Happy New Year! Welcome to the first 2016 issue of This week in Rails.

I’m Andy, and before diving in to contributions from this week, let’s briefly recap some stats from 2015. Our 12 editors released 50 issues summarizing over 6500 commits to Rails! Each issue is now being sent to over 4300 subscribers.

What a great year! To celebrate, sweep up some confetti laying around from last weekend, toss it in the air, and sing some bars of Auld Lang Syne.

Featured

This Week’s Rails Contributors

79 people contributed to Rails since the last issue on December 18, 2015! Check out the list of issues if you’d like to help out as well.

RailsConf 2016 CFP deadline

Interested in speaking at RailsConf 2016 in Kansas City? Call for proposals closes January 15th, 2016, 11:59pm CST! You’ve got 1 week!

New Stuff

Security: Per-form CSRF tokens

Changes brought upstream from GitHub, related to Content Security Policy (CSP) and securing forms. Check out the links in the PR to learn more.

Default new apps to tag logs with request_id

The :request_id log tag ensures that each request is tagged with a unique identifier.

Short-hand methods for types in MySQL

This change adds short-hand methods like tinyblob and mediumblob for text and blob types when using MySQL.

Fixed

Don’t output to STDOUT twice

Stops printing messages twice with rails console or rails server and a logger set to output to STDOUT.

Faster

Replace x.times.map{} with Array.new(x){}

Small performance improvement supported with a benchmark. Check out the results.

Wrapping Up

That’s all for This week in Rails. As always, there are many more changes than we have room to cover here, but feel free to check them out yourself.

Until next time!