𪨠Newsletter WoR #69: AI won't solve all your problems, being human to avoid human error, and some games
A monthly newsletter about Ruby on Rails and the web
In this issue, we celebrate 20 years of jQuery and 25 years of Wikipedia, we can finally write CLIs in Ruby, we get inspired by mobile-first websites, we look at how to contribute to open source through docs, we improve our SQL skillsâŚ
đ French version (version française)
Web News đď¸
đ¤ News in Brief
jQuery is still alive and kicking, and released version 4.4.0 to celebrate its 20th birthday
The Astro framework is joining Cloudflare. Can a framework be community-based and not depend on a company (like React with Meta, Next.js with Vercel, Angular with Google, etc.) ? Could Ruby on Rails lead the way? đŤŁ
Wikipedia is celebrating 25 years. Ah, we long for the days when it was the only collaborative web media whose information we couldnât trust!
Ruby and Rails News đ¤ď¸
Did you, from the depth of your soul, always want to build pretty interfaces for your terminal, but was scared to learn Go or Rust? Youâre in luck then! Two new gems are letting you build Text User Interfaces (TUI) and Command Line Interfaces (CLI) using Ruby: RatatuiRuby, a gem built on Ratatui (Rust) and Charm Ruby, a gem built on Charm (Go).
đ¤ News in Brief
The Ruby website was redesigned completely. How do we like it?
And anecdotally, Ruby 4.4.0 was released on December 25th
Knowing how to code is also being able to create a program to solve a task or improve your everyday life. Thatâs exactly what Mary Lee did to generate crochet patterns in Crafting Code: Building a Ruby Pattern Generator for a Crochet Circle
On the Web đ¸ď¸
đŞ Really? AI Isnât Magic?
Companies left and right are letting go of people, saying that AI made them redundant. Coincidentally, that suits investors just fine. But if a company has lousy management to begin with, AI is not going to miraculously improve productivity (could it be done instead through better working conditions? Better work-life balance? WHO KNOWS? Ah yes, sociologists for the past 30 years.)
⨠Feeling Fast, Delivering Slow: Why Your AI Adoption Still Hasnât Paid Off - Dalia Havens
đą Mobile-first, Literately
If the web experience started off with the horizontal format, isnât it vertical now that social media is all the rage? (yes, Instagram, how could you have changed posts from square to rectangular without any warning?) At any rate, here weâre getting inspired by websites with mobile-first design.
⨠loadmo.re - Kim Lê Boutin
𪨠A Carrier Role Model?
Itâs always important to step back to change your perspective. Here, designers share various âmilestonesâ of their carriers. The fact that burnout is one of them is not worrying for the current work culture, not at all.
⨠Navigating career: Designerâs milestones
Some Code đť
đ Whatâs Up, CSS?
âCSS for design and JavaScript for interactivityâ will soon become a dated phrase. We can do more and more interactions in CSS, with the caveat that new functionalities are not supported by all browsers yet.
⨠CSS in 2026: The new features reshaping frontend development - Jemina Abu
âď¸ Better Docs
We sometimes forget that contributing to open source can also be done by improving documentation to make it accessible to a broader audience. Thatâs what Julia Evens and Marie LeBlanc Flanagan did. Julia explains the contributions theyâve made as well as the process, and we hope that inspires you to contribute to a project too!
⨠A data model for Git (and other docs updates) - Julia Evans
đ Itâs Not You, Itâs Us
When a bug rears its ugly head itâs tempting to look for a scapegoat. But only blaming human error hides the whole picture that explains why the bug happened in the first place, and how to fix it so that it doesnât happen again. Itâs about being more human by focusing on improving how an organization runs.
⨠You Canât Debug a System by Blaming a Person - Busra Koken
Fun đ
đ More Work?
More like a technique to pretend to work. Or even a better group activity to replace the backlog refinement meeting on Monday mornings. Hereâs a game that looks like a Kanban board in which you have to order events chronologically.
⨠Timdle Board
đ Riding the Wave
Results of the GitHub Game Jam 2025 with the theme âwavesâ have been announced. Weâre lucky to see some creative games, and this can even give you some inspiration to create your own game since GitHub has provided some recommendations for game engines based on the language of your choice.
⨠Game Off 2025 - GitHub
đď¸ A Social Network for the SQL Elite
Having to write SQL to post. Isnât that slightly absurd and pretentious? Yes. Do we love it because of this? Yes. Why stay on Twitter when you can use this site for micro-blogging AND review your SQL commands?
⨠SQLNET
â Buy us a coffee to support the newsletter đ°
⨠Join us: meet-up | website
Editors: Camille and Juliette
English version: Jade
Really solid newsletter. The jQuery turning 20 while still being actively developed is kind of wild, especially when so many younger frameworks burn bright and fade fast. The point about Cloudflare's framework acquisition versus organic community growth hits diffrently when you see how much weight corporate backing carries now in the dev ecosystem.