• surrealist is a new gem in Ruby ecosystem for serialising Ruby objects to JSON, using nice, declarative DSL. Check it out or read introductory blog post.
• Luca Guidi, creator of Hanami framework, gave a talk at RailsClub conference (a bit ironic, I know) “Functional web with Ruby”. This is all about how to design systems, how to ease common pains using pure functions etc. He also gives a sneak peek of what will Hanami 2.0 will look like. Watch it here. I mean it, watch it.
• Have you ever written a gem containing C extension? If you liked it, good for you. I did not. However, I recently found out that there is a library, or more precisely a whole programming language, to write C extensions with Ruby-like syntax. I haven’t tried that yet, but the idea seems appealing. It’s called Rubex.
  Of course, this is not the only option to avoid writing C. You can use any other C-compatible language, such as (two options here: Helix or Ruru) or D.
• Are symbols in Ruby really necessary? We are used to them, they are everywhere in our code. But the rationale for them seems to have faded away a bit, since the introduction of strings being frozen by default. Robert Pankowecki in his blog post “Could we drop Symbols from Ruby?“ explores the idea quite thoroughly and describes what challenges lie ahead, preventing us from removing symbols altogether.
• Since Ruby Tuesday is a “Rails-free zone” it seems right to include “What Did I Learn After Going Eighteen Months Without Rails“ from Monterail, where Wojciech shares his experience in writing a web project in Ruby but without Rails. Each one of us should do the same at least once in their life.