🎡 Newsletter WoR #50: back to work – time to cheer up, try tofu, and meet GPT…

A monthly newsletter about Ruby on Rails and the web

We’re so happy to be back here after the summer break 💖 Especially since this newsletter celebrates its fiftieth edition and almost three-year anniversary. Thank you again for reading it and sharing it! As usual after the break, we take time to rewind on what’s new in Rails and around the web. 

In this issue, we read our application logs and watch the RubyKaigi conference, we say no to toxic productivity, we set up jobs to scale user growth, and we add pastel colors to our lives…

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

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Web News 🗞️

A big piece of news has shaken the global stage, and even gotten some French devs to wake up from their summer naps: HashiCorp adopted the Business Source License for all their products, including Terraform. It was a biiiig deal in August. This nightmare ended with the release of OpenTofu, a fork of Terraform (a Terrafork!) which joined the Linux CNCF Foundation. Tech might be going vegan…

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Ruby and Rails News 🛤️

🪵 It’s a log, log world

If we’re going to break production, we might as well log it properly, right? Aestimo Kirina shows us how to use logs and the 6 levels of severity of Logger: debug, info, warn, error, fatal, unknown. He shares some formatting tips, like displaying logs with rainbow colors in your terminal, cos’ who says debugging can’t be 🌈 fun 🌈? And if you’re already past that kind of fun, you can also delve into his introduction to Lograge 🤬.

✨ Managing your Ruby Logs like a Pro - Aestimo Kirina

🤏 News in a nutshell

• Podcasts aplenty:

  • The Ruby for all podcast invited Megan Brown to share her experience with UX research as well as some career advice.

  • The Bike Shed podcast invited Andrea Goulet to speak about empathy, community and gender bias. 

  • Way back in May but way worth a listen, the Ruby on Rails podcast released a recap of RubyKaigi 2023.

• Speaking of RubyKaigi, it was good to see Emily Samp’s talk Generating RBIs for dynamic mixins with Sorbet and Tapioca (ah the mystery of RBI files) and Jemma Issroff’s talk Tips and Tricks for working in the MRI Codebase (ah the mystery of MRI).

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Ruby Tip 💎

Rails Go to Spec

This Vscode extension will find your file of specs in no time, or create it for you! 

This is the default keybinding:

- Ctrl + Shift + y
- Cmd + Shift + y (Mac)

But of course you can customize the keybinding in your favorite code editor.

✨Rails Go to Spec

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On the Web 🕸️

⏱ Less is more? 

You’re back to work, but definitely still in the mood for a holiday. So you find yourself laying eyes on The 4-hour Workweek, Tim Ferris’ bestseller that caused quite the sensation in the tech industry. Alas, Meagan Day is here to snap you out of your fantasy plans. In this brilliant article, she debunks the myth of hyperproductivity born straight out of  – surprise surprise – the Silicon Valley. 

✨ The Fraud and the four-hour workweek - Meagan Day

📝 To do or not to do

Let’s talk real productivity. Dr Amantha Imber, who specializes in behavioral science, examines the flaws – and the true potential – of to-do lists. 

✨ Not Getting Anything Done? Try This To-Do List Hack - Amantha Imber

💪 Wind of change

Some September inspiration: yes, even in the middle of the industry crisis and its mass layoffs, it is still possible to get a new or a different job, whatever your background. Jolene from Colorful Codes is here to prove it: with no prior degree or training, she became a developer at Microsoft. 

✨ How to stay motivated during your tech job hunt - Colorful Codes

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Some Code 💻

📈 Exponential growth

A job for this, a job for that… That’s all very well when you have 1000 users. But multiply this number by 10, and you end up with endless job queues and users waiting for their data to refresh for over 10 minutes… what a nightmare!

Surbhi Garg shows us how to configure Sidekiq to get a system to scale with its user base. 

✨ Scaling Journey from 16k to 160k Users - Surbhi Garg

✋ The truth, nothing but the truth

If you haven’t taken electrotech classes, you may not be familiar with truth tables. These tables help understand the basics of conditionals, but also the impact of certain admin panel settings and ways around unfortunate bugs. Eve Ragins illustrates this with very clear examples. 

✨ Using Truth Tables - Eve Ragins

🤖 Hey Gepetto, tell me my name

Whether we like it or not, we’re going to have to get used to AI sticking around. And we’d better know a thing or two about it if we want to use it wisely. Birgitta Böckeler has put together an overview on the topic for us. 

✨ Exploring Generative AI - Birgitta Böckeler

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Fun 🎉

🍬 Back to work sweet work

As you may have gathered by now, we need BEAUTY and COLORS and GLITTER in our lives. So we were delighted to read Carrie Cousins’ article about websites in candy pastel shades, and we’re tempted to try out her color recommendations. 

✨ Candy Pastels: A Soft and Soothing Graphic Trend - Carrie Cousins

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Events 🎡

🌈 Unicorns in tech afterworks - Berlin

Unicorns in Tech is an LGBTIQ+ friendly community with more than 4000 members. Every first Thursday of the month they hold an afterwork to get together with techies and create new projects. 

✨ Unicorns in Tech afterworks

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