Through the Stack 2-06 (Week 11)
The last few weeks have been a forced break on this newsletter. After a year of publishing, I wondered about its type of content and format. I was not happy with the results. The lack of growth might be related to many things, but honestly, I think the content wasn't good enough to be of much interest.
So, let's be a bit rawer, focusing on topics that can help Tech Leads and CTOs but with fewer links and more depth.
Pier 22's life
As mentioned late last year, "Pier 22" is now the brand we will use most. So here is what we have been doing.
New website
Learning TailwindCSS allowed us to redo the main website of the company. It's all Ruby on Rails 7 and TailwindCSS with some Javascript.
Upcoming RSpec course
Following the release of our RSpec ebook, we continue on this topic with our first course on Maven: RSpec testing fundamentals for Ruby developers.
The course is aimed at being a live and extended version of the ebook to speed up your learning and get you through any hurdles you might encounter. There are limited seats, so don't wait too long.
Note: the ebook is still free until the 4th of April, after that it will be offered at the price of 8 EUR.
This week ...
Now let's look into what caught my eye. I have continued catching up with my reading, which was still on topics related to the DevOps Research papers. But it also echoed an interesting post titled "Efficiency is the Enemy".
I have published a post summarizing what I have found in those: "Slack and WIP limits".
That thread spawned from a deeper read of the content from the DevOps Capabilities content on Google Cloud's website. That content and DORA DevOps' quick check tool are quite handy for any CTO or Tech Lead to assess how things are going in their organization and what to do next to improve things.
A nice find through this was also the https://fs.blog/ website and its content.
On the AI & Ruby front
It's been tough to avoid any OpenAI and ChatGPT content lately. The buzz is growing, and with GPT-4 we will see another round of buzz around the technology. Still, it's difficult not to agree that there are plenty of use cases of the technology, and there will be a significant impact. We shall see. Will we finally see an actually helpful version of Clippy thanks for GPT-4?
Rubygems already has a few openai related libraries and a few articles have surfaced too. Here is one giving a good introduction to wire ChatGPT to a Ruby application. So there is little stopping you from integrating it into your own products or your local tooling.
Thanks to JoeMasilotti and Kirill Shevchenko, I discovered Overmind, an alternative to Foreman relying on Tmux so that you can still debug through it.
Searching for a new role?
- Algrano is looking for a Full-Stack Engineer. I had the pleasure of having a chat with them. As I am a bit too senior for the role we agreed to stay in contact but it was nice to chat. Their stack and work strategies sound interesting. The product is also nice, especially if you like coffee.
- Warmango is looking for a Full-Stack Engineer. I actually worked with them for a time, the team is very nice, and the project is also interesting. As they are now part of the Van Marcke group, it might not have all the feeling of a startup anymore. Oh, this is a french speaking team (for now).
- Sêmeia, which I talked about last week, is also looking for a developer. As far as I know, this is also a french speaking team.
- Ilek, is also looking for several people located in France to fill several roles. I have worked with this team for two years, a really nice set of people.
All those opportunities are remote-friendly too.
Wrapping up
That'll be all for this week: news about the company and a specific spotlight on a topic that has been on my screens actively these last few weeks.
As always, feel free to reach out with comments, questions, and related content that might interest you.
Who are we, by the way?
This content is written and published by Imfiny/Pier22, a consulting company based in France. We help CTOs and Tech Leads grow their engineering team and stack.