Building Ruby Head for your Rails App

This talk by Maple Ong from Gusto explores the concept of "Ruby Head" – the bleeding edge of Ruby development – and advocates for running it within Rails application tests and CI pipelines. The presentation covers the benefits of a gradual Ruby upgrade strategy, such as reduced debugging time and proactive identification of issues, contrasted with the risks of large, infrequent upgrades. It details how to build Ruby Head using Docker, its integration with CI tools like Buildkite, and introduces jemalloc as a memory allocation library that can further optimize performance, especially in multi-threaded applications. The talk encourages active participation in the evolution of Ruby and Rails by contributing feedback and testing new versions.