Through the Stack / 01-07 (Week 11)
This is "Through the Stack", a weekly list of links relating to topics relevant to Lead developers (actual or aspiring) working with an internet related product.
Many lead developers, tech lead and staff engineers have their hands in many projects and influence many layers in their organisations. This publication is aimed at sharing thoughts and content that are relevant to such profiles.
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This week ...
... we are going to see a bit of Ruby (mostly). After a little break last week as I was pretty busy I followed a bit of content this week and last week-end.
As I am currently involved with a Ruby team packaging their services in Docker containers I am browsing through a bit of content on the topic. It's been covered time and time again over the years so the signal vs noise ratio isn't great. But you can stumble upon gold nuggets such as this "Best practices when writing a Dockerfile for a Ruby application". This post is full of great stuff, and there is a lot of it.
I have found some great content for mid to senior level Rubyists : a short (about 8 min) intro to Using Prawn to make PDFs, some help with migrating from Ruby 2.7 to Ruby 3, and a great article on parallel testing with RubyOnRails.
Prawn is one of the cheapest way to generate PDFs from a Ruby stack before going to things like PrinceXML or DocRaptor. Generating PDFs is something that most projects out there need one way or another (invoices, contracts, reports, ...).
Migrations to Ruby 3 is a topic that will become very important in the coming months and years as Ruby 2.7 will see its decline accelerate. So better have some tools in our toolboxes for that.
Testing a Ruby application is a standard in all projects I have worked on and teams I know of. As a project starts to age making tests run in parallel becomes a requirement. So this is also a great skill to have.
Maybe less useful on the long run but great to know about and have at hand is a Rails engine to build Forums and this template example of Hotwire use.
This week I also want to share a link in the devops topic. I stumbled upon an open source project aimed at helping us keeping kubernetes clusters safer : Kubescape. Looks promising and helpful.
Finally, to conclude, I want to share a thread I found in my Twitter feed, a summary of Extreme Programmming (XP). It seems there is a trend to go back to the basics and roots of Agile these days, (as a reaction to the trend of ever more codified practices such as SAFe probably). None the less, this thread is great to give us food for thoughts and opportunities to reflect on how we work, what XP is about and how we can focus, again, on delivering actual value to our users and customers. The thread itself is an overview of 1999 Extreme Programming explained by Kent Beck, definitely a good read.
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