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Ruby 3.2, released in December 2022, introduced the Data class. A built-in, immutable value object for Rubyists who want simple, safe, and fast data structures without the boilerplate of custom classes or Structs. If you haven’t upgraded to Ruby 3.2 or later, you’re missing out on this powerful feature!

The Roadmap to Upgrade Rails opens a new window is FastRuby.io’s discovery product that helps teams plan and execute their Rails upgrade projects.

We’re happy to introduce an Automated Version of the Roadmap, powered by an AI agent, available completely for free!

Check it out on the Automated Roadmap to Upgrade Rails opens a new window page and keep reading to learn more about how it works.

At FastRuby.io, we spend our days deep in Rails codebases, upgrading, refactoring, and occasionally wondering, “Wait… is this method from Ruby or Rails?”.

Now, we’re turning that moment of confusion into a game. We’re excited to introduce Is It Ruby or Rails?, a brand new Discord bot that delivers daily puzzles to challenge your Ruby knowledge and fuel a little friendly competition.

You can install it using the Discord install link opens a new window and start playing right away!

When people hear the phrase “technical debt”, they often picture broken code, outdated infrastructure, or a total rewrite waiting to happen. But in our experience at Planet Argon opens a new window , technical debt usually shows up more quietly.

It’s not a crisis. It’s a pattern.

It shows up in how long it takes to make changes, how often bugs sneak in, and how hesitant developers are to touch certain parts of the codebase. And while it rarely announces itself, it always costs something — whether in time, budget, or momentum.

In this post, we’ll highlight real-world examples of how technical debt has surfaced in Rails applications we’ve worked on. These aren’t horror stories — they’re common issues we see even in well-run projects. More importantly, we’ll share some ways teams can manage debt strategically without a massive rewrite.

At FastRuby.io opens a new window , we deeply value the Ruby and Rails communities and believe in giving back through open source contributions. We wouldn’t be where we are today if it wasn’t thanks to a lot of open source projects we use on a daily basis.

We actively use, maintain, and enhance several tools designed to empower developers and teams who want to handle Ruby and Rails upgrades themselves, especially those who might not have the budget to hire our services.

These open source projects facilitate upgrades by improving transparency, managing technical debt, and ensuring smooth transitions between Ruby and Rails versions.

Here’s an overview of each tool and how it can support your next upgrade project.

Whether you’re debugging a dependency issue, checking for an optional gem, or just curious about what’s loaded in your Ruby app, there’s a handy command that can help:

puts Gem.loaded_specs.keys.grep(/your_pattern_here/)

In this article, we will discuss what this command does, what exactly it’s checking for, and its limitations.

At FastRuby.io opens a new window , we offer specialized Rails upgrade, maintenance, and technical debt services.

Before doing an upgrade, we strongly recommend doing the Roadmap to Upgrade Rails opens a new window , a static analysis of your codebase that outlines the action plan to do the upgrade and provides time and investment estimates.

The first step in every Rails upgrade we do is addressing deprecation warnings in the current version. So recently, we set out to extract all deprecation warnings from all versions of Rails starting at Rails 2.3 to help in our static analysis of Rails applications.

Having reproducible development environments is one of the best ways to guarantee ease of application setup and code sharing in teams. Dev containers are a way to achieve this.

In this article we’ll try to give you a small introduction to what dev containers are at their core and provide a minimal example on how to set up a Rails application to use dev containers.

In this article we will present compatibility between Ruby opens a new window and Heroku opens a new window across different versions. In the process of upgrading really old applications to more modern versions of Ruby we have run into a lot of these combinations.

In Ruby, we often want to rename methods or attributes for clarity, to extend functionality and for compatibility. However, there are three different tools for this, each with its own use case and behavior: alias, alias_method and alias_attribute.

In this post we’ll go over each one of them, what they actually do and when to use them.

Founded in 2011, Valid Eval opens a new window provides a secure, SaaS-based platform that helps organizations make defensible, data-driven decisions in high-stakes situations involving many applicants, subjects, domain experts, and judges. The Denver, Colorado-based company primarily serves federal government agencies that need to evaluate complex bids before awarding contracts.

Aysan opens a new window recently wrote about accessibility testing in Rails applications opens a new window using your test suite to ensure that your application is accessible to all users.

However, you may not have a test suite in place or you may not have a Rails application, but you still want to test the accessibility of your web application, right? So, we discovered the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools opens a new window that can help you test the accessibility of your web application, regardless of the technology stack you are using.

Does this sound interesting to you? Let’s dive in!

Have you ever found yourself wondering how to best manage your database migrations in Rails? Migrations are a powerful tool for evolving your database schema, but without proper practices, they can become difficult to manage and even lead to inconsistencies between environments. In this post, we’ll cover essential strategies for keeping your migrations organized, efficient, and in sync across development, staging, and production, helping you avoid common pitfalls and maintain a clean, up-to-date database.

In earlier versions of Elasticsearch, types were a convenient way to categorically organize documents within a single index. However, types were eventually deprecated, pushing developers toward a type-less structure in Elasticsearch 7 and later versions. Recently while working on a project to migrate a Rails application from Elasticsearch 2 to OpenSearch 2, we faced the challenge of identifying a way to replicate this behavior in a way that is allowed with OpenSearch. In this blog we will discuss how types were used for document organization and how to achieve the same behavior in OpenSearch.

For developers, segmentation faults can feel like a sudden nightmare—cryptic errors that crash your application out of nowhere. This frustration is amplified when they show up in high-level languages like Ruby, where memory management is typically handled behind the scenes. Recently, while running my Ruby application, I experienced a segmentation fault caused by a gem. The crash not only halted my program but also left me facing a daunting debugging challenge. In this post, I’ll talk about how I identified the issue, debugged it, and eventually found a solution.