⚡️ Hotwire dev newsletter - January 2023 edition

Welcome back to the ⚡️ Hotwire dev newsletter and happy New Year!

How are you keeping up with your New Year’s resolutions? I set a single goal for myself: be more intentional with my time. I’m keeping a daily journal, tracking all my time spent on a computer, and getting outside more.

Having a single goal, even if a little abstract, is helping me focus what I work on. And more importantly, what not to work on.

And I’d love to apply that same mentality to this newsletter. I want to produce the best newsletter for Hotwire and Rails developers. So I’d love to know why you read it every month.

Can you please help by filling out a 2 question survey? It will only take 10 seconds. Thank you!

🎥 Videos

Real-time Drawing With Action Cable

by Deanin @Deaniocom

This is one of the more impressive Action Cable tutorials I’ve seen. By the end of the video you can drag your mouse on the screen to draw lines. And another user visiting the same page will see your sketch in real time! As expected, there is a fair amount of JavaScript required. Most of the code here is working with the HTML Canvas API and Action Cable is doing the plumbing to make it update in real time.

Why are we afraid to hire junior rails developers?

by Joe Masilotti @joemasilotti

In May I had the honor of speaking at the first ever Rails SaaS conference in LA. And you can now watch my talk on YouTube.

From my learnings building RailsDevs, I cover how to get more juniors hired in our ecosystem. I outline actionable tips and stories for hiring mangers, senior developers, and even juniors looking for their first role.

Custom Turbo Stream Actions

by David Kimura @kobaltz

Turbo Streams are a powerful way to add a bit of dynamic content to your Rails app. But sometimes the default 7 that are included can be a little limiting. This tutorial walks through how to add completely custom Turbo Stream Actions which let you execute a bit of JavaScript code directly from your Ruby backend.

Let’s Build Twitter with Ruby on Rails

by TypeFast

Part 1 of a whopping 23 part series on building Twitter with Rails and Hotwire. This video kicks off the series with a new Rails project and some initial setup like adding RSpec and Bootstrap. The rest of the series covers Devise, flash messages, tweeting from modals, upgrading flows with Turbo, retweeting, and a whole lot more.

Hotwire: Online user tracking with Turbo Streams

by Pete Hawkins @peteyhawkins

A quick 8 minute video on how to add an online presence badge when someone is signed in. Everything comes together without any custom JavaScript or Action Cable code – all the logic is kept in the model and some supporting views.

📰 Articles

An Overview Of Ruby on Rails 7.1 Features. Parts I to III

by Emmanuel Hayford @siaw23

This series includes 60+ new features, improvements, and upgrades from Rails 7.1, all documented with concrete examples. I’m most looking forward to #stub_const, explicitly defining which locals a template accepts, Rails.env.local?, and an easier way to search for Rails routes. Don’t miss Part I, Part II, and Part III.

My journey from frustration with the JavaScript stack to finding joy in Ruby on Rails

by Devanil Junior @Devanil

Devanil goes through 7 reasons on why they are excited about Ruby on Rails after spending some times in the JavaScript ecosystem. #3 especially resonated with me, touching on developer happiness. It’s clear how much time and effort is put into Ruby and Rails to make the developer experience better. I genuinly enjoy writing Ruby code. I can’t say the same for any other language.

Ruby and Rails going from 2022 to 2023

by Rich Steinmetz @RichStoneIO

The good and the bad on our favorite language and framework in 2022. Also, a peek into what’s coming in 2023. Speculation perhaps, but the last sentence gets me excited. “We might see more content, development and maturity around building native mobile apps with Rails in 2023.” Yes, please! I’d love to see more Turbo Native content, especially if it came from official sources. One man can only write so much on the subject.

Rails::Command::NotesCommand

by Women On Rails Newsletter @womenonrails

Did you know that Rails has a built in task to list all of your FIXME comments? Me neither! You can even add your own custom ones tags to the default FIXME, OPTIMIZE, and CODE.

Private methods in Stimulus controllers

by Konnor Rogers @RogersKonnor

Hotwire helps remove a lot of custom JavaScript from your application. But there are still times where you need to add a few sprinkles on top for a feature or two. One thing I’ve always disliked about Stimulus was the lack of private methods. Konnor to the rescue!

💼 Job hunt

37signals is hiring three engineering interns

A rare opportunity to work with the folks at 37signals as a summer intern. They are offering a 4-day work week and $2,000 per week. Applications close February 10, so apply soon.

Hotwire job board

by Ryan Strickler @ryanstrickler

A new job board dedicated to Hotwire appeared a few weeks ago. It’s still fairly new so there aren’t a ton of jobs yet. But Ryan manually curates the list so expect a lot of signal and very little noise.

GoRails job board

by Chris Oliver @excid3

Another Rails job board, brought to you Chris from GoRails. You can find contract gigs alongside full-time roles here, making it one of the few sites valuable to the fellow Rails freelancer.

RailsDevs

by Joe Masilotti @joemasilotti

If scouring job boards and emailing resumes is not your thing then your profile on RailsDevs. Hiring businesses will reach out to you - directly. No middlemen, only organic conversations.