✨ What is this post about: As a part of my professional growth, I make time to watch conference talks on Ruby, Rails, JS, React, tech writing, and tech trivia. Previously, I'd just watch them but now I will take and publish notes for future reference. This talk was a part of RailsConf 2021 that I'm participating at the time of writing.

✨ Talk: 'Self-Care on Rails' by @bengreenberg , or Ben Greenberg

✨ One-paragraph summary: This past year has been one of the most challenging years in recent memory. The pandemic has taken a toll, including on children. Adults used their professional skills to help make the year a little better for the kids in our lives: Therapists counseled, entertainers delighted, teachers educated... and Rails developers developed!

✨ Impression: I appreciate the human-side of the Rails community that Ben represents; the talk was inspiring and also grounding

Table of contents:

• Notes
• Side Notes
• Read more

Notes

• "...citizens of a democracy are collectively responsible for what their society allows; they have a special duty towards those it systematically fails, and this burden falls most heavily on those most rewarded..." (Chiala Cordelli)
• a new initiative in the Open Source community: Hippocratic License
  • "...we are starting to realize that the software that we create has a real and lasting impact on the world in which we live" (An Ethical License to Open Source - how will your code be used? will it be bettering the world at large?
• "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?"
  • self-interest can mean asserting yourself among others and that's not a bad thing!
  • your interest is among others and it matters
• We are facing mental health crises (loneliness, etc.) and it's affecting all of us: adults and youths alike
• webRTC: real-time communication
  • open web standard and available as regular JS APIs in the majority of browsers
  • it supports video, voice, and generic data to be sent between peers
• Ben mentioned two apps he built:
  • a video-sharing app he built for his son's birthday party,
  • a gem he published that uses web-scraping to automate school form submission (btw. his blog post on building this is amazing)
• the more you help yourself, the more you help others ✨

Side notes:

• I love Ben's attitude, kindness, and jokes
• "You can't escape JavaScript ;-; " - Ben 😹

Read more

• webRTC
• Blog: Automate School Forms with Web Scraping in Ruby