🦹 Newsletter WoR #61: There's No Stopping AI, Monoliths vs Microservices (Yes, Really), Inspiration for 404s...
A monthly newsletter about Ruby on Rails and the web
In this issue, we talk once again about AI (we had to trim down the content, otherwise the whole newsletter would have been about it), we read a defense of monoliths, get scared by secrets leaking, listen to Kylie Minogue…
😚 French version (version française)
Web News 🗞️
It's official: everyone is talking about AI (and billions of dollars—is this the Dot-com bubble all over again?). However, reading the State of WebDev AI 2025, we find that the quality of the code isn't good enough yet, and one needs to keep an eye on what comes out of it. Birgitta Böckeler underlines this point in Exploring Generative AI, with recommendations for devs and organizations. As for the future, it's best to be cautious in your predictions, according to Kari McMahon in How AI will change software engineering. So, to stay humble, let's meditate on Terry Pratchett's wise words from 1996 in Hogfather: “Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.”
🤏 In Brief
Item Flow proposes to combine Flexbox and Grid
As Ruby on Rails devs, we can only appreciate Wasp, a Rails-like framework for React, Node.js and Prisma, or gofr, an opinionated Go framework
Ruby and Rails News 🛤️
🌱 Defending our turf
This article starts like a tale that may bring a tear to some eyes: “Once upon a time, there was a start-up that built its MVP using Ruby on Rails. Then comes a new CTO that decides to split the monolith into microservices”. A little catharsis never hurts.
✨ Making the case for Rails monoliths over microservices - Sara Jackson
🤏 In Brief
Nidhi Sarvaiya presents the .excluding method for our database queries
A bit of debugging with a pry guide: How to use Pry to debug Ruby apps by Melissa Williams
Irina Nazarova delivered the keynote at Tropical on Rails with Startups On Rails 2025
Are you bumping your Rails version soon? Amanda Bizzinotto explains an important first step in Extracting Deprecation Warnings from the Rails Source Code
Fast MCP, a Ruby implementation of the Model Context Protocol
Gumboard, built using RoR, has gone open source
JRuby 10 and the first preview of Ruby 3.5 have been published
On the Web 🕸️
🪞Mirror, Mirror, On The wall, What Is a Social Construct?
A salutary call to reflect on the impact of AI, and to not simply consider it as a technical challenge, but also as a societal one. What do we want our AIs to say about us?
✨ You Are What You Create: The Human Reflection in AI's Mirror - Nnenna Ndukwe
📊 Show Me Your Data
We came across several articles in this newsletter on engineering leadership that covers developer well-being, how to conduct better retrospectives, what makes a code review useful, etc. All of this supported by data.
✨ Research-Driven Engineering Leadership - Lizzie Matusov
🤏 In Brief
If you don’t want users rage quitting your website on the sign-up screen because they don’t understand why their answer isn’t right, this article is for you
✨ How to write error messages that actually help users rather than frustrate them - Amy HupeTwo articles that sort of answer each other: the first on how to craft a standout leadership CV, the second on the first 90 days in this role (did Trump read all of this? Probably not)
✨ Crafting a Standout Leadership CV: A Comprehensive Guide - Lena Reinhard
✨ Your 30-60-90-day plan as a new manager - Franziska HinkelmannReminder: the European Accessibility Act is coming into effect soon. This article shows how a website should be accessible by keyboard navigation
✨ What Does It Really Mean For A Site To Be Keyboard Navigable - Eleanor Hecks
Some Code 💻
♾️ Context is Always Good
After a first article last August—Is It Time To Version Observability? (Signs Point To Yes)—that defined metrics, logs and traces as “Observability 1.0” and structured log events as “Observability 2.0”, the author is seeing “Observability 3.0” emerge through unified storage.
✨ Another Observability 3.0 appears on the Horizon - Charity Majors
📏 Performance Everywhere
Who said that only JavaScript slows down page loading? HTML also has a part in this. Here we learn how to check the size of our HTML file and different techniques to reduce it.
✨ 5 Ways to Reduce HTML File Size on Your Website - Anna Monus
🦹 You Weren’t Invited
Little horror story of the day: malicious code in tj-actions/changed-files leaked secrets in build logs. We learn how all of this happened because of a mutable Git reference and we are treated to a small shell script to check those in our repos.
✨ Whose code am I running in GitHub Actions ? - Alex Wan
🤏 In Brief
If you want to get into Front-End or if you need to strengthen the basics, you’ll find some project ideas here
✨ Ready to Build? 5 Fun Frontend Projects for Beginners (with HTML, CSS & JS) - Anisha SwainA presentation of Terraform drifts—when what is defined in Infrastructure as Code doesn’t match reality—and their causes
✨ The Dark Side of Terraform: Drifts, Chaos, and the Headaches They Bring - Saijal ShrivastavaLearning more about the text-wrap CSS property
✨ Typography troubles: Balancing lines in Japanese & Korean - Kelly Choyce-Dwan
Fun 🎉
🎶 Catchy Tune
Crazy things happened in the 90s, like when Kylie Minogue sang a song from the perspective of the GBI (German Bold Italic) typeface.
✨ Whitney Mallett on When Kylie Minogue Was a Font
🍴 Put Down That Fork
A cozy mystery with forms displaying "forks" instead of "yes."
✨ How a glitch in an online survey replaced the word ‘yes’ with ‘forks’ - Anna Brown
🗺️ Not Found
A collection of 404 pages to get inspired.
✨ 404s
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Editors: Camille and Juliette
English version: Jade