A handful of things that caught my attention this week.
1. Spinel
Matz has been busy with Spinel, a self-hosting Ahead-of-Time compiler for Ruby that translates source code into standalone native executables (not to be confused with Spinel, the cooperative building tools like rv). It’s achieving some impressive performance gains – around 11.6x over CRuby – by performing whole-program type inference and generating optimised C code. To get there, it sticks to a “metaprogramming-free” subset of Ruby. Sam Ruby has a couple of excellent posts exploring this “moment” where both Spinel and his tooling called Roundhouse have emerged, both converging on this same subset. It’s a fascinating look at how the maturity of the Prism parser and AI-assisted engineering are lowering the bar for this kind of work.
2. Migflow
Migflow is a new Rails engine that adds a bit of “migration intelligence” to your development workflow. It provides a dashboard with a visual timeline of your migrations and schema diffs, but the real value is in the audit warnings. It’s designed to help teams catch potential downtime or performance risks from database changes before they hit production, which is always a welcome addition to any serious project.
It feels like a natural companion to some of the other database tools I’ve mentioned recently. While PgHero and MySQLGenius give you that high-level dashboard for index health and query performance, and pg_reports helps you bridge the gap between slow queries and your IDE (with a bit of AI help), Migflow focuses specifically on the lifecycle of your schema changes. Definitely another tool worth having in your toolbox, and also reminds me I owe readers a summary of my testing with PgHero and pg_reports.
3. DragonRuby’s Seventh Year
DragonRuby is celebrating its seventh anniversary, and it’s quite a milestone for an engine that’s managed to stay so stable, while continuously adding new features and performance tweaks, is no small feat. They’re looking ahead to an SDL3 upgrade that’ll bring things like cross-platform shaders and raw geometry rendering.
DragonRuby was free for a couple of days around this anniversary, but unfortunately that has now ended. However, it will be available again for free at the start of the Ancient & Nameless & Fun & Stupid Jam, which starts in just over three weeks.
I’ve said this before, but the community on Discord is friendly, supportive and all around amazing.
(Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with DragonRuby, but I am a host of the game Ancient & Nameless & Fun & Stupid Jam)
4. Rails Survey 2026
Planet Argon has launched the 2026 edition of their biennial Ruby on Rails Community Survey. It’s the ninth time they’ve done this, and it’s a great way to get a pulse on the ecosystem. This year, they’re specifically looking at things like gem optimisation and, unsurprisingly, how AI tools are being integrated into our daily Rails workflows. If you’ve got a few minutes, it’s worth contributing your thoughts to the collective dataset.
5. NASA working on ‘Big Bang’ upgrade for Voyager probes
NASA is working on what they’re calling a “Big Bang” upgrade for the Voyager probes, which are now nearly five decades into their mission. They’re looking to swap out powered devices for lower-power alternatives to squeeze every last bit of life out of the probes. After a recent power glitch on Voyager 1, the hope is that this will allow them to restart the Low-energy Charged Particles instrument and keep the data flowing from interstellar space for just a bit longer.
To me, this is just peak engineering. They’re updating software originally written half a century ago to run on hardware that’s just as old, all while the probe is sitting roughly 25 billion kilometres (around 16 billion miles) away. At that distance, radio signals take nearly a day to travel one way ‒ so you’re looking at a round-trip time of upwards of 46 hours for any command you send. The patience and precision required to debug something across a two-day feedback loop is honestly hard to wrap my head around. I consider my tests too slow if running a single test file takes more than about two seconds.
6. #ShareGoodNewsToo
Many of the items in this newsletter come from links posted on my Mastodon feed. I’ve recently started following the #ShareGoodNewsToo hashtag, which breaks up the tech-related and doom-related content in my feed nicely. It’s heartening to see more people adopting the hashtag; it feels like it’s starting to build some real momentum and making the fediverse a slightly brighter place to hang out. If you take a look at the tag, you’ll see quite a few posts from Prof. Ada Palmer, whom I spoke about previously. It’s a nice change of pace from the usual noise.