Powerful Rails Features You Might Not Know

Have you ever wondered what Rails features exist but you’ve never learned? We’re going to look at a bunch of things that you might not realize Rails can do and upcoming features in Rails 7.1. You’ll leave this talk with new tools in your Rails toolbox to build even better applications.

An unbelievable amount of features are packed into Rails making it one of the most powerful web frameworks you can use. So let’s take a look at some little known, underused, and new things in Rails 7.

A few of the topics we’ll cover:

• ActiveRecord features like “excluding”, strict_loading, virtual columns, with_options, attr_readonly, etc
• ActiveStorage named variants
• ActionText embedding any database record
• Saving ActionMailbox inbound emails in ActionText
• Routing constraints like the “(un)authenticated” helpers in Devise
• Overriding generator templates like scaffolds to add your own features
• Turbo Native authentication with your Rails backend
• ActiveSupport features like truncate_words
• Rails 7.1’s new features: authentication, normalizes, logging background enqueue callers, and more.

It’s hard to remember all the features in and sometimes you just need a reminder and a sneak peak about the exciting new features in Rails that you can use to refactor and improve your Rails applications.

This is a talk I’d love to attend as a Rails developer with over 10 years of experience but will be just as useful for someone brand new to Rails.

I publish little tips like this regularly on Twitter and in screencasts. They always get a good response so I imagine this would make an excellent talk to have all these tips packed into one single place. You’re almost guaranteed to walk away learning something new no matter what your experience level is.