbo Native to Hotwire Native and the exciting new features and improvements that come with this transition. Joe shares insights from his journey of writing "The Rails and Hotwire Codex" and collaborates with Pragmatic Bookshelf to make the integration of web and mobile technologies more seamless for Ruby on Rails developers. Whether you're considering mobile applications for your Rails projects or pondering the benefits of working with a publisher versus self-publishing, this episode is packed with valuable advice and motivation. Tune in to learn about the intricacies of launching mobile apps with Hotwire Native and gain behind-the-scenes knowledge from Joe's experience as an author and developer in this ever-evolving tech landscape. Don't miss out on this compelling discussion that bridges the gap between Rails and mobile app development!

In this episode of Top End Devs, we dive deep into the realm of security within the Rails ecosystem with our guest, Greg Molnar. Known for his expertise in this field, Greg joins our panelists Valentino Stoll and host Charles Max Wood to unravel the intricacies of security measures and updates in Rails 8 and 7.2. From exploring built-in features like rate limiting, authentication generators, and parameter filtering to discussing the importance of tools like dependabot and Brakeman.

Welcome back to another episode of the Top End Devs podcast! Today, we have an exciting lineup featuring our host Charles Max Wood and special guests Robbie Russell from Planet Argon, along with panelists Ayush Nawatia and Valentino Stoll. This episode dives deep into the insights from the latest Ruby community survey conducted by Robbie Russell.

In this episode of Top End Devs, host David Camira is joined by panelists Luke Stutters and John Epperson, along with special guest Jesse Spivak, a senior engineer at Ibotta. Jesse shares his experiences and insights from a challenging project at Ibotta, where he navigated through four critical mistakes. These included choosing the wrong technology, siloing work, falling into premature optimization, and making too many changes at once. Jesse explains how these mistakes jeopardized the project but ultimately led to valuable learning experiences.

In this episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast, we dive deep into the world of Hotwire Native with our special guest, Joe Masilotti. Hosted by Charles Max Wood, along with panelist Ayush Nwatiya, we explore the evolution from Turbo Native to Hotwire Native and the exciting new features and improvements that come with this transition. Joe shares insights from his journey of writing "The Rails and Hotwire Codex" and collaborates with Pragmatic Bookshelf to make the integration of web and mobile technologies more seamless for Ruby on Rails developers.

Ivan Nemytchenko is a freelancer. He's a speaker and conference organizer. Ivan spoke at RailsConf about abstract object-oriented programming ideas and how they can be expressed with pictures. The discussion goes into learning processes and how to create visual representations that help people understand Ruby, Rails, or other concepts.

Kyle d'Oliveira (Clio) shares his survival tips for dealing with tens of thousands of commits, massive migrations and the very limits of databases. We discuss the lessons learned from Rails megaprojects and how to use these tips in your own projects to reduce technical debt and tools to keep your monolith majestic when the code won't stop coming.

In this episode, Charles and Valentino dive into the complexities of software design decisions with the esteemed guest, Uncle Bob Martin. They explore the pivotal question: How do you evaluate frameworks and dependencies in your projects? Uncle Bob shares his seasoned perspective on choosing frameworks based on an application's long-term goals and complexity, emphasizing the importance of thoughtful decision-making over defaulting to popular solutions. Together, they delve into the nuances of evaluating framework capabilities, testing with small demo applications, and considering AI's potential in refining design decisions.

Different doesn’t need to be worse. Dmitry Tsepelev tells us how to make the most of using GraphQL with Rails, the advantages over REST-based API queries and best practices for security and schemas.

In this episode of Ruby Rogues, we talk with Ufuk about how Shopify made the transition to using Sorbet and about the benefits they felt they received from implementing it. Ufuk also reveals a little bit about how Shopify transitioned to fully remote and about how that will be the default moving forward.

In this episode of Ruby Rogues, Chelsea Troy teaches us to hone our debugging skills to a razor-sharp edge. We learn how to actively improve debugging skills, train troubleshooting instincts and practical strategies for tackling brain-bending bugs.

This week, our host Charles Max Wood sits down with co-host Valentino Stoll to dive deep into the cutting-edge tools and strategies in AI development and integration. Valentino shares his go-to resources, including Langchain and Rails plug-ins like RAIX and Ray, to enhance applications with AI. They discuss the nuances of agent-based systems, Justin Bowen’s frameworks, and AI engines from industry leaders like Alex Rudolph and Toby Lukett.