Noel Rappin Writes Here

You don’t need me to tell you that 2020 was a weird year, and that definitely showed up in my reading list. For a long time mid-year, I really shied away from anything that was dark or challenging. Still, I somehow managed to read books this year, and I managed to put together a list. Eventually, I mean it is April 2021, which is a little late for a Best Of 2020 list.

Previously on Locally Sourced: I said this one would be about interview code, which it isn’t. Next time. Meantime, the live home of this newsletter is https://buttondown.email/noelrap, where you can subscribe for free, or for money if that’s feasible for you and you are so inclined. Thanks, and tell your friends! People have been asking me quite a bit recently whether I would choose Hotwire or React for a project and what role each has in the web ecosystem.

I’ve been going back and forth about what to put in this newsletter about Modern Front-End Development For Rails. On the one hand, it’s a big deal for me, and it’d be great for me if people bought it. On the other hand, you’ve likely heard me talking about it for a year and you’ve probably made up your mind. (If you haven’t, would you consider buying a book?) I did realize I had a weird, niche topic about the book that I wanted to talk about.

If you are reading this, then I did at least one thing right. I’ve moved this newsletter to new provider called Buttondown. Ideally, this will not affect you at all. (You may have gotten a request to re-confirm your email, if so, that was my mistake.) For me, it gives me the ability to write in Markdown, with code syntax coloring, an API that I might use at some point, and somewhat better financial terms for what is, let’s face it, a tiny email list.

Previously on Locally Sourced: It’s been quite a while. I’ve been very focused on finishing the big update to the draft of the book. Which I have done, giving me a bit of a breather until the technical reviews come in. I’m hoping this means I’ll be getting this newsletter out more frequently. I was looking back over the past newsletters, which I do from time to time to prevent repeating myself, and I realized that I had promised two posts from talks that I felt never got a wide audience and only delivered one of them.

Previously On Locally Sourced: I wrote about Hotwire and Turbo, the Rails client side New Magic. Then I wrote about them again. I think you are all caught up. I’ve been writing about Hotwire and Turbo, and haven’t said all that much here about Stimulus. Which is a tool that I like so much, that after using it on a project, I literally decided to write a book so I could tell more people about it.

Previously On Locally Sourced: I wrote about how to use Hotwire and Turbo. (My Mac keeps wanting to autocorrect that to “Hot-wire” for some unknown reason…). The update to Modern Front-End Development With Rails is ongoing, the book is available for beta purchase if you want the new stuff as soon as we can get it to you. After writing a post a couple of weeks ago explaining how the new Hotwire framework works I want to spend some time explaining what I like about it.

This week, after some mysterious announcements about “New Magic”, Basecamp released Hotwire, their support tools for client-side development using HTML over the wire rather than JSON. These are the generic versions of the tools that power Hey. Hotwire consists of the already released StimulusJS, and Turbo, which is the successor to Turbolinks. This is also the tool release that has been holding up Modern Front-End Development With Rails, on sale now!

It occurred to me recently that two of the conference talks that I consider the best I’ve ever written never really got a very wide audience, even by the admittedly low standards of my conference talks. And I also wanted to revisit them to see if I can improve the argument. This post comes from a talk called “The Road To Legacy is Paved With Good Intentions”, and here is the original talk video from WindyCityRails 2017.

I recently gave a workshop about technical writing at Virtual RubyConf 2020. I enjoyed doing that tremendously, because, in case it’s not clear, I could yammer on forever about technical writing in much the same way as I normally yammer on about code, just to a smaller audience. I didn’t get to some of my outline in the workshop, so I’m being a little indulgent and writing it up here. I hope it’s helpful.