🏞 Newsletter #27: take the power, scale without drowning, automate your documentation...
A bi-monthly newsletter about Ruby on Rails and the web.
In this issue we think about Spring, we learn about what’s new in CSS, we make a lot of tiny projects, we let robots write our documentation, we celebrate the new WNB.rb website…
😚 French version (version française) | 🤌 Italian version (versione italiana) | 🤝 Spanish version (versión española)
🇺🇦 How to help regarding the conflict in Ukraine: Appeal to Ruby community from Kharkiv Rubyist
Web News 🗞️
We are in the middle of Women History Month (not calling it Women Herstory Month is a missed opportunity), so you can go to Women who stream tech to follow women in science, tech, software development, or video games, and be inspired by all these women who do awesome stuff. 💖
🛤️ Ruby and Rails News
All the talks you might have missed from RubyConf 2021 by Jennie Lundrigan
Videos from the last WNB.rb meetup are available!
We could have started with the last outburst from DHH (sigh), but this article does it better than us: RailsConf and DHH Go Their Separate Ways
WNB.rb has 🌟 a brand new website 🌟 that is open-source and it’s a beautiful collaborative project, bravo!
Ruby tip 💎
pick pick pick (>= v6.0.0)In the most recent versions of Rails, there is a method lighter than #pluck which returns one or multiple values from one or multiple columns.
Like #pluck, #pick will also load only the desired values and not the whole object, though it will return only the first result.
User.all.limit(1).pluck(:name, :email).first
=> ['Jane', 'jane@mail.com']User.all.pick(:name, :email)
=> ['Jane', 'jane@mail.com']In the Web 🕸️
📖 Take the Power
Available since March 1st, the book The First, the Few, the Only by Deepa Purushothaman is “a playbook for women of color and a broader call for a healthier, more equitable approach to power”. She lists new rules to change the white male heteronormative definition of power as it is known today and finally access leadership roles.
✨ How Business Can Evolve with Women of Color Leading - Deepa Purushothaman
🪜 Scale-up: a game for kids?
After her beginnings at Facebook, Molly Graham worked at Quip, then Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as VP Operations. She knows very well about companies with rocket growth where the headcount triples just in the blink of an eye. She shares her tips and experience of hypergrowth to thrive in these agitated waters.
✨ “Giving Up Your Legos” and Other Lessons in Scaling - Molly Graham
🏄 Space Surfing
Despite all the science fictions movies imagining fancy interfaces for computers (like in Minority Report), the browser never really evolved since its creation with the search bar on top or hypertext links to navigate between pages. Maggie Appleton lists some projects for a more “spatial” browser.
✨ Spatial Web Browsing - Maggie Appleton
Some Code 💻
📜 You Don’t Need To Write Your Documentation Yourself
If there is a subject where all developers agree on, it is the importance of good and lengthy documentation ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) … Just kidding. Hopefully, Portia Burton suggests solutions to automate it, with tools docs-as-code, Pydoc, Sphinx…
✨ Who Owns the Docs, and Why It Should Be the Robots - Portia Burton
🏞️ A Little Goes a Long Way
Knowing how to code is cool because if we need a little script to ease our life or if we have a kick-a$$-business-idea-for-sure, we can just open our IDE and go for it. Julia Evans lists all the tiny projects she coded and it can give ideas!
✨ Some tiny personal programs I've written - Julia Evans
🆕 What’s Up CSS?
While framework empires rise and fall (which we’ll call “Game Of Thrones: JavaScript Edition”), CSS is still here so it’s always good to know what’s new. And it has a lot in its bag for 2022: container queries, :has(), @when/@else, accent-color, Cascade Layers…
✨ New CSS Features In 2022 - Michelle Barker
Fun 🎉
🌼 Flower power
It’s almost Spring and we are happy to let Winter behind us! To get ready, we dive into the psychedelic universe of the 70s.
✨ Design by the Decades: Get inspired by 70s graphic design trends - Olivia Hoskin
Events 🎡
📢 Call for Speakers - Connect - Until April 25
You can apply to be a speaker at Connect Recharge which will happen in May 2022! Women Who Code is searching for speakers to talk career, tech, host a workshop, or do a lighting talk. You can take a look at the previous edition to get some inspiration.
✨ CFP Women Who Code - Connect 2022
🥰 WNB.rb - March 29
@KattyaCuevas will talk about query optimization with Active Record and @Clara_Morgen about concurrency in Ruby.
☕ Buy us a coffee to support the newsletter 🍰 Thank you Sonia and “anonymous person” for your support!
✨ Join us: meet-up | twitter | website
Editors: Camille and Juliette
English version: Aurelie
Italian version: Paola
Spanish version: Kattya