This week at RubyConf I learned about two new tools.

Karafka

Karafka is a framework used to simplify Apache Kafka based Ruby applications development. It looks like a Rails-like abstraction to remove some of the boilerplate and decisions around how to structure a Kafka application. I don’t know if it’s ready for production, but worth keeping an eye on it.

MiniTest is not “Just Ruby”, it is “Just Rails”

Victor Shepelev writes his opinion about RSpec and MiniTest and how the differ. I don’t subscribe to all the author’s opinions or conclusions, but I do prefer RSpec and I have never found the “It’s just Ruby” argument for MiniTest very convincing. If anything, I find that having a distinct shape, structure and feel for test is a net positive. It promotes shifting from “This is the part that specifies behavior” to “This is the part that implements behavior” in a cleaner way.

Be Kind

Being a good and kind person pays dividends. I love this story. You should read it.

xargs is one of my go-to tools in Unix. It reads lines from stdin and executes another command with each line as an argument. It’s very useful to glue commands together.

Microservices – Please, don’t

Sean Kelly writes a cautionary post about microservices, organized into debunking 5 fallacies that he has encountered about microservices: They keep the code cleaner, they are easy, they are faster, they are simple for engineers and, they scale better.

The science of encryption: prime numbers and mod n arithmetic

While looking into Apache Milagro, I found a link to this short paper on the math behind public-key cryptography. It’s a great introduction, or refresher, to the mathematics that makes the secure web work. The paper itself has no author information, but the URL suggests that it written by Kathryn Mann at the University of California at Berkley.

Concurrency in Ruby 3 with Guilds

Olivier Lacan has a great explanation of Koichi Sasada recent proposal for bringing better parallelism to Ruby 3. The proposal is to introduce a new abstraction, called Guilds that is implemented in terms of existing Threads and Fibers, but can actually execute in parallel, because they have stronger guarantees around accessing shared state. In particular, guilds won’t be able to access objects in other guilds, without explicitly transferring them via channels. It’s exciting to think about Ruby’s performance not being bound by the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL).

Mozilla is considering taking action against two Certificate Authorities, WoSign and StartCom after an investigation into improper behavior, including not reporting that the WoSign bought StartCom outright.