🎊 Newsletter WoR #67: Celebrating 5 years!

A monthly newsletter about Ruby on Rails and the web

In this issue, we look back on five years of the newsletter, we stay up to date with web news and the latest developments in the Ruby community before moving on to some games. We have a little less tech content this time, but we’ll resume where we left off next time!

😚 French version (version française)

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Our first newsletter was published on November 3^rd 2020! To go back to the spirit (and the wording) of the first edition, I (Juliette Audema) will start this editorial in my name. When I created this newsletter five years ago I was in a start-up where I was sexually harassed. My career switch had taken place just over a year ago. I “fell into coding” and my learning, the people I was meeting, all of this gave me enthusiasm and supported my career transition, until this company.

Shit happens as they say.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I created at that time, under the banner of Women on Rails, this little online space where I could write about code with the enthusiasm I had since the beginning. In all fairness this project wasn’t born out of itself. I was mentored, and I used all of my CPF (Compte personnel de formation: allowance given by the French government to allow people to pursue professional training - Yeah we’re that lucky) to follow a training on digital content creation.

Since then, I’ve been vocal about the harassment I was a victim of by sharing legal resources. Accompanied by my lawyer and an NGO militating against sexual violences in the workplace against women, I went to labour court. Two years ago my former employer, CapSens, was convicted for sexual harassment and sexist behavior, as well as for failing to fulfill its prevention and safety obligations.

And the newsletter… is still here! Camille Regnault jumped on the bandwagon in the very beginning. The WNB.rb got us in touch with Aurélie Verrot who translated the newsletter in English. Paola Ducolin translated it in Italian for some time, while Kattya Cuevas did it in Spanish. Lucille James joined the writing and editorial team, Aurélie also wrote and edited in addition to translating. Marine Gallois translated issues in English. Today Jade Philippe writes the English translation.

At the start of the newsletter, we were sharing news that were popular in English-speaking newsletters, but we quickly realized that most of the content we were sharing was created by men… Were there no women or non-binary people in tech?! Of course not, but “mainstream” newsletters that we read did not highlight these voices. We then decided to share content created almost exclusively by women, non-binary people or minorities, knowing that all of those people can face multiple forms of discrimination, whether due to their gender, social or ethic background, age, weight, sexual orientation or disability. We do our best to be aware of the image the newsletter depicts of diversity of people that work in tech. If you’re not familiar with this political topic, or you’d like to talk about it with people around you and you want a (cautious) introduction, we recommend the keynote Lucky You by Sandi Metz.

This is the (not so secret) goal of the newsletter: giving you tech news, sharing content that picked our curiosity while hoping it does the same for you. Being able to write now that yes, there are women, non-binary people and minorities working in tech. And for the future, leaving a proof of this reality for those who are often tempted to rewrite History.

Thank you for continuing to read the newsletter, subscribing, sharing it, and for the heartwarming feedback we’re received over the years. 🫶

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Web News 🗞️

• AWS shared the post-mortem from their outage of October 19^th and 20^th and you won’t believe it but:

• One year after they released the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Anthropic announced their latest creation: Agent Skills. MCPs can access external data and with Agent Skills we can give specialized skills (procedures, scripts, resources) to an AI agent. Just a timing coincidence but M3gan 2.0 is now available for streaming.

• Chrome published their chrome-devtools-mcp that allows your coding agent to inspect your Chrome browser. Because delegating the creation of a form is nice, but delegating testing of said form is basically nirvana.

• New emojis are available!

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Ruby and Rails News 🛤️

A lot of things happened since our last newsletter when a big conflict in the Ruby community was seen by outsiders as a textbook case on open-source project management. In order: Ruby Central published a timeline which ended up being disputed, as presented by Sarah Gooding. Maintainers who left Ruby Central presented their own tool, gem.coop, to replace Ruby Gems. Matz (the creator of Ruby) intervened and announced that the Ruby core team would take ownership of RubyGems in collaboration with Ruby Central. And now former maintainers have announced that they would pass the torch on to the Ruby core team under some legal conditions to focus on other projects in the Ruby community, including gem.coop.

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Ruby tip 💎

Enumerator.produce: generate a lazy repeating pattern

colors = [:ruby, :rails, :bronze, :silver, :gold]

pattern = Enumerator.produce(0) { |i| (i + 1) % colors.size }

5.times { |year| puts “Year #{year + 1}: #{colors[pattern.next]}” }

=>
Year 1: ruby
Year 2: rails
Year 3: bronze
Year 4: silver
Year 5: gold

• Enumerator.produce(initial) { |current| next } creates a lazy enumerator that computes each value on demand from the previous one

• Here, (i + 1) % colors.size cycles through color indices infinitely without storing the full array

• Perfect for generating repeating patterns or badges, memory-safe and easily extensible

✨ Enumerator.produce Documentation

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Fun 🎉

A few games to wrap up this special edition:

• Investigations based on Wikipedia data

• Three.js struck again with this very pretty game that can be played in the browser: Messenger

Finally, this beautiful website, Mushroom Color Atlas, that lets you explore the color palette of mushrooms. The project was created by Julie Beeler and illustrated by Yuli Gates. We do not want to know if you find the color of your ex’s fungal infection though.

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Editors: Camille and Juliette
English version: Jade