This week’s things are a little late because of thing one.

Quick me update: I did post one item to Medium this week, about how I learned to love Rubocop. Read it, won’t you?

Thing One: RailsConf

RailsConf was this week, and despite what I might have said last week, it really does feel different in 2016 than 2008.

I’ll post some specific talk recommendations when the videos are posted. Well, there’s one talk up already Justin Searls posted his own recording, and what was ostensibly a talk about Rails 5 and RSpec becomes something more interesting about maturity in tools and where we go from there.

This was a common theme in 2016, and one way in which RailsConf felt different than 2008. Consider, for example the somewhat snarky write up of the TIOBE programming language popularity index, where Ruby has come back up for the first time in a few years.

Anyway, more in this over the next week or so, as I process.

Thing Two: Michael Feathers

On a related note, here’s Michael Feathers on Agile, saying something that I think is true about Agile methods – they don’t really scale to large teams, and that’s OK.

Thing Three: The Earth from the Air

On a totally different note, a cool piece from Vox from a pilot about what he’s learned in the air. It’s sort of what you think it’s going to be, but not quite.

Thing Four: Ted Cruz (But Really Dahlia Lithwick)

I haven’t written about politics here (though I do occasionally vent on an anonymous blog and Twitter account). I’m not sad to see that Ted Cruz isn’t going to be president, but this account of Cruz as a debater and as a lawyer is probably the most interesting portrait of what he’s like in person that you are likely to read. The author of the piece, Dahlia Lithwick) has been writing very entertainingly about the Supreme Court for a long time, and recently started a well-done podcast if the idea of a podcast about the Supreme Court interests you.

Thing Five: Martha Wells

You are all reading Martha Wells like I said to the other week, right? Here’s
an interview with Wells specifically about her world-building. Worth checking out.

Thing Six: Books

I mentioned Gwenda Bond’s Lois Lane series last year as one of my favorite books of the year. Double Down, the second book of the series, came out last week, and it’s also really fun. Bond does a great job of writing something that works both as a YA story and as a Lois Lane story. (Lois is online friends with somebody who goes by the monicker “Smallville Guy”, and if you don’t think it’s great when SG – who is not public yet – says he wants to be the kind of person Lois deserves, we’ll you are wrong, it is objectively great)