🎁 Newsletter #39: 2 years already, a new record for Pi, UX good for mental health...
A bi-monthly newsletter about Ruby on Rails and the web.
In this issue, we celebrate our 2nd anniversary! It does not make us younger! You neither if you follow us from the beginning (thank you!). We also remember Kathleen Booth, we wonder how to prevent harassment in the workplace, we have a 90s nostalgia…
👋 French version (version française) | 🤌 Italian version (versione italiana) | 🤝 Spanish version (versión española)
Web News 🗞️
We don’t know your opinion about this, though it seems that during the Jamstack Conf last week, there was a panel saying that the more Javascript frameworks, the better. It seems like it helps avoid the “WordPress syndrome”, where only one method can be applied to everything.
To stay on the same topic, you can give a try to the latest frameworks people talk about: Astro, Fresh, or Qwik.
🛤️ Ruby and Rails News
*We love seeing Ruby mentioned in Hacker News (especially when it says positive things), and this is the last article that made people talk: It's not Ruby that's slow, it's your database
*We also love reading from Julia Evans who started to use Ruby some years ago: Making a DNS query in Ruby from scratch
*In the Ruby for All podcast, Emily Samp, Senior Developer at Shopify, explains to us how to collect better feedback
*A focus on JIT compilers for your Ruby on Rails app par Renata Marques
Ruby tip 💎
#squish
It’s a milkshake method that cleans up strings. First, it removes the spaces at the extremities of the string, then it replaces groups of consecutive spaces with a single space.
%{ Multi-line
string }.squish # => "Multi-line string"
" foo bar \n \t boo".squish # => "foo bar boo"
On the Web 🕸️
🧘🏽♀️ UX Zen
Who never experienced anxiety when starting an online administrative task? Or the stress of a Zoom meeting? Websites poorly designed, obscure navigation, scary pop-ups: today a lot of websites and applications are a cocktail for nightmares. With 15 years of experience in UX Design, Danae Botha proves in this article that another UX is possible, thought through, and good for the mental health of everybody.
✨ Kinder Tools: How to Improve Enterprise UX Design for Mental Health - Danae Botha
🛑 Stop Harassment
« They have harassed her for years? How weird, they were always nice to me ». At work, harassers know precisely what they are doing: they aim at a specific population (juniors, minorities, …), and sympathize with the hierarchy. And the more you are in a position of power, the harder it is to identify them. Sarah Milstein, VP of Engineering at Daily, gives us resources to prevent, act and be a leader who listens to their team.
✨ Why leaders can’t see workplace harassment - Sarah Milstein
📈 100,000,000,000,000
You can’t read that number? Don’t worry, neither do we. Emma Haruka Iwao can do it though, and for a good reason: in March 2022, the Cloud Engineer broke the world record by calculating the 100,000,000,000,000th decimal of Pi.
✨ How Google’s Emma Haruka Iwao Helped Set a New Record for Pi - David Cassel
Some Code 💻
⛰️ A Tribute to Kathleen Booth
Everybody knows that if there are very few women in tech it’s because they are not interested [sarcasm off]. If you are a bit serious you know women had a major role in the origin of tech. In October, Kathleen Booth passed away at 100 years old. Mathematician, computer scientist, we owe her the first assembler.
✨ Computer Pioneer Kathleen Booth Dies At Age 100 - Sue Gee
✏️ Make Your Own Animation Movie with CSS
Okay this title lies a little bit: not sure you can create the next Pixar movie though this tutorial. Yosra Emad teaches us how to make a little ball move using cubic Bézier and CSS transitions. Though you know, as we say, we all have to start somewhere.
✨ How To Create Advanced Animations With CSS - Yosra Emad
💎 Look at my beautiful collection of gems
dry-rb is a collection of Ruby gems based on the encapsulation principle. Two weeks ago dry-schema, a gem for the validation of data structures, has been updated to version 1.12. This a good opportunity for Abiodun Olowode to explain to us how it works. And if you are curious you can find many articles by Abiodun about the other gems from that collection.
✨ An Intro to dry-schema in Ruby - Abiodun Olowode
Fun 🎉
📖 The Little Story of GIFs
Haaaa the 90s and their delicate aesthetic.
Did you know that the first GIF has been created in 1987? What it was representing? That it was patented (and usable with a fee) until 2004 (the year of the freedom of the GIF)? Jenny Brewer’s article will tell you all about it.
We found this article in the Tech Sisters newsletter, and we invite you to subscribe to it!
✨ The creative legacy of Gifs: Past, present and future - Jenny Brewer
Events 🎡
🔥 Black Girls Tech Summit - November 16 & 17
Two days of conferences to build your network, listen to more than 50 speakers, meet recruiters, participate in workshops, and even in a wellness session 🧘♀️. All of this is either on-site in London, or online.
👽 Guide to Best Practices in Code Reviews - November 21
There is no good code without a good ol’ code review! To prove it, researchers studied the claim to develop a practical guide. No more excuses to avoid the reviews.
✨ Coding review - RIOT Science Club
☕ Buy us a coffee to support the newsletter 🍰 Thank you Michaël and Zoé for your support!
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Editors: Aurelie, Camille, Lucille and Juliette
English version: Aurelie
Italian version: Paola
Spanish version: Kattya