What's New in Ruby 4.0 — It’s exactly a week till Ruby 4.0 is expected to land (on Christmas Day!) and while the official release notes will be the eventual ‘go to’ for discovering everything that’s new, Nithin has done a good job of rounding up the headline changes here.
Nithin Bekal
CERN Chooses TimescaleDB to Power Its Next-Gen Archiver — TimescaleDB brings PostgreSQL performance to a new level at CERN: faster writes, huge compression gains, and 10–40x faster queries. See why it’s becoming the new standard for historical data across 500+ control systems.
Tiger Data
⚡️ IN BRIEF:
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Ruby 3.4.8 has been released with a large number of minor bug fixes.
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🏆 Marco Roth has been chosen as this year's Rails Luminary, not least for his epic work on Herb and ReActionView.
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RubyGems/Bundler 4.0.2 has been released with a new
-jflag to specify the number of concurrent jobs that can run when building native extensions. -
Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson is particularly excited that object allocations will get faster in Ruby 4.0.
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Amanda Perino shares a quick update on Rails World 2026 – it's taking place in Austin, Texas next September 23-24.
Why Are exec and run So Confusing? — André is working on the rv Ruby version manager and runner and explains the role of exec and run commands in rv as well as Bundler, npm, and Cargo – all of which have similar concepts but with slightly different takes.
André Arko
Kimurai 2.0: A Ruby Web Scraping Framework — A Capybara and Nokogiri based scraper that can use headless Chromium or Firefox to support JavaScript-rendered sites. It’s been many years without a release, but v2.0 brings things up to Ruby 3.x standards and adds Selenium Manager support.
Victor Afanasev
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Minitest 6.0 – This has only just dropped and is a significant release we'll cover in the next issue.
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StoreModel v4.4 – Wrap JSON-backed columns with ActiveModel-like classes.
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twilio-ruby 7.9.0 – Communicate with the Twilio API and generate TwiML.
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Kamal v2.10 – Deploy web apps anywhere with containerization.
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telegram-bot-ruby v2.5.0 – Ruby wrapper for Telegram's Bot API.
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Sidekiq 8.1 – The long-standing background processing system.
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Capistrano v3.20 – The deployment automation framework.
🏆 The Top 5 Ruby Videos of 2025
As judged by reader engagement across the year – not purely by views!
▶ 1. Why to Use Jupyter Notebooks with Ruby — There have been a few attempts at bringing ‘notebook’ style programming, commonly associated with Python, to Ruby (e.g. IRuby) but Landon does a good job of explaining the why and the benefits here.
Landon Gray
▶ 5. An Interview with Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto — Ruby’s creator Matz was interviewed about Ruby, his work-life balance, and experiences being a father. It’s not highly technical, but a good interview if you want to get a more rounded view of Matz and how he’s thinking about Ruby’s future.
Baltic Ruby
Want more? rubyevents.org is exactly what you need. It's an index covering over 8,000 talks from almost 700 events; many of them with videos. Luckily, there's a search feature, too, so you can just look for videos about Ractors or fibers, say.
🎄 This is the final issue of the year - in theory. We might drop a random issue to celebrate the Ruby 4.0 launch, but our next scheduled issue is on Thursday, January 8. If we don't see you again before then, we hope you have a happy holiday season!