Remote Ruby Jason Charnes, Chris Oliver, Andrew Mason

On this episode of Remote Ruby, if you’ve never heard of The Cannonball Run, Chris explains what it involves, Andrew is down for it of course, and Jason tells us Vin Diesel recorded a song and Andrew celebrated his birthday!  In the Ruby world,  we’ll find out why the guys are all fans of Pagy, and we’ll hear about a fun hack day project that the talented guys from GoRails built called, Beginner Bounties.  Basically, if you’re a Junior Developer and you need to build your resume and want to stand out, you can use this platform to list small engineering projects for other people and get paid for it. Also, the guys discuss why shipping is such a great skill to have, finding the right job you enjoy, avoiding burnout, the importance of taking breaks, balancing things out, and there’s some valuable advice given for all the Junior Developers out there that you don’t want to miss.  Hit download now to hear more! 


[00:04:50] At the end of last year, Andrew was working with Turbo and infinite scrolling Pagination, we find out what happened when the author of Pagy reached out to him. Chris and Andres give a huge shout-out to the author for doing top notch maintenance. 

[00:10:18] If you build Pagination on the frontend with React, Jason explains that Pagy’s really good because they have a metadata option you can turn on that has the full set of variables and properties to build pagination on the front end. Jason did it with Inertia.js and there’s a great episode to check out with the creator of it.  

[00:13:39] The new Pagy docs look incredible, we hear about Microsoft .NET, and Chris tells us about using someone’s browser called a kiosk browser.

[00:18:36] Chris announces at GoRails this week, they decided to have a fun hack day and built a site called Beginner Bounties. Chris had this idea for years, and it’s geared towards Junior Developers. Go check it out! 

[00:22:00] Andrew plays devil’s advocate and asks a question using a real example regarding a project, needing to upgrade a gem to take advantage of a new configuration system, and rather than figuring out how to do it, he could pay someone to figure it out faster. Why is this wrong? 

[00:26:38] We hear a great story about Colin and how he got the experience he needed by helping Andrew, which led to him finally getting a job. Rails developers are the top paid developers right now, but Chris tells us there’s not a lot of Junior job openings right now but hopes companies will start hiring more juniors since it will be hard to fight for the senior positions. 

[00:30:25] There is important advice shared here regarding shipping, and why it’s a great skill to have. 
 
[00:31:22] Chris tells us about a PR that someone made to the prefixed_ids gem.

[00:33:58] Andrew and Chris talk about bounties for Juniors to gain experience in coding. 
 
[00:43:23] The valuable points shared here is don’t wait for an opportunity to come to you. Start doing something! The people who get stuff done are the ones who will get hired.  The worst thing you can do is fail, but you can always try, try again! Also, people hire their friends, and they can help when it comes to finding a job, and when you work with friends you can accomplish more, you can learn more, and have more fun. 

[00:49:18] Andrew and Chris discuss enjoying what you do for a living, balancing things out, avoiding burnout, and the importance of taking breaks.


Panelists:
Jason Charnes
Chris Oliver
Andrew Mason


Sponsor:
Honeybadger


Links:
Jason Charnes Twitter
Chris Oliver Twitter
Andrew Mason Twitter
The Cannonball Run
Remote Ruby Podcast-Episode 66-Joined by Jonathan Reinink, Creator of Inertia.js
Pagy
.NET
Beginner Bounties
Prefixed_ids 
IMAGINARY kiosk-browser
Ruby Radar Twitter
Ruby for All Podcast

On this episode of Remote Ruby, Chris came down with what he thinks was food poisoning this week, Jason brings up Ghost Kitchens which seem to be a thing these days, and Chris applied to be a Guide at RailsConf 2023. Also, Jason and Chris are excited to have a guest joining them because they’ve always talked about how they wished for better tooling for day-to-day Ruby development, so they brought on Vini Stock, who’s a Senior Developer at Shopify. Shopify has created the Ruby Language Server (LSP) to make it easier to implement features such as code definition and auto formatting for Ruby across different editors. We’re so lucky to have Vini with us to discuss the Ruby LSP and some other really cool things happening in the Ruby tooling space. We hope you enjoy this episode! Hit the download button now.

[00:06:19] Vini shares his journey of programming and working with the Ruby on Rails Infrastructure team.

[00:08:27] Now that Vini is on the Ruby Infrastructure team, we find out what kind of projects he was first working on. 

[00:12:04] How long has the Ruby Experience team and the LSP project been a thing?

[00:12:44] Vini explains why the Ruby LSP was created. 

[00:15:25] Let’s find out some goals they want to achieve with the LSP right now.

[00:17:37] We hear some of the differences between the work Vini’s doing on Ruby LSP and something like Solargraph.

[00:19:01] Listen here as Vini details how Go To Definition works, which is a more complex feature than others.

[00:24:34] Jason asks Vini what language do you write a language server in? 

[00:27:26] Chris wonders what challenges Vini runs into and what’s the next step of the problem of building the language server. Where does he go from there?
 
[00:31:38] Vini shares his aha moment when he built a feature and used it, and he was thinking, “Build with joy!” 

[00:32:46] We hear if Vini’s using RuboCop or Syntax tree for formatting, which leads him into telling us about future plans of adding a plugin system to be able to format with standard and with Ruby format. 

[00:35:56] Vini shares other ideas he has for the future of the Ruby LSP.

[00:37:11] Outside of the LSP, we hear about some other projects Shopify is working on with contributing to the new Ruby debugger, Chris expresses his appreciation for all the new tooling the team at Shopify is working on, and Jason expresses his love for the Rust tooling.

[00:42:18] Have you seen Gary Bernhardt’s talk on building an editor? 

[00:46:27] If you want to try Ruby LSP, Vini tells us where to go to set up VS Code.

[00:50:29] There’s a great blog post Vini wrote, a video with his talk from RailsConf 2022, and find out where you can follow him online.


Panelists:
Jason Charnes
Chris Oliver


Guest:
Vinicius (Vini) Stock


Sponsor:
Honeybadger


Links:
Jason Charnes Twitter
Chris Oliver Twitter
Andrew Mason Twitter
Vinicius Stock Twitter
Vinicius Stock GitHub
Vinicius Stock Website
Ruby LSP (VS Code extension)
Ruby LSP-Shopify
Improving the Developer Experience with the Ruby LSP by Vinicius Stock
RubyConf 2022- Improving the development experience with language servers by Vinicius Stock (YouTube)
RailConf 2023
A Whole New World-A talk by Gary Bernhardt from Strange Loop 2012
Ruby Radar Twitter
Ruby for All Podcast

On this episode of Remote Ruby, it’s another “Five Minutes of Nothing About Our Show” as the guys discuss Police Academy and the comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, a picture of Chris’s son dressed in Adidas gear, and Jason’s dilemma finding Adidas gear.  Now back to our regularly scheduled podcast topics, as Jason decided he needed a new hobby, so he bought a BeagleBone Black. We’ll hear how he used Elixir Nerves, Circuits, and some Ruby programming languages he’s been tinkering with. The guys discuss trying mruby, DragonRuby, Pi-hole, and Zeus.  Also, after two years, devise 4.9.0 was released thanks to Carlos, and you can find out all the cool new features here, as well as the new authentication stuff in Rails 7.1. Download this episode now to find out more! 

[00:02:26] Jason shares a journey he’s been on since his knee surgery and deciding he needed a hobby, so he ordered a BeagleBone Black, which is like a Raspberry Pi. 

[00:05:17] We hear how Jason used Elixir Nerves, which is a way to build Elixir apps on microcomputers and controllers, and he used a GPIO library called Circuits.

[00:07:56] We hear about some Ruby programming languages that Jason has been tinkering with such as Ruby 2D which is built on top of another library from the same author for C called Simple 2D, Chris mentions a library that he used for air quality sensor on the Raspberry Pi.

[00:09:16] Jason and Andrew talk about trying mruby and DragonRuby.

[00:12:17] Andrew wonders if anyone has tried Pi-hole.

[00:14:07] Chris talks about Big Clive, a hilarious guy on YouTube that you should check out if you want to get into soldering and circuits. 

[00:18:06] In case you don’t know, mruby is really cool and if Jason can find a use case for it, he’ll use it, and Matz is still actively working on it. The guys discuss the details between mruby and CRuby.

[00:21:48] Jason’s been looking at Rust and going through the tutorial has been a little scary to him, but they have a build system called Cargo and he tells us what it does. The guys bring up an old episode with Terence Lee where they talked about mruby.

[00:23:49] Have you heard of Zeus, not the Greek God but a Rails preloader? 
 
[00:24:59] Chris shares how fiddling with stuff and making things got all of them into programming, and how he’s still working on his project with wiring up LED lights in his home theater. 

[00:26:25] A BIG shout out to Carlos for getting devise 4.9.0 released with backward compatibility and Turbo and Hotwire support after two years of not working properly with Rails 7.

[00:30:42] Find out about all the new authentication stuff in Rails 7.1.


Panelists:
Jason Charnes
Chris Oliver
Andrew Mason


Sponsor:
Honeybadger


Links:
Jason Charnes Twitter
Chris Oliver Twitter
Andrew Mason Twitter
Ruby Radar Twitter
Ruby for All Podcast
BeagleBone Black
Nerves
Circuits.GPIO
Ruby 2D
Simple 2D
mruby
DragonRuby
Pi-hole
Bigclivedotcom-YouTube
mruby
Cargo
Remote Ruby Podcast-Episode 27: Joined by Terence Lee
Zeus
devise 4.9.0
Rails 7.1 Release Notes

On this episode of Remote Ruby, we have an awesome guest joining us. Today, we have Ken Collins, who’s a Principal Engineer and Cloud Architect at Custom Ink, an active member in the Ruby community for over fifteen years, a Microsoft open source contributor, PC Gamer, and an AWS Serverless Hero. We have so much to discuss today, as Ken fills us in on Lamby, Custom Ink, how Lambda evolved, a gem called Lambdakiq, and if you’re looking for cost optimization, why Lambda is the best compute service out there. We’ll also learn how CloudFormation can help developers, how CloudWatch Events is used, and we’ll hear about the different database options Amazon has such as Aurora Serverless, DynamoDB, and RDS. If you’ve never used Lambda, it’s a good time to try it out. Andrew realized he’s in the perfect place to try it since he recently built a proxy one. Download this episode to learn much more! 

[00:01:52] Ken tells us about himself and his background

[00:04:47] Custom Ink makes some great products, and we’ll learn how Lamby came to be, the stuff they build, the cool tech behind it, and the services, such as AWS Lambda.

[00:08:16] How did Lambda evolve?

[00:09:17] Ken details what the OCI format is, and how Lambda works compared to deploying to a traditional server. We hear about Lambda releasing Function URLs, a free API gateway, and what it does.

[00:12:16] We hear the whole process from end-to-end, starting from a web request, what happens, how it gets to Rails, Dynos are running, the database gets affected, and how those containers can be used for other things like an event driven architectures.

[00:16:03] Chris asks Ken how Kubernetes and Lambda compare. Also, we hear how background jobs and cron jobs fit in, and a gem that Ken wrote called, Lambdakiq.

[00:20:30] How does Ken manage connections being made and the events being sent to the right place? Also, Chris wonders if CloudFormation is something you should learn as one of the starting points or you should later for it to be more useful, and Ken tells us about the AWS Cloud Development Kit and what it does.

[00:24:10] Amazon has many different database options and Ken explains that you can use any database you want, wherever you want.

[00:25:39] Ken explains the differences between Aurora Serverless, DynamoDB, and RDS.  
 
[00:30:23] We’re going back to talking about Lambda now and Ken tells us about their website, a documentation website where they cover things, and a Quick Start Guide on how you can deploy a new Rails APP on Rails 3.2 to Lambda in 5 minutes.
[00:33:02] Chris mentions how Taylor Otwell modified Laravel to run on Lambda, and Vapor is their tool for deploying to Lambda.

[00:36:25] Are there any gotchas? Chris heard people were talking about Rails being slow to boot and issues with connecting to your Lambda to a VPC was slow. Ken tells us the VPC has been solved very well.

[00:39:31] Ken and Chris chat about the hardest things are learning and change management, like setting up CI for the first time can be challenging, Heroku is amazing but has its limits, and using CloudWatch Logs which is a change for people. Also, Ken shares a hotspot with Lambda, and he tells us about Lambda Punch and New Relic.
 
[00:42:47] Ken tells us to use CloudWatch Events for setting up Cronjobs that run on a schedule.

[00:44:51] Chris wonders if there are concerns or ways you have to change things for assets, and Ken explains what they do with turning on the magic environment variable, but if you need something else, it goes into the CI/CD Pipeline creation.

[00:48:30] Andrew is going to try Lambda now, and we hear Ken’s thoughts on how different development is from production when you use Lambda. Find out why he loves Microsoft’s Development Containers Specification, and Chris mentions DHH’s MRSK project and what it’s going to do.

[00:56:06] Find out where to follow Ken, if you’re interested in Custom Ink, check them out, and please

Welcome to Remote Ruby and thanks for joining us!  Today, we have the most boring guest joining us…we’re kidding of course!  Our guest is Matt Swanson, who’s the CTO at Arrows and author of Boring Rails.  He’s taking over Jason’s spot today to bring us all the “spicy takes.”  Now that we’ve got your attention, you’re probably wondering what these “spicy takes” are.  We’ll just give you a little teaser…a new tool may replace Git in the next five years and contributing to open source is terrible advice for new programmers. We’ll also find out why testing and automated tests are so important, Matt explains how they prioritize features for customers at Arrows, he highlights two open source projects for people learning Ruby and Rails, and we find out Arrows is hiring Product Engineers.   Download this episode now to hear much more!

[00:01:00] Chris brings up Matt’s post from two weeks ago on Action Mailer stuff that you should go read.

[00:04:48] Matt has some spicy takes he wants to talk about, and he starts with the spiciest thing, and tells us about a new tool that may replace Git in the next five years.

[00:10:35] It’s spicy take #2, and Andrew wants it at a Maximum level of hot. Matt tells us that contributing to open source is terrible advice for new programmers, and Andrew and Chris share their take on this. 

[00:17:19] Matt highlights two open source projects for people who are learning Ruby and Rails that simulate real work and they are the umbrella of the Ruby for Good project and Forem project. Chris shares a college story when he was building a Rails app, ran into a bug, and wanted to fix it.

[00:21:13] Chris brings up the most common advice you see given always is, “Take it with a grain of salt.” Also, he explains why building features is the thing to focus on the most as a developer.

[00:25:39] Matt explains why testing and automated tests are so important, and there’s a discussion about VIM.

[00:28:54] Chris asks Matt how they prioritize features and things for customers, and what they use for custom domains.

[00:37:43] Chris talks about Hatchbox, how he learned so much from building the first version and making things simple, not building team support was an issue, and switching from Vimeo to Wistia for GoRails videos, but now looking at other options.

[00:44:06] Matt tells us about a feature in Arrows where they wanted people to have the ability to do embeds. 
 
[00:46:21] Arrows is looking to hire people for that Product Engineer role so please reach out to them. 

[00:48:02] What does Matt mean by scrappy, not crappy, when it comes to building, and he explains something he shared from someone recently on Twitter where you can build a mini form inside of an onboarding plan.  

[00:56:15] Chris brings up how they recently had Derek Sivers on as a guest where he talked about when he’s writing his Ruby code he tries to put as much logic and functions in Postgres.

[00:59:24] We end with Matt teasing a few last spicy takes for a future episode that you will want to hear.

[01:03:21] Find out where you can follow Matt on the web.


Panelists:
Chris Oliver
Andrew Mason


Guest:
Matt Swanson


Sponsor:
Honeybadger


Links:
Jason Charnes Twitter
Chris Oliver Twitter
Andrew Mason Twitter
Matt Swanson Twitter
Arrows
Boring Rails
Writing better Action Mailers: Revisiting a core Rails concept (Boring Rails)
Ruby for Good
Forem
Kent Beck
Jobs at Arrows
Remote Ruby Podcast-Episode 216: How Derek Sivers Uses Ruby and His Programming Philosophy
Ruby Radar Twitter
Ruby for All Podcast

Welcome to this episode of The Food Reviews: Remote Uber Eats, where you’ll find out Chili’s is the new golf course, Hooters does not serve southern seafood, restaurants that have ghost kitchens, and Applebee’s tableside electronic games trap. We’ll also hear about the new Stimulus Outlets API, concurrency problems, Jason using Stripe event and adding webhooks for his Stripe account, Chris tells us about using Friendly ID, Jason explains what routing constraints does, and Andrew shares a pro tip with creating class methods. Also, there’s a new little gem Chris has been working on called ReviseAuth, and he’s looking for contributors if you want to help him out. Download this episode now to find out more!