With the year coming to a close, it felt like a good time to look back over the highlights of the past twelve months in the Ruby space.

As such, here's a list (compiled using data from the Ruby Weekly newsletter) that represents what Rubyists were interested in this year.

The Ruby highlights of 2019:

The Ruby Style Guide

This truly one-stop-shop for how to write Ruby code got a facelift back in June. It's a great resource that can be easily read and maintained by other Rubyists.

Using Ruby in 2019

Jason Charnes shared a few reasons to be excited about being a Rubyist in 2019, the perfect tonic for fighting off the yearly "Ruby is Dead" posts. 😅

Six Great Ruby Gems Most People Haven’t Heard About

Back in September Jesus Castello shared this list of great Ruby gems that's worth digging into.

Changes You Might Have Missed Coming in Ruby 2.7

With Ruby 2.7 just around the corner, this article from Sebastian Sogamoso is a timely reminder of what the update has in store — things like Module#const_source_location , FrozenError#receiver and more.

Three ActiveRecord mistakes that slow down Rails apps: Count, Where & Present

Popular advice that you will no doubt use from someone (Nate Berkopec) who literally wrote a book on Rails performance.

Rails 6 unnoticed features

Alexandre Ferraille outlined the 'unnoticed' changes that were on the then-horizon for Rails 6 back in February, including host whitelisting, migration features, and tons of time and date syntactical sugar. This video from Drifting Ruby also highlights what was new, in a tight well-produced video.

Magic Comments in Ruby

You’ve likely seen (and even used) ‘magic’ comments, but you probably don’t know all of them - this post from the summer is a solid overview of magic comments and the precedence rules applied to them.

A Guide to Function Composition in Ruby

Paul Mucur took us on a tour of some of the interesting new techniques brought about by the << and >> function composition operators introduced in Ruby 2.6.

First Impressions of Ruby 2.7's Pattern Matching

This 'sneak peek' from Brandon Weaver runs through what pattern matching will look like in Ruby 2.7. It's essentially an extension to case using in instead of when .

10 New Things in Active Record (in Rails 6)

A neat roundup from November that covers things like rails db:prepare , database switching, #annotate , #touch_all and implicit ordering by a specific column (which is nicer than using a default scope).