These last twelve months have seen both a minor (7.2) and a major (8.0) Rails release. Rails 8 released at Toronto Rails World included SolidCache and SolidQueue as well as an improved Kamal 2 proxy, making production deployments simpler than ever before. However, though Rails 8 was dubbed “from Hello World to IPO” Ruby’s developer mindshare has continued to slip as major corporate sponsors like GitHub and Shopify have outgrown and are diversifying away from their core monoliths. GitHub for a while now has adopted Kuberbetes with Go and Java and Shopify has adopted Remix for the front end and Node for CLI tools.
Outside the Rails ecosystem much attention has focused on ‘agentic’ AI, using MCP that can search and summarize up to date web content before taking control of an enabled editor and creating or modifying source files. Codeium became WindSurf, scooped up by OpenAI for $3bn before Microsoft open sourced GitHub Copilot Chat. Can Claude make more sense of outdated responses on a (dying) Stack Overflow than a human? Not yet. ‘Vibe coding` too often results in ‘AI slop’ and vulnerabilities like ‘slopsquatting’. Nonetheless AI bots, both text and voice based, are convenient, mostly useful, and increasingly ubiquitous.
At my employer last year’s database upgrades have opened the door to dozens more payments related data model improvements. We also integrated with Facebook Commerce and added support for multiple fulfillment locations. Adoption of Rack 3 forced final abandonment of Unicorn for Puma which in turn has led us to evaluate AppSignal.