by Hello everyone! 🎉 Today is December 19th, 2025, and you’re reading the 92nd, and final,edition of Codeminer42’s tech news report for the year. Let’s dive into the highlights of what the tech world brought us this week!
What’s new in Ruby 4.0 – by Edy Silva
This article dives into the exciting experimental features coming in Ruby 4.0, including Ruby::Box for isolated execution contexts to avoid library conflicts, major improvements to Ractors with better message passing and shareable procs, and handy language tweaks like enhanced error messages and a new top-level Ruby module. It highlights how these changes boost concurrency and performance while keeping things developer-friendly. Click on the article link to explore Ruby’s future!
Context Engineering 101: How ChatGPT Stays on Track – by Neo Kim and Louis-François Bouchard
This interesting article explains context engineering as the art of carefully curating prompts, history, and data to keep LLMs like ChatGPT focused and accurate, preventing issues from overloaded or irrelevant context windows. It emphasizes its critical role in multi-step tasks to avoid "context rot" and ensure reliable outputs. Click on the article link to master keeping your AI on track!
Why are exec and run so confusing? – by André Arko
This post breaks down the often-confusing differences between exec and run commands in package managers like Bundler, npm, Cargo, and uv, where exec typically installs and runs external packages while run stays within the project scope. It proposes clearer conventions for a future Ruby tool to reduce frustration. Click on the article link to finally clear up the exec vs. run debate!
Coming soon: Simpler pricing and a better experience for GitHub Actions – by GitHub Blog
This article announces GitHub’s decision to postpone new charges for self-hosted Actions runners after community feedback, while proceeding with up to 39% price cuts on hosted runners starting January 2026 and investing in better self-hosted features like autoscaling. Free quotas remain unchanged for a smoother experience. Click on the article link for the full pricing update!
Rust unit testing: basic HTTP testing – by Jorge Ortiz-Fuentes
This interesting article shows how to efficiently test Axum HTTP handlers in Rust unit tests by calling the router directly in-memory with oneshot(), avoiding network dependencies for faster, deterministic checks on status codes and responses. It’s a clean way to handle routes and fallbacks without external tools. Click on the article link to level up your Rust testing!
TornadoVM 2.0 Brings Automatic GPU Acceleration and LLM support to Java – by Ben Evans
This article covers the major release of TornadoVM 2.0, enabling automatic offloading of Java code to GPUs and support for running large language models with accelerated performance. It brings seamless hardware acceleration to Java developers for compute-intensive tasks. Click on the article link to accelerate your Java apps!
Is MCP Overhyped? – by Moncef Abboud
This post examines the Model Context Protocol (MCP) from Anthropic, a standard for LLMs to interact with external tools uniformly, praising its discoverability and integrations but questioning if it’s overhyped due to context bloat, security risks, and rapid standardization. It weighs the real benefits against potential drawbacks. Click on the article link to decide if MCP lives up to the buzz!
Feature-First Development – by Patrick Jackson
This article introduces feature-first development, prioritizing rapid implementation of core features in an unstable state to gain velocity and resolve unknowns before stabilizing with tests and reviews, as applied to a decentralized database project. It’s ideal for bootstrapping user-attracting capabilities early. Click on the article link for a fresh take on dev workflows!
Why I started hating AI? – by Alem Tuzlak
This interesting video explores balanced perspectives on AI’s impact, debating whether to embrace or criticize it amid rapid advancements and ethical concerns. It encourages thoughtful views over outright hate. Click on the article link to watch and form your opinion!
Inlining – the ultimate optimisation – by Matt Godbolt
This post delves into function inlining as a powerful compiler optimization that can dramatically boost performance by eliminating call overhead, with insights from compiler explorer Matt Godbolt. It showcases real-world speedups and when it shines. Click on the article link for deep optimization wisdom!
Languages, Tools & Framework releases
Kimurai
Kimurai, a modern Ruby web scraping framework built on Capybara and Nokogiri. It README.md shows how easily developers can scrape static and JavaScript-rendered websites using headless Chrome, Firefox, or simple HTTP requests.
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And that’s all for this week! Wish you all a great weekend and happy coding!
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