The Best Ruby Blogs
Ruby is a popular language used for building full-stack and backend web applications, so I set out to find the 22 best Ruby blogs publishing today. Developers who want to keep up with Ruby’s new features, frameworks, and best practices should keep up with the content they find most helpful.
To build this list, I researched, analyzed, and read articles by several authors on each blog to get an idea of their standards, composition, insight, simplicity, and eloquence. I also looked at feedback from developers to figure out which blogs are the most useful to the community.
Here are the top 22 Ruby blogs and resources I found:
1. Ruby Weekly
Ruby Weekly is a newsletter that features the latest news and trends on Ruby. Ruby Weekly is very comprehensible and has excellent feedback from the developer community. On the home page, there is a preview of the latest issue to enable you to get an overview of the content. A new issue is published weekly and includes several well-written and well-referenced articles.
- Writing Quality - 5
- Consistency - 5
- Longevity - 5
- Technical Depth - 5
- Broad Usefulness - 5
Overall Score: 5.0
2. The Official Rails Blog
For updates about the latest features and detailed knowledge of Ruby on Rails, the official blog is highly recommended. The blog includes everything you need to build Rails applications and keep up with the newest changes to the framework. It has a friendly community, and each article on the blog is written precisely. A section called “This week in Rails” includes effective guidelines and instructions from developers. The style and ideas are simple easy for any reader - beginner or advanced - to understand.
- Writing Quality - 5
- Consistency -4
- Longevity - 5
- Technical Depth - 5
- Broad Usefulness - 5
Overall Score: 4.8
3. Everyday Rails
Everyday Rails contains a lot of useful tips, especially if you are just starting out as a Ruby developer. The articles on the blog are practically applicable, and most posts are about getting a better understanding of why the plugins, gems, and other Ruby parts do what they do. The author’s explanation is professional and offers a direct implementation guide.
- Writing Quality - 5
- Consistency - 4
- Longevity - 4
- Technical Depth - 5
- Broad Usefulness - 5
Overall Score: 4.6
4. RubyFlow
RubyFlow is a popular Ruby blog that aggregates technical posts from a variety of well-known sources. It includes language updates, tutorial guides, and productivity tips. Content shared on RubyFlow is clearly expressed for newbies and experienced Ruby developers alike.
- Writing Quality - 5
- Consistency - 4
- Longevity - 4
- Technical Depth - 5
- Broad Usefulness - 5
Overall Score: 4.6
5. Drifting Ruby
Drifting Ruby is a compilation of documentation, tutorials, and screencasts for Ruby developers. It provides tutorials for all levels ranging from beginner to expert. Most topics covered are drafted out step-by-step with helpful real-world examples, and you can subscribe on the homepage to get the weekly posts delivered to your inbox. The topics can also be filtered to enable you to find the exact kind of content you are looking for.
- Writing Quality - 5
- Consistency - 4
- Longevity - 4
- Technical Depth - 5
- Broad Usefulness - 5
Overall Score: 4.6
6. Awesome Ruby
Awesome Ruby is a curated list of Ruby resources and packages that can help you with testing, package management, security, authentication, and more. There are a lot of libraries here, and they use tags to help organize all of them.
- Writing Quality - 5
- Consistency - 5
- Longevity - 4
- Technical Depth - 5
- Broad Usefulness - 3
Overall Score: 4.4
7. Arkency Blog
Arkency is a ruby blog that has published articles from various authors since 2012. The content ranges from beginner to advanced; however, the quality of writing varies from author to author. The blog’s structure is a little confusing, and it isn’t the most consistently updated, but it’s a great resource overall.
- Writing Quality - 4
- Consistency - 3
- Longevity - 5
- Technical Depth - 5
- Broad Usefulness - 4
Overall Score: 4.2
8. Reddit’s r/ruby
Reddit for Rubyists is the subreddit for tutorials and updates about Ruby. It has a large community of 68,000 people who are ready to help you answer your questions about the language or any frameworks. While the content quality varies, most posts that are upvoted to the front page are quite useful.
- Writing Quality - 4
- Consistency - 3
- Longevity - 4
- Technical Depth - 5
- Broad Usefulness - 5
Overall Score: 4.2
9. BigBinary
BigBinary is an agency blog that details major updates to Ruby, Rails, and several related topics. Most of the articles and tutorials are based on open-source development for Ruby, but there is a mix of front-end topics as well. Most of the time, a new post is published once a month and includes images, code samples, and links to improve your understanding.
- Writing Quality - 4
- Consistency - 2
- Longevity - 4
- Technical Depth - 5
- Broad Usefulness - 5
Overall Score: 4.0
10. Stackify Blog
In addition to Ruby news and tutorials, Stackify offers posts on a variety of topics for web developers. While most of the topics revolve around error tracking, application logs, and performance, the wide range of writers means wide-ranging quality differences between each piece. There’s also not a great way to filter by Ruby topics alone, so you’ll have to sift through a lot of content if you’re focusing on Ruby.
- Writing Quality - 4
- Consistency - 2
- Longevity - 4
- Technical Depth - 5
- Broad Usefulness - 5
Overall Score: 4.0
11. Virteous Code
Virtuous Code is a Ruby blog that was started by Avdi Grimm. Most of the blog content is about team growth and building Ruby software, including announcements, code fragments, resources, and tutorials. Avdi updates the blog quite frequently and goes into considerable technical detail when required.
- Writing Quality - 2
- Consistency - 4
- Longevity - 4
- Technical Depth - 5
- Broad Usefulness - 5
Overall Score: 4.0
12. Nopio
The Nopio blog explains Ruby concepts as well as business and organizational topics. Their blog espouses their team’s high standards of quality and transparency.
- Writing Quality - 2
- Consistency - 1
- Longevity - 4
- Technical Depth - 5
- Broad Usefulness - 5
Overall Score: 3.8
13. Railsware Blog
Railsware is another web development agency whose blog includes useful tips on Ruby, management, design, and culture. Publications on Ruby are scarce as articles are only published every couple of months, but they’re well-written when they come.
- Writing Quality - 3
- Consistency - 3
- Longevity - 4
- Technical Depth - 4
- Broad Usefulness - 5
Overall Score: 3.8
14. Ruby Tapas
Ruby Tapas is another resource from Avdi Grimm aimed at intermediate Ruby developers who want to advance to the next level of mastery. New screencasts are released twice a week and introduce a wide variety of intermediate to advanced techniques, including object-oriented design principles, testing practices, refactoring skills, and software architecture. The content is well-organized and easy to follow.
- Writing Quality - 4
- Consistency - 3
- Longevity - 3
- Technical Depth - 4
- Broad Usefulness - 5
Overall Score: 3.8
15. Akita on Rails
Akita on Rails was created by Fabio Akita in 2006 and includes the best Portuguese content for Ruby developers. There are a variety of blog posts for beginner, intermediate, and advanced Ruby developers. Some articles are based on Ruby gems, and most of the posts include helpful details like GIFs and code snippets.
- Writing Quality - 3
- Consistency - 3
- Longevity - 4
- Technical Depth - 4
- Broad Usefulness - 4
Overall Score: 3.6
16. Railwaymen
Railwaymen features posts on Ruby, Rails, and related development topics. Articles are thoroughly researched and written, but the blog’s publishing frequency is only occasional.
- Writing Quality - 2
- Consistency - 3
- Longevity - 3
- Technical Depth - 4
- Broad Usefulness - 5
Overall Score: 3.4
17. Karol Galanciak
Karol is a distributed systems architect and the founder of the Karol Galanciak blog. Most of the articles published on the blog relate to Ruby with a healthy dose of other topics, including microservices, performance optimizations, Kafka, RabbitMQ, and event-driven systems. The tutorials are detailed, and the code snippets are easy to follow. New posts are published once every two months, but they cannot be filtered on the blog, so reading older content can be difficult.
- Writing Quality - 2
- Consistency - 3
- Longevity - 3
- Technical Depth - 5
- Broad Usefulness - 4
Overall Score: 3.4
18. Hix on Rails
Hix on Rails is a comprehensive blog, including Ruby tutorials and guides for all skill levels. Most of the recently published tutorials are based on integrating Ruby with DevOps tools like Github and CircleCI.
- Writing Quality - 3
- Consistency - 3
- Longevity - 3
- Technical Depth - 3
- Broad Usefulness - 3
Overall Score: 3.0
19. SCHNEEMS
The Schneems blog was founded by Richard Schneeman. It focuses on Ruby performance and building open-source applications. New posts are released every month, and while technically detailed, some of the posts are not necessarily friendly to Ruby beginners. Regardless, the blog is worth reading.
- Writing Quality - 3
- Consistency - 3
- Longevity - 3
- Technical Depth - 3
- Broad Usefulness - 3
Overall Score: 3.0
20. RubyGuides
Jesus Castello founded RubyGuides, and he is the author of most of the articles. The mission of RubyGuides is to help you as possible improve your Ruby skills so that you can write better code and be proud of your work. Articles include topics like Ruby’s working directories, helper methods, hash methods, and scaffolding. The content is useful for intermediate and advanced Ruby developers, and Castello does a good job covering complex programming topics in plain English.
- Writing Quality - 2
- Consistency - 4
- Longevity - 1
- Technical Depth - 4
- Broad Usefulness - 4
Overall Score: 3.0
21. Andy Croll
Andy Croll is an author, Rubyist, and speaker who writes about Ruby techniques with a why? and a how? every two weeks. Despite being a personal blog, it’s worth following and offers a useful content stricture.
- Writing Quality - 3
- Consistency - 2
- Longevity - 3
- Technical Depth - 3
- Broad Usefulness - 3
Overall Score: 2.8
22. Martin Fowler
Martin Fowler’s blog is focused on architecture and software development in a wide range of languages. Posts from other authors are included, so while many posts relate to Ruby, others are more focused on general software development best practices. Posts are made inconsistently, sometimes once in a month, sometimes once in two months.
- Writing Quality - 4
- Consistency - 2
- Longevity - 3
- Technical Depth - 3
- Broad Usefulness - 2
Overall Score: 2.8
This concludes my quest to evaluate, rate, and rank the best Ruby blogs and resources in 2020. If you know another blog I should consider for this list, click here to submit it.
If you’ve enjoyed this, don’t miss our other Best Technical Blogs lists.
By Tola Ore-Aruwaji
Tola is an open-source contributor at Chaoss and a technical writer for Draft.dev.
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