Through the stack 1.18 (week 27)

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 organizations. This publication aims to share thoughts and content that are relevant to such profiles.
If you have comments or content to suggest, please reach out to us by email through-the-stack@imfiny.com.

This week ...

It's again quite tainted with Ruby but fear not: there are also links for Ops and Network people and some for team leads. It's more balanced than some past episodes.

On the Ruby side

As last week's episode was almost ready I suddenly found quite a bit of Ruby content. Yet, as there were quite a few links already I decided to keep them for this week.

Ruby is known quite a lot for Web applications and last week Keygen published an interesting take on API versioning: "Breaking things without breaking things". An interesting read with a few other links to other takes on the topic peppered in there.

Still on the web level, and the Ruby on Rails world: a post from Monade (a small web agency) on how to optimize database reads in a Ruby on Rails application. A good read for any Ruby on Rails developer (junior or not) to freshen up on what to do to query data from the database.

For the ones interested in deeper-level stuff: I came by an intriguing post about asynchronous programming in Ruby (one of the big additions to Ruby 3.0). It's not exactly a recent post, but still, a good read: "Ruby fiber scheduler".

Can't help but add a reference to a gem that looks quite interesting to handle document signing through SignWell: sign_well.

Finally, as this is one of the first items on my to-do list whenever I join a team: yet another good post about Rubocop and how to put it to good use in your projects.

Ops, Net & Sys

I was invited to a little AWS online event about release notes for Amazon RDS PostgreSQL. There were quite a bit of product-specific things in there (better performance, and so on) but there were also some nuggets that can be of use for anyone using PostgreSQL (in or out of AWS). One such nugget is pg_cron. You probably guessed it: it's a way to run commands in your instance.

Oh, if you are using AWS RDS then you might want to check this specific pg_cron documentation.

Possibly a bit more generic than "devops" but still an interesting read and a good reminder about the risks we tend to disregard about our favorite devices. Terence Eden shared, last month, an interesting article about his experience losing his house, and all is belongings to a house fire. Yes including his phone and 2FA physical keys.

AWS Week in Review has quite a list of updates to share this week. If you are using AWS and not keeping an eye on this feed you might want to add it to your bookmarks.

For those of us still putting our hands in SQL, Twitter delivered a nice set of cheat sheets.

And if you want to refresh yourselves on how HTTPS works, the great team at DNSimple has made a nice mini-site just for that.

Lead

Echoing last week's episode: more reading on #NoEstimates: this time from Zalando Engineering blog and (in french) from BearStudio: "Si on arrêtait de faire des estimations".

I haven't read on leadership topics much lately so I also tried to do so this week. A good way to refresh my thoughts on the topic.

As usual, LeadDev is one of my first stops. It's a great source of content around leadership for senior developers and has plenty of different points of view expressed too.

@lara_hogan's post "How to get helpful, actionable feedback from your colleagues" is nice to get us to review our way to ask for feedback and processing it.

@patkua's post "Three ways to run inclusive meetings" is great to learn or remind us about 3 important concepts to have better meetings.

Last week's episode of this newsletter also includes a reference to Pat Kua with his great participation to the Tech Lead Journal podcast.

@rhein_wein posted an interesting thread about burnout. Some good insights even though, since it's Twitter, the format is concise.

Podcasts

This week there is a bit more diversity in this section:

• Remote Ruby episode 186 is about Ruby infrastructure with Ufuk Kayserilioglu. A very interesting listen for Ruby folks.
• Tech Lead Journal episode 95 with Jeff Perry is super interesting. Probably more for people in leadership roles or aspiring to them.

Epilogue

This is the end for this week. I hope you enjoyed this episode. There are quite some good reads in there and they might help you in your day-to-day work.

Don't hesitate to ping me through https://twitter.com/ThomasRiboulet_ or through through-the-stack@imfiny.com with content suggestions or comments.

Who are we, by the way?

This content is written and published by Imfiny/CloudPier22, a consulting company based in France. We do Ruby software engineering and DevOps in the Cloud (AWS, GCP, and others). We also train and support teams in their journeys to grow code, infrastructure, and practices (production engineering, incident management, retrospectives, ...).
We have courses available on https://learn.imfiny.com/. We are available for 3 to 18 months contracts.