💡 This is an active moment for Ruby TUIs with Marco Roth's efforts in bringing Charm's powerful TUI tooling from the Go world into Ruby too.
Considering GoodJob, Solid Queue, Sidekiq, and Active Job in 2026 — The Ruby ecosystem is lucky to have many options for running background jobs. Here, Ben, the maintainer of GoodJob, shares his genuine thoughts on choosing between the options, built upon his years of Rails experience. He finds merits in each option, depending on the specific scenario.
Ben Sheldon
⚡️ IN BRIEF:
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📕 The 6th edition of Programming Ruby is now in beta. The Pickaxe book, as it is commonly known, is set for final publication in March and covers Ruby 4.0 in depth.
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Saroj Maharjan, one of the coordinators of Ruby's participation in Google Summer of Code, wrote in asking us to share the news that the Ruby GSoC team is looking for ideas for projects across the Ruby ecosystem that could join in and accept contributions from GSoC 2026 participants.
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Eileen Uchitelle ran into an odd bug in Bundler 4.0.1 when using gems across multiple sources. The fix, in Bundler 4.0.4, may have caused another related issue, though. One to keep an eye out for.
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🇦🇹 RubyConf AT is taking place in Vienna, Austria this May 29-31. Ticket sales open tomorrow.
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🤖 RubyLLM 1.11.0 – Unified API for working with AI models and services. Say hello to xAI/Grok in this version.
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Sidekiq::Throttled v2.1.0 – Concurrency and rate-limit throttling for Sidekiq. Changelog.
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Rage 1.20.0 – Fast web framework for API-first apps that's compatible with Rails.
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Shoryuken 7.0 – Efficient thread-based message processor for Amazon SQS.
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🎨 Color 2.2 – RGB, CMYK, HSL, and other color space manipulation library.
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Listen v3.10 – Listens to file modifications and notifies you about changes.
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🤖 MCP Ruby SDK v0.6 – Official Ruby SDK for the Model Context Protocol.
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resque-scheduler v5.0.0 – Job scheduling system built on top of Resque.
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Byebug v13.0 – Long-standing feature-rich debugger for Ruby.
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Phlex 2.4.0 – Build object-oriented web views in pure Ruby.
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Faker v3.6.0 – Library for generating realistic fake data.
📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem
Some other interesting stories in the broader landscape:
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🤖 Whether you agree or not, Ryan Dahl, the original creator of both Node.js and Deno, drew much attention with a provocative post on X where he shared a thought on the changing role of software engineers in an agentic world, namely: "the era of humans writing code is over." Meanwhile, though, DHH says AI isn't ready to replace junior developers yet.
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🐘 If you're a Postgres user, you might enjoy this article on alternatives to 'soft deleting' where rather than use a boolean or datetime flag, you could use a trigger to move a row to an archive table or capture deleted rows from the WAL for archival.
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🔎 The VS Code team has explained how they implemented a new, fast client-side docs search system for the VS Code site using WebAssembly. You can use their docfind engine yourself too, and there's a live demo showing off its speed on an index of 50,000 articles.
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A fun read about the techniques involved in creating an ASCII text renderer for graphics.