🗝️ Newsletter WoR #63: quitting your job after a week?, Google outage, a bingo for front-end devs
A monthly newsletter about Ruby on Rails and the web
In this issue we read a postmortem, we see how to create a Ruby community, we are sick of cookies being forced on us, we learn more about AI agents, we admire beautiful portfolios…
😚 French version (version française)
Web News 🗞️
Between Cloudfare and Google outages this month we chose to discuss Google’s, especially because ByteByteGo’s excellent newsletter summarized it: How the Google Cloud Outage Crashed the Internet.
🤏 News in Brief
Angular continues to glow up in v20
Biome, the JavaScript AND TypeScript linter, released its v2: Biotype
GitHub reached 1 billion repos (and the name of that lucky repo is interesting)!
Ruby and Rails News 🛤️
📄 Time to Write Docs
You probably already thought “no time for docs”, “no one even reads them"? But as soon as Copilot comes up with a quirky bit of code, you quickly realize that well structured docs also helps your AI productivity.
✨The Machines Finally Made Us Care About Documentation - Daniela Baron
🤏 News in Brief
Celina Lopez created the gem Pretty ToDo to get organized
Some inspiration to start a meet-up in your city?
✨ Ruby Talks With Irina Nazarova: Meet the Woman Leading the Ruby Revival in San Francisco - Ruby CentralOlga Kuvardina presents How to Deploy a Rails App With Kamal (in as little as 8 minutes)
Amanda Bizzinotto published two back-to-back articles on how to get help from AI to write FastRuby.io’s newsletter: An LLM-based AI Assistant for the FastRuby.io Newsletter and Implementing Semantic Search with Sequel and pgvector
On the Web 🕸️
🗝️ I Guess We Need To Leave
Figma just released its Dev Mode MCP Server that allows tools like Cursor, Claude or VS Code to directly read Figma frames and styles. The tools can then generate React, styled-components or Tailwind code from simple prompts.
✨ Figma MCP and the most useful Figma resources for designers 🌟 - Romina Kavcic
🍪 No Cookies, Thanks
Tired of pop-ups that ask you to accept cookies in any way, shape or form? You’re not the only one. By using dark patterns, playing around with layout, styling and order of buttons we’re pushed to click “Accept”, even for those who are privacy-conscious and don’t want these damned cookies.
✨ Cookie Consent Design: How UI Choices and User Psychology Influence Privacy Decisions - Dr Maria Panagiotidi
🚪 Should I Stay Or Should I Go ?
When things don’t feel right the first week into a new job you don’t have to quit right away, but instead make an exit plan: identifying yellow flags (for example, everyone thinks the same), calmly plan and act when yellow flags become red.
✨ On How Long it Takes to Know if a Job is Right for You or Not - Charity Majors
🤏 News in Brief
Can a start-up grow without fundamentally changing its structure? The Peter Pan Syndrome is used here to describe start-ups with cultures that don’t change
✨ "Stripe has Peter Pan Syndrome" (Ex-Staff Engineer) - Amal HusseinDoes data really support in taking good decisions, or does it just confirm our biases?
✨ On the objectivity of data-driven decisions - Sarah MoirSome advice on writing engineering ladders that will make devs stay at a company
✨ 10 Years of Engineering Ladders - Camille FournierWe don’t have a hidden agenda, we just want to share an article discussing how the 4-day work week benefits both employees and companies
✨ Of Course Workers Want a Four-Day Week. Companies Should Too - Juliet B. SchorA tool with image recognition to learn how to spell your name in American Sign Language
✨ Sign Your Name
Some Code 💻
👩✈️ Airplane!
We’re embarking in a real “copilot” episode: creating a React front-end for “Planventure” by using GitHub Copilot Chat with Vite and Material UI. Authentication, forms, protected routes—everything is generated and injected directly in VS Code.
✨ GitHub for Beginners: Building a React App with GitHub Copilot - Kedasha Kerr
🚨 Buckle Up
To secure AI agents we’re setting up guardrails (request capping, error thresholds, sandbox, canary deployments, human validations at critial steps) and rollback mechanisms (audit, restoration). All the architecture must be planned to fail safely (that’s optimistic).
✨ Securing AI agents: A guide to authentication, authorization, and defense - Maria Paktiti
🎨 We’re Still Needed
Good news! Coding agents won’t necessarily replace teams of devs, at least according to this article that reveals that providing good abstractions upfront reduces cognitive complexity for both humans and AI.
✨ AI Agents (and humans) do better with good abstractions - Emma Forman Ling
🤏 News in Brief
Forcing devs to use a tool doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll adopt it (looking at you, Jira)
✨ The problem with shadow development - Kelli KorduckiFor those of you who aren’t following CSS news, it’s now possible to close `if`s!
✨ CSS if() functions & reading-flow (in Chrome 137) - Una KravetsAI doesn’t always work well with niche languages… Does that mean we still have to learn how to code? We’re definitely not surprised!
✨ The programming languages facing an AI-driven existential crisis - Kari McMahonGitHub is hosting Open Source Fridays led by Andrea Griffiths and Kedasha Kerr, and you can submit your project to be showcased if it meets the criteria
LLMs are living their best life right now but we long for the days of DSLs (Domain-Specific Languages)
✨ Programming Language Design in the Era of LLMs: A Return to Mediocrity? - Kiran GopinathanEverything is about lighting when it comes to bringing CSS objects to life!
✨ Lighting: Where 3D Comes to Life - Julia MioceneWe’re quite sure that the Nobel Prize in Literature won’t be awarded to a generative AI
✨ Writing in the Age of LLMs - Shreya Shankar
Fun 🎉
🔤 A Story of Fonts
The history of the latin alphabet isn’t linear. It’s more like a network with many connections throughout the centuries, which this website illustrates (yeah it’s pretty nerdy).
✨ Arete Visual History of the Latin Alphabet
🏠 Welcome Home
A pixel art portfolio that sleeps at night, it’s so kawaii.
✨ elle’s homepage
🔢 Yes, I’m Working
2048 straight from your terminal.
✨ The Bitwise Challenge: 2048 - Isabella Bosia
🍦 Front-end’s bingo
Another pretty pixel art portfolio, but this time with a quiz on the joys and frustrations of front-end development.
✨ You're not a front-end developer until you've... - Nic Chan
Events 🎡
🐗 Intense Reading - July 6th
Has the massive Designing Data-Intensive Applications book (or the PDF version that you’ve obtained 100% legally) been sitting on your shelf for months? It’s time to tackle it with the support of this book club.
✨ Elixir Book Club
☕ Buy us a coffee to support the newsletter 🍰 Thanks for your support, Ice Bear Nararno!
✨ Join us: meet-up | twitter | website
Editors: Camille and Juliette
English version: Jade