Advent of Ruby Changelog: Week 2

A diary of preparing Ruby 3.3's annotated changelog.

Every year since 2018, I write the annotated Ruby Changelog. This year I want to cover it in a day-by-day diary to make it a bit more visible—and to incentivize for the regular work.

Here is Week 2 of it!

Quoting from the 14th day (which is today):

[…] Two weeks of working on the changelog. This means something between 25 and 35 hours (~1.5-2 hours on a workday, more on the weekends) of time.

So, what was done during these two weeks?

• an amount of changelog texts no more than my regular blogpost (and much rougher);

• a lot of code studying, ticket reading, and head scratching;

• three documentation PRs:

  • a small cosmetic one just handling the rendering glitches;

  • a bigger (yet still pretty small) one with adjustment of phrasing and examples for several new methods;

  • and one more specific to WeakMap and WeakkeyMap;

• A couple of tickets:

  • One with a weird small (but very old) bug/inconsistency, for later discussions;

  • And another one about equally small inconsistency in the newly-introduced Dir methods, that was promptly fixed by Jeremy Evans (and, truth be told, probably would’ve been fixed anyway);

• A growing list of TODOs to eventually follow upon (most probably not before the release), related to small better docs and (mostly) small core API changes for more consistency;

• …definitely not enough sleep.

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So, here goes (each day is a link):

• Day 8, where new features are landing in Ruby’s NEWS.md, while I am working on a PR to fix small documentation problems in Ruby’s docs;

• Day 9, where I prepare one more documentation-fixing PR and notice some changes are still missing from NEWS.md;

• Day 10, where I dive head-first into finally writing a big part of the changelog, but also discover some small new inconsistencies to report, possible language improvements to pursue, and philosophical problems to ponder on;

• Day 11, where I try to proceed, but it entangled into some lack of understanding, old surprising behaviors, and historical discussions (and also meet my younger self accidentally);

• Day 12, where I recompile Ruby and investigate the new (if not yet fully materialized) possibilities that would be opened with the introduction of it anonymous block argument next year;

• Day 13, where I am almost done with the first, quick-and-rough part of the changelog;

• Day 14, where I am summarizing what was done and writing this blog post.

To be continued…

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A weekly postcard from Ukraine

Please read this too. This is your weekly mid-text reminder that I am a living person from Ukraine, and a bit of useful related information.

One news item. Like the last winter, Russia started to target a critical infrastructure of Ukraine. This week, there were several multi-missile attacks (listen to one of them here to imagine what it is to live in Kyiv right now—not even mentioning the cities that are closer to the front lines).

One piece of context. It is probably a well-known fact, but worth reminding nevertheless, due to the season: a famous “Carol of the Bells” melody was written by Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovich. What happened to him later? Take a guess.

One fundraiser. Ada Wordsworth runs a charity helping my home region of Kharkiv and does a lot of valuable humanitarian work. Currently, she gathers funds through PayPal to provide the necessary equipment to her friend, who just joined the Ukrainian army. Oh, and also read her awesome article for The Telegraph about the best English-language books of 2023 written by Ukrainians and about Ukraine.

One plea. This week, I ask Rubyists from the US to call your representative. It is vital.