Through the Stack: 1.25 (week 45)
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 relevant thoughts and content 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 ...
We are cooling down a bit as we will be off for 2 weeks for my yearly "meditation break".
So, I did want to share what I have been reading about: a bit about Twitter and what's happening as a consequence of the change of heads. A bit about a company I keep an eye on (Plain.). As usual, there is quite a bit about Ruby, and Ruby on Rails; but also one tough link about infrastructure.
Leadership & product
With the current tumultuous times at Twitter some are heading towards Mastodon instances (if you are a Rubyist you might want to checkout https://ruby.social). Martinfowler.com published an interesting post on the topic of migration from Twitter to Mastodon: "Your organization should run its own Mastodon server".
Depending on how things go, this might be a significant turn for social networks in general, for companies in particular. Federated services such as what mastodon allows to build could move us back towards less centralized web and internet.
Speaking of which, just a plug to remind you of the RSS feed for this blog.
If you are looking for a tool to manage your newsletter, you might want to check http://buttondown.email/. Small company and a nice product. (I am not a paying customer).
Former co-worker at Lyst, Matt Vagni published some many tweets in the last few days about the company he is CTO at: Plain. Have a look. They are also hiring.
I want to share one of my tweets too because what I have been reading reminds me so much of some bad experiences that I wanted to potentially avoid someone going through similar experiences.
if you are thinking of joining a company and the CEO (founder or not) is front and center of every single product decision and publicly loud about them: go find another company to join
— Thomas Riboulet (@ThomasRiboulet_) November 8, 2022
Software engineering
Ruby is still the primary language of many teams. This week I stumbled upon a few things.
A thread on Twitter from @gregnavis about an interesting way to handle compound objects.
💡 Rails tip: Active Record makes it easy to manipulate compound objects stored in multiple columns. Works great in many scenarios:
— Greg Navis (@gregnavis) November 7, 2022
✅ Addresses
✅ Currencies
✅ Settings
✅ Tax IDs (ID type + ID value)
✅ Many others
Let's have a look some code ⬇️
The same Greg Navis shared another Ruby on Rails and Git trick.
A thread I jumped in too was about onboarding from @dpaola2. It also happens I shared a post on the topic recently.
And to conclude on Ruby on Rails a post from 37signals dev blog: Vanilla rails is plenty.
Infrastructure
After a couple of years of rising, Kubernetes seems to be hitting a wall. I keep reading more articles on why Kubernetes might not be for this or that use. Anyhow, Adam Chalmers has published an interesting list of solutions to common problems and how to solve them in Kubernetes. It's a long read, but it's worth it.
Music & audio
One song that I picked from a woodworking video:
An album I discovered through either Tools of titans or Tribe of Mentors (both, books from Tim Ferriss):
Epilogue
This is the end for this week. I hope you enjoyed this episode. There are quite some good reads, and they might help you in your day-to-day work and beyond.
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, ...).