🪄 Newsletter WoR #51: the magic behind Rails, male ragers, unapologetic work ethic
A monthly newsletter about Ruby on Rails and the web
In this issue, we want to take the dudes down a peg or two, we use test frameworks to strengthen our Ruby projects, and as usual we love to mix art and code…
😚 French version (version française) | 🤌 Italian version (versione italiana) | 🤝 Spanish version (versión española)
Web News 🗞️
😡 403 Error
“There’s only one female-only event in this male dominated industry, and it ended up being a male dominated event… Thanks guys”. In Orlando, a tech conference dedicated to female developers was completely taken over by male participants. Some of them even pushed and harassed other female participants to get to the recruiting booths. A sad story with a bitter taste of déjà vu.
✨ ‘Some of You Lied About Your Gender:’ Men Swamp Tech Conference for Women - Samantha Cole
Ruby and Rails News 🛤️
📕 21 reasons to read
We keep badgering you to test your code, and Veethee Dixit is definitely not gonna blame us. She found quite a few frameworks to do exactly that. We have to admit: we had no idea there were so many testing frameworks!
✨ 21 Best Ruby Testing Frameworks for 2023 - Veethee Dixit
🤏 News in a nutshell
Ruby Video, an open-source project that lists over 700 Ruby and Rails talks
The Ruby on Rails Podcast invited Megan Marquardt-Ray, an Engineering Manager from Included Health who tells us all about hiring devs and supporting their careers.
Do you think katas are only useful to prepare job interviews? Think again: in this article, Nina Torganukova from Evil Martians explains how she upped her game with a year of LeetCode.
Ruby Tip 💎
Strong Migrationsstrong_migrations is a gem that detects potentially risky steps in your migrations, and blocks them by default. This gem is even kind enough to give you some advice on how to make your migrations safer. For example:
=== Dangerous operation detected #strong_migrations ===
Active Record caches attributes, which causes problems when removing columns. Be sure to ignore the column:
class User < ApplicationRecord
self.ignored_columns = ["name"]
end
Deploy the code, then wrap this step in a safety_assured { ... } block.
class RemoveColumn < ActiveRecord::Migration[7.0]
def change
safety_assured { remove_column :users, :name }
end
endOn the Web 🕸️
🙋🏻♀️ We can do it
More women in tech also means more women holding tech conferences. Is imposter syndrome holding you back from launching your own conference? Eleftheria Batsou went from junior dev to tech conference speaker, and learned a lot in the process. Read on on her blog:
✨ How I became a tech conference speaker and how you can do it too - Eleftheria Batsou
🪷 Good design vs bad design
As poet Nicolas Boileau says, “whatever is well conceived is clearly said”, and that’s especially relevant to the design of a web page or an app. If it’s well conceived, it’s clear for the user. And sometimes it all comes down to tiny but essential details which absolutely do not call for dark patterns!
Why Does a Design Look Good ? - Sarah GibbonsandKelley Gordon
🥺 Sorry, but…
You’ve probably heard this a hundred times, sorry. But (and sorry to insist), you really need to stop saying sorry at work. Nupur Arya shares very practical tips to help you stop.
✨ Stop Over-Apologizing at Work - Nupur Arya
Some Code 💻
✊ Action, reaction!
Loraine Lawson gives us a glimpse of what was said at the International Javascript Conference. She heard the creator of Angular and Qwik give a lecture on the reactivity of Javascript frameworks, his point being that Qwik will be the “next big thing”. Let’s see what Loraine thinks about that.
✨ How Javascript Frameworks Handle Reactivity - Loraine Lawson
🌁 Misty eyes
We love to see technology and art come together. That is exactly what Chuan is offering with these 3 ways of giving images a blurry effect. Just what you need to add a mystery feel to your blog posts.
🪄 It’s a kind of maaa-giiic
In the opening Keynote for RailsConf 2023, Eileen M. Uchitelle spoke about the cliché that we often hear from non Ruby/Rails devs: “Too much magic in Rails”. Indeedy, much magic can mean much frustration for those who don’t feel in control! Here is the perfect article to show them how to nail all the Rails tricks.
✨ The Magic of Rails - Eileen M. Uchitelle
Fun 🎉
🖇️ Scan me
Holly Cummins shared her code to generate a QR code. Unlike most generators, hers does not have any cookies so it protects the data. You can even customize it with an image!
✨ Creating Custom QR Codes - Holly Cummins
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Editors: Aurelie, Camille, Lucille and Juliette
English version: Marine and Jade
Italian version: Paola
Spanish version: Kattya