😋 Newsletter #48: Monolith or micro-services, the new fromage or dessert debate...
A bi-monthly newsletter about Ruby on Rails and the web.
In this issue we dare look at the tech Twitter debate (pray for our souls), we reflect on our procrastination, we learn how to make technical decisions in early-stage start-ups…
😚 French version (version française) | 🤌 Italian version (versione italiana) | 🤝 Spanish version (versión española)
Web News 🗞️
If you are not on Twitter, you avoided the debate for which we are still counting the victims: what if a good ol’ monolith was better than a swarm of micro-services? Everything started with an article from Prime Video Tech, explaining they saved 90% of their costs by switching from micro-services to a monolith. The author of this paragraph, who often announces the rise of serverless on Twitter, will just squint her eyes and say: “Yeah, but it depends…”
Ruby and Rails News 🛤️
😋 Fromage AND Dessert
On the monolith side: let’s learn how to put it in containers and hurl them in the sea put them online. This is what shows the tuto Containerize a Rails 7 application and Run it on Vultr with Cloud 66 by Kasia Hoffman. Inside, you can find an open-source app using ES Build, Hotwire, View Components, and TailwindCSS. 🎁
On the micro-services side: a tutorial by Carla Urrea Stabile: Add Authorization to a Sinatra API using Auth0. If you never build with Sinatra (a framework lighter than Rails), the tuto explains how to create an API with it, step by step.
🤏 News in Brief
A new Ruby/Rails podcast appeared! The Tightly Coupled Book Club by Aji and Mina Slater, who read the docs we never take the time to read, and talk about it. Right now, they unpack Getting Started With Rails. They were invited to the Ruby on Rails Podcast at the end of March to talk about it.
Code Tip 💎
dasherize() A method that replaces the underscores with a classic dash. No more gsub and Regex !
"Lovely_Class_Name".dasherize
# => "Lovely-Class-Name"On the Web 🕸️
😴 The Return of Bed Time
Are you reading this newsletter at 1 am, in your bed, the nose glued on the smartphone, after spending 10 hours in meetings back to back? We don’t judge, and you’re not the only one. It is called revenge bedtime procrastination, and it is a phenomenon that concerns more and more people, with very real consequences on their health.
✨ Revenge bedtime procrastination - Anne Helen Petersen
🔡 Font Police is not Comic
Everybody its police? On the web, in the absence of universal graphic guidelines, the choice of fonts can sometimes be chaotic. From Times New Roman size 7 for the “little lines that nobody reads” to the huge letters for trendy websites, there is something for every taste. Yes, but… Not everyone has the same reading constraints. Zoya Bylinskii, a research scientist at Adobe, pondered the question.
✨ The need to personalize fonts for each individual reader - Zoya Bylinskii
💻 That Might Be Helpful
Some extensions for Visual Studio Code super useful for junior developers? We say yes!
✨ 7 useful VS Code extensions for junior Web developers - Stefi Rosca
Some Code 💻
🐣 Quack Quack
The author will be honest, the first time she heard about talking to a rubber duck, she was not expecting that this was really the main character of Hook a Duck, and couldn’t imagine how this would help her to code. Once the ridicule is defeated, talking to your rubber duck can really help fight the blockers. But if you can’t do it, Christina Padilla has other tips.
✨ Explain it to Your Rubber Duck - Christina Padilla
🪠 Follow the Green Pipe
You write code, that’s nice. Pushing it live without breaking the rest is even better. Hana Khelifa explains to us what CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Delivery) are, and gives us 7 pieces of advice for pipelines respectful of DevOps principles (there are a lot of keywords to shine during coffee break here right? Don’t worry, everything is explained in the article).
✨ 7 Best Practices to Set up Your CI/CD Pipeline - Hana Khelifa
🏎 Fast, I am Fast…
Building a start-up it’s about juggling between doing things fast or well. We want a secured product, that is nice, but that will also decide VCs to invest, without letting the competition have the advantage. And of course, with all of this, we need to pay our employees! So how to decide what tech to choose, and what process to apply? Ellen Chisa gives us an idea of how it works.
✨ Building Faster - Ellen Chisa
Fun 🎉
🤖 Human, too human
Are you sure you are talking to a human? Human or not, a browser game developed by Al21labs, created a lot of debate this month. Made like a good ol’ chat room, each player logs in to talk with others… or with an AI. After two minutes, the player has to guess if they were talking to a human or a bot. Funny, and sometimes a bit scary.
✨ Human or not, a social Turing Game
Events 🎡
🩺 Femtech Expo, Health and BioTech - May 17
FemTech expo focuses on women's health at large (finally!). On May 17th you will be able to discover some projects linked to BioTech, DeepTech, and Artificial Intelligence.
🎤 Women in Tech Global Summit, Paris - May 22 - 23
This year’s theme: “HERstory in the Making”. This is a good opportunity to meet with women who innovate and create to make the change in their field. The subjects will be Cybersecurity, Immersive Tech, Environnement, inclusivity in fintech, AI ethics, activism, and Web3.
☕ Buy us a coffee to support the newsletter 🍰
✨ Join us: meet-up | twitter | website
Editors: Aurelie, Camille, Lucille and Juliette
English version: Aurelie
Italian version: Paola
Spanish version: Kattya