Last week at RailsConf in Kansas City, Terence Lee and Richard Schneeman of Heroku’s Ruby Task Force sat down with the legendary Aaron Patterson (AKA tenderlove).

Aaron has been working hard to make Ruby three times faster — a goal that Matz called Ruby 3x3. Along the way, Aaron has discovered that Ruby may face a hard decision. On one side, Ruby can continue to be the productive, general-purpose scripting language that it looks like today. But the other side of Ruby is that it’s used to run long-running processes in Rails applications, pushing it to be more performant, strongly-typed, and memory-heavy. Ruby can't prioritize both.

To find out where Aaron thinks Ruby’s going, you can...

It's been one year since Action Cable debuted at RailsConf 2015, and Sophie DeBenedetto is here to answer the question in the minds of many developers: what is it really like to implement "the highlight of Rails 5"? Sophie is a web developer and an instructor at the Flatiron School. Her first love is Ruby on Rails, although she has developed projects with and written about Rails, Ember and Phoenix.

Recent years have seen the rise of "the real-time web." Web apps we use every day rely on real-time features—the sort of features that let you see new posts magically appearing at the top of your feeds without having to lift a finger.

While we may take those features...

Rails 5 will be the easiest release ever to get running on Heroku. You can get it going in just five lines:

$ rails new myapp -d postgresql $ cd myapp $ git init . ; git add . ; git commit -m first $ heroku create $ git push heroku master 

These five lines (and a view or two) are all you need to get a Rails 5 app working on Heroku — there are no special gems you need to install, or flags you must toggle. Let's take a peek under the hood, and explore the interfaces baked right into Rails 5 that make it easy to deploy your app on any modern container-based platform.

Production Web Server as the Default

Before Rails 5, the default web server that you get when you run $ rails server is...

The asset pipeline is the slowest part of deploying a Rails app. How slow? On average, it's over 20x slower than installing dependencies via $ bundle install. Why so slow? In this article, we're going to take a look at some of the reasons the asset pipeline is slow and how we were able to get a 12x performance improvement on some apps with Sprockets version 3.3+.

The Rails asset pipeline uses the sprockets library to take your raw assets such as javascript or Sass files and pre-build minified, compressed assets that are ready to be served by a production web service. The process is inherently slow. For example, compiling Sass file to CSS requires reading the file in, which...

Rails 5 has been brewing for more than a year. To take advantage of new features, and stay on the supported path, you'll need to upgrade. In this post, we'll look at the upgrade process for a production Rails app, codetriage.com. The codebase is open source so you can follow along. Special thanks to Prathamesh for his help with this blog post.

How Stable is the Beta?

In Rails a beta means the API is not yet stable, and features will come and go. A Release Candidate (RC) means no new features; the API is considered stable, and RCs will continue to be released until all reported regressions are resolved.

Should you run your production app on the beta? There is value in getting a...