🦀 Newsletter #36: The year of the crab, build trust while remote, create good Pull Requests...
A bi-monthly newsletter about Ruby on Rails and the web.
In this issue we talk about crab (it won’t be a crab feed, sorry), we verify our *definitions* in Ruby, we learn to reach out for help, we create good pull requests, we put planes on watch…
👋 French version (version française) | 🤌 Italian version (versione italiana) | 🤝 Spanish version (versión española)
Web News 🗞️
Many news made noise these past weeks, one of them being the Microsoft Azure CTO who decided that it was time to bury C and C++ and switch to Rust:
If you want to learn it, you can check the repo here. Fun fact: those who code are named cRUSTacean and they have a mascot (non-official) Ferris the crab.
🛤️ Ruby and Rails News
We continue to unpile the news of the summer (in the North hemisphere) ☀️ before coming back to something more recent!
*RubyGems now asks for multi-factor authentication (MFA) for gems with more than 180 million downloads 🔒
*The Ruby article that has been on top of HackerNews: Why Ruby is More Readable than Python where the author tells how Ruby sparks joy 💖
*A new tutorial by Abiodun Ajibade about RSpec Mocks and one by Corinn Pope with different methods to take screenshots with Rails
*We learn more about the cloud and the job of SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) thanks to Mina Slater who talked with Brittany Martin on the Ruby on Rails podcast
Ruby Tip 💎
defined? KeywordThis keyword allows you to verify if an argument has been defined while specifying the nature of the argument.
defined? String # => "constant"
defined? puts # => "method"
defined? [1, 2] # => "expression"
@@a, @a, a = 21, 42, 84
defined? @aa # => "class variable"
defined? @a # => "instance-variable"
defined? a # => "local-variable"
defined? a = 2 # => "assignment"
defined? $$ # => "global-variable"You can optimize your code by replacing given_block? by defined?
✨ How to check if a variable is defined
On the Web 🕸️
🦺 Help! I Need Somebody’s Help!
Asking for help when we are stuck on a problem is not easy, it can be even worse sometimes when being remote and when context switching is feared. Jessica Cregg teaches us how to ask for help efficiently.
✨ Soliciting Feedback and Help - Jessica Cregg
🤝 Trust Can Be Built
Sadhana Gopal shares her experience at Spotify where she started to manage a team remotely. She relied on a book that has a lot of followers right now in tech: The 90-Day Plan (which focuses on the first 90 days at a new job). The action plan is divided into 3 steps: the environment, the team, and yourself.
✨ How to Build Trust as a New Manager in a Fully Remote Team - Sadhana Gopal
👐 LGBTQIA+ Inclusivity in Practice
For everybody to feel welcomed in a team, there are some principles that Ettie Bailey-King explains to us: using non-gendered words when talking to an audience (throw away the “hey guys” and use “hey folks”), thinking intersectionality, stop guessing people’s orientation, learn how to apologize…
✨ How to be LGBTQIA+ inclusive 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈 - Ettie Bailey-King
Some Code 💻
💬 It’s a Pull Request Only if it Comes From the Region of Template….
Have you ever been in a team full of unicorns and narwhals where everybody trusted that shiny collective intelligence to draft a PR until it became all nonsense and you had to impose a template? We bet you were. The author won’t reveal if it was the case for her. Though Jenna Kiyasu gives us some advice to improve our PRs, for the well-being of our reviewers.
✨ 6 Best Practices to Manage Pull Request Creation and Feedback - Jenna Kiyasu
📉 Crash test
Nobody likes when a mobile crashes, users and developers. These micro-crashes can have multiple causes and very few know (or are comfortable enough) to give a try at fixing them. Jessica Watchel studied how Lyft tackled the problem and divided the amount of crashes by two, and therefore gives us a little summary.
✨ Lyft’s Tips for Avoiding (Software) Crashes - Jessica Wachtel
🧑🔧 Debt, Debt, Always the Debt
Okay, new features are nice and can be sold, but code needs to be maintained, and that, Leslie Chapman explains it very well with an analogy that everybody (and most importantly those who don’t code) can understand.
✨ What is tech debt and how can you explain it to non-technical peers? - Leslie Chapman
Fun 🎉
🛫 It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane
We can do it all with JavaScript and Charlie Gerard proves it using it to track the planes that are flying near her home (JavaScript still needs an antenna…). You know it, we love that kind of project, and we can learn a bit about aviation at the same time.
✨ Building an aircraft radar system in JavaScript - Charlie Gerard
Events 🎡
📊 Observability in DevOps - October 6th
If you want to know what lies behind the magic of automatic instrumentation, how to trace the lifecycle of a user request, or learn to simplify the observability between microservices… then join Women In Devops and let the experts explain all of that.
✨ Making observability make sense - Women In DevOps
☕ Buy us a coffee to support the newsletter 🍰 Thank you Charlie for your support and kind words ❤️
✨ Join us: meet-up | twitter | website
Editors: Aurelie, Camille, Lucille and Juliette
English version: Aurelie
Italian version: Paola
Spanish version: Kattya