🍄 Newsletter #45: mushrooms reading code, we have enough to wait 3 hours for a build, Ruby turned 30...
A bi-monthly newsletter about Ruby on Rails and the web.
In this issue we are a week late, sowwyyyy 💖 (did you notice?), we talk about builds, we talk Ruby conferences, we present you a CLI tool for MySQL, MariaDB, and Percona, we continue to talk about the challenges of being a woman in tech, we wonder how left-handed people use their mobile…
😚 French version (version française) | 🤌 Italian version (versione italiana) | 🤝 Spanish version (versión española)
Web News 🗞️
Javascript builds, pure joy amirite?! No? How? This subject had been debated the past few weeks with this article on Deno’s blog: “You Don't Need a Build Step” (warning for a sensitive audience: they roast some Next JS). We liked Julia Evans’ article as well: Writing Javascript without a build system. Let’s make a test: if you built and deployed your portfolio or blog, how long do you think it will take for you to download the repo, build and deploy from another machine?
Ruby and Rails News 🛤️
👩✈️ It Passes, It Doesn’t
Imagine, you finished your piece of code, it works, tests are passing, you smile, you push on GitHub, prepare yourself a little margarita real fresh to celebrate… and bam! the linter fails, it’s Rubocop. You’re mad right? Though Rubocop is really useful to unify a codebase, improve readability, and remove code smells. Rubocop is also customizable, and if you want to know more, Shloka helps you configure it with your own rules.
✨ Configuring Rubocop in the codebase - Shloka Shah
🕊 Fly High Little App
In the good ol’ days of the free tiers on Heroku, it was so easy to deploy yet another Pokedex during your bootcamp, create your own blog, or even launch your little company. But all the good things come to an end and have successors! Natalia V shows us how to deploy on Fly.
✨ The Case Against Monkey Patching, From a Rails Core Team Member - Eileen Uchitelle
🤏 News in Brief
Ruby turned 30, time to stop dating unstable people and build healthy relationships. You can celebrate this milestone with a quine (it’s code that prints its source code 🤯)
Amanda Perino was named Executive Director of the Rails Foundation, we hope she will provide better advertising than DHH.
Standard, le guide/linter/formatter for Ruby now has its extension on VSCode
The announcement from MRSK made a lot of noise: it is designed to deploy Rails but can work with any app using Docker containers.
Some Ruby conferences are scheduled in Europe:
Friendly.rb a new conf in Bucarest in June. The CFP is open until April 1st
Helvetic Ruby in Bern in November. The CFP is open until March 31st
Code Tip 💎
Auto-complétion et MySQLMyCLI is an online command line interface that enables autocompletion and coloring of the syntax for MySLQ, MariaDB, and Percona. It is not cheating, just a handy tool.
On the Web 🕸️
👀 Where Are the Ladies?
Always the same song. When we explain why tech needs more women, we always hear back this annoying echo: « What for? What does it change if it is a man or a woman writing the code? », sometimes they even complain about “forced diversity”. Eleftheria Batsou sweeps those backward arguments and describes some actions to finally give tech another image.
✨ Why we need more women in tech - Eleftheria Batsou
🕵🏽 Women Undercover
We all have in our heads the image of a dreadful Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada – CEO perfectly dressed with an incendiary authority. But this image of the skilled woman with a very manly kind of leadership did more damage than we could imagine. This is what Alicia Menendez explains to us in this fascinating chronicle.
✨ What women give up to be a culture fit at work - Alicia Menendez
💻 The Codes Changed: Understanding Power Dynamics at Work
Kate Stitham develops in this article the difficulties women and minorities face to fit into the power structure of a company. Some dress differently, change the way they speak, or even the way they eat…
✨ Code-switching in the workplace: understanding cultures of power - Kate Stitham
Some Code 💻
✍️ In Good Hands
Holding your phone in one hand, the other in your pocket. It is important to have in mind how the user will use the app… with only one hand. This is why it can be a good idea to adapt the layout to the said hand. Kitty worked on this subject and explains what the process is.
✨ Dominant hand-respecting design - Kitty Giraudel
🧞 Wishes for Site Realibity Engineering (SRE) in 2023
Tons of good wishes for SRE in 2023: always more observability (this is not a buzzword but the hope to have enough data to understand bugs), that devs and QA will help a bit, more OpenTelemetry and other solutions because you know the deal: when SRE is happy, everybody is happy.
✨ Our 2023 Site Reliability Engineering Wish List - Adriana Villela & Ana Margarita Medina
🧾 Make Accessibility Pass
We like to make people think we are all hacking NASA with our little terminals when we are in reality just coding the 2,000th form of our career. That’s why we don’t have any more excuses to not make them accessible on the first try. And this guide well detailed will help you with that.
✨ A Guide To Accessible Form Validation - Sandrina Pereira
Fun 🎉
🍄 Compiled Like a Mushroom
Do quantic computers overwhelm you? You will be happy to learn that since 2001 scientists are betting that the future of hardware will be linked to the living, and therefore they create some devices with mushrooms. We just hope it won’t turn into Rise of the Machines featuring Last of Us.
✨ Inside the lab that’s growing mushroom computers - Charlotte Hu
Events 🎡
🧬 Women in Machine Learning & Data Science - March 16
Marine Gosselin will help you build a production-ready and end-user-friendly Data Science application with Python. Then Amélie Héliou will talk about LLM. And finally, Sandrine Henry will present the project Bechdel AI (Data for Good) to measure inequalities in the movie industry.
⚙️ Breaking the Barriers - March 28
Women in DevOps organizes in Bristol, UK a conference for women in tech with multiple interesting testimonies: Prakriti Karthauser with a magnificent career including 6 years of maternity leave, Jen Beattie who mixes DevOps with her Art studies, and Mhairi Hislop who talks in complete transparency about her anxiety and depression to break the taboo around mental health.
✨ Talking Equity: Breaking Biases & Embracing Advocacy - Women in DevOps
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Editors: Aurelie, Camille, Lucille and Juliette
English version: Aurelie
Italian version: Paola
Spanish version: Kattya