Unboxed Roundup: Our links for w/c 13th March 2017
March 17, 2017
How the tech sector could move in One Direction - Murray S
http://www.sachajudd.com/one-direction/
This talk by Sacha Judd (available as a video and transcript with better gifs) has two parts. The first is a story about engaging in a fandom that you aren't the target market for, in this case One Direction fans that think Liam and Harry are a couple. The second is about diversity, and how the lack of it in the tech sector makes everything worse. The bridge between the two is that Sacha found the primarily young and female members of the fan community to be incredibily tech-savvy, but also that most of them felt their self-taught know-how wasn't good enough to get jobs in tech. It's a great talk, with a strong message: it's long past time we did something to fix the problem.
Cargo Check - Charlie
https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/blob/d8159308bde4f3a3ad20a67fb80a6956a64d91d2/src/bin/check.rs#L9
Rust 1.16 was announced yesterday with various interesting changes. cargo check is a tool to validate the correctness of a program is now built into Cargo; Rust's build system and package manager. Cargo check is interesting as it saves time by not building the program's binary. Coupled with Rust's compiler messages I thought this sounded pretty useful.
The dRuby Book - Andrew W
http://www.druby.org/sidruby/the-druby-book.html
The DRb module has gotten some bad press over the years, a lot of it down to its use in the early days of Twitter and problems scaling but it's still a valid tool in a lot of circumstances. Now learning how to use it has been made easier by the release of the out of print dRuby book written by Masatoshi Seki, the creator of the DRb module.
Introducing Exec (beta) - Connect to a dyno via SSH - Andrew W
https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/1112
Sometimes you need that SSH connection to debug a problem in production and up until now it's been a limitation with Heroku but that's no longer the case with with the beta release of the heroku ps:exec feature.
Generate complex gmail filters via a ruby DSL - Andrew W
https://github.com/antifuchs/gmail-britta
Most developers have there own suite of GMail filters to deal with the endless notifications and the GMail UI is cumbersome at best but they do have an import/export feature and the gmail-britta gem provides an nice way of writing the required XML in a friendly DSL.
Track of the Week - Paula S
Here's to my Unboxed friends! Thank you for a great 2.5 years journey :)