The RailsConf 2016 website is up! This year, we will be gathering in Kansas City from May 4 to May 6. If you would like to submit a talk, the call for proposals (CFP) is open from now until Jan 15!

This week we have seen commits from 29 different contributors in the Rails repository, including 6 new faces!

When you use a non-frozen (i.e. mutable) string as a Hash key, Ruby would have to duplicate and freeze it in order to guarantee a stable hash key.

This is usually fine, but when that string is used to build many different hashes, the work adds up. Fortunately, we can simply freeze it upfront to avoid the repeated work.

byebug 7.0 has recently been released with some major performance improvements. (See this pull request for details.) If you are using byebug for debugging, you might want to upgrade!

Did you know that Enumerable#{inject,reduce} can take a symbol as its argument? Apparently, this is slightly faster too! (Note: this is different from inject(&:method) which goes through Symbol#to_proc.)

Usually, you can use +some_word+ to switch to fixed-width fonts in Rails' documentation. However, the parser for this rule would sometime fail in some more complex cases.

If you are not sure when to use which, be sure to check the guidelines, or just check the output locally by running rake rdoc.