🧱 Newsletter #46: what happens when typing in the terminal, sexism in tech in India, pixel art...

A bi-monthly newsletter about Ruby on Rails and the web.

In this issue we talk about the state of hirings for RoR in 2023, we show you how to create a heredoc, we don’t listen to bad advice, we discover the library KendoUI…

😚 French version (version française) | 🤌 Italian version (versione italiana) | 🤝 Spanish version (versión española)

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Web News 🗞️

We love having good excuses to partayyy, so here is what we celebrate today:

• Electron is 10: an interesting article talking about the 10th anniversary of the popular open-source project and its organization, security, and what is coming next!

• TypeScript 5.0 is out: if it’s not already done, it’s a good time to run npm install -D typescript

Ruby and Rails News 🛤️

🐒 Leave Donkey Kong Alone

With Ruby, it’s possible to modify the behavior of an existing piece of code with what we call “Monkey Patching”. Eileen Uchitelle does not recommend this practice, mostly because it can give bad surprises to people newly onboarded on the project, others who don’t like the Rails magic will say -again- that this is code hidden in a $$%! file (inhale… exhaaaale). Eileen Uchitelle explains how to use it with parsimony.

✨ The Case Against Monkey Patching, From a Rails Core Team Member - Eileen Uchitelle

🤏 News in Brief

• Gift Egwuenu (developer advocate at Cloudfare, GitHub star, Microsoft MVP, Auth0 Ambassador, Polynuat Advisor, and Nuxt.js Ambassador) wrote a summary of the RubyGem news for February. Contributors are listed, and there are links to their PRs, which can inspire you to contribute!

• Aurélie Verrot mentioned it: Ruby on Rails, which had died a hundred times already, is the most in-demand skill in 2023 🥰 The full report.

• The Ruby on Rails podcast made a whole episode on the state of hiring in 2023.

• Irina Nazarova, CEO of Evil Martians, was invited to the Code With Jason podcast to talk about how to conceive and develop a feature.

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Code Tip 💎

Here Document Literals

A heredoc is a way to define a multi-line string of characters while keeping the original indentation and formatting. 

It can be used for integrating pieces of code, like SQL or HTML, or to interpolate data.

> name = 'Jane'
> str = <<-HEREDOC
>  My
>  name is
>  #{name}.
> HEREDOC
=> "  My\n  name is\n  Jane.\n"

query = <<-SQL
> Select * from users
> where name = '#{name}'
> SQL
=> "Select * from users\nwhere name = 'Jane'\n"

str = %Q(
>  This is
>  a sample
>  text.
>)
=> "\nThis is\na sample\ntext.\n"

✨ Here Document Literals

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On the Web 🕸️

🙅‍♀️ That’s Bad Advice

The Women on Rails love career advice, and we share them often. But be careful, not every piece of advice is good to be followed, especially when they tend to erase some behavior judged too “feminine” at work. Cindy Gallop helps us to sort this out.

✨ 7 Pieces of Bad Career Advice Women Should Ignore - Cindy Gallop and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

🙉 I Know Nothing, I See Nothing, I Hear Nothing

The client is always right… Or not. Often, user feedback is part of the post-launch routine for a new feature, and we wait for them with impatience and apprehension. To avoid being overwhelmed with the feedback, Jessica Tenuta (designer and founder of Payback.co) describes to us what to keep, and what to ignore.

✨ Should you ever NOT listen to user feedback? - Jessica Tenuta

🇮🇳 Ups and Downs of Tech in India

One of the most inclusive tech industries is also one of the most sexist. 37% of the 5 million tech workers in India are women, and they face strong discrimination. Raksha Kumar wrote about the daily challenges of Indian women in tech.

✨ The enduring sexism of India’s tech industry - Raksha Kumar

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Some Code 💻

❓The Tests, It’s Automatic

We told you, we say it again, we don’t cut corners with tests. Period. And if you automate them, it’s royal! But if you still need to convince your manager that test automation is not a waste of time, Olya Kabanova offers us some answers to their questions.

✨ Top 5 Manager’s Questions About Automated Testing - Olya Kabanova

⌨️ What’s That Gibberish?

If you work on the front end, you know how to capture keystrokes to work with your app. But do you know how your terminal interprets the commands? Julia Evans found a way to observe that and shares her discoveries.

✨ What happens when you press a key in your terminal? - Julia Evans

🏁 A Table For Six!

Zara Cooper shows us what we can build with KendoUI, a library that helps you deliver data in a table. A table that can size up or down easily on different devices, while staying user-friendly. Nice!

✨ You Can Do That With A JavaScript Data Grid? - Zara Cooper

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Fun 🎉

🧱 Break the Brick!

You know us, we are nostalgic. Maybe the pixels bring back memories to you too. The memories of video games, screens, or old cell phones… This article has a lot of pixeled designs to inspire you.

✨ Pixel Art & Pixel Fonts: How to Work With This Timeless Design Trend - Carrie Cousins

Valerie Phoenix🌻 (🖥, ☕️) @DigitalBlkHippy

The amount of tears I've cried to get my coding skill to where they at now is wild 🥹 Shout out to TDD (tear driven development)

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Events 🎡

👩‍🍳 Become a CTO - April 5-6

CTOs and Engineering Managers share about their jobs, career paths, and possible evolutions!

✨ Wanna be a CTO Bootcamp - 50inTech

📦 Productivity in a Box - April 6

Kubernetes (K8s for the friends) is popular, but that doesn’t mean that everybody excels at it, or that the learning curve is smooth. Aly Ibrahim, Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS) will present advanced concepts: how to increase productivity, improve the dev experience, and optimize development and test environments with Kubernetes. 

✨ 5 Kubernetes tools to maximize your productivity - Chapter 2 - Platform Engineers Tel Aviv

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Editors: Aurelie, Camille, Lucille and Juliette
English version: Aurelie
Italian version: Paola
Spanish version: Kattya