Weeknotes: 16 June to 20 June 2025

What I have found gripping

• Deploying a small project combining new skills I have been building and a topic I’m learning about

• In Ruby, the Time object contains the date and time since the Unix epoch (1 January 1970). I can create a Time object in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) before checking what day it is:

time = Time.new.utc
=> 2025-06-20 18:51:35.828909 UTC
time.monday?
=> false
time.tuesday?
=> false
time.friday?
=> true

• Organisations creating inclusive and diverse environments pay attention to small details and remain diverse

• Thinking in terms of missing skills to add to a team also matters

• According to Professor Alex Edmans cognitive diversity is the range of expertise, experiences, information, perspectives, preferences, and ways of thinking within a team. He also underlines the fact that cognitive diversity is particularly positively correlated with performance where psychological safety is high

What I have read

• Newsletter WoR #62: coder un site sans framework, manager son/sa manager, des carrousels en CSS, Women on Rails

• Active Storage & Form Errors: Preventing Lost File Uploads in Rails, Daniela Baron

• Class Time, RubyDoc 3.4.1

• Tech hiring: is this an inflection point? Gergely Orosz

• Cognitive Diversity in Asset Management (report), Alex Edmans

• Beyond “Being Nice”: What Does an Effective Team Really Look Like? Matthew Syed

• Disrupt “Prove It Again” Bias, and Other Actions for Allies, Karen Catlin (Better Allies)

• How to beat diversity, equity and inclusion fatigue in the workplace, Aniruddha Methi (GORM Media)

• Why and how we do work trials at Linear, Nathalie Alex et al.

• The Learning Community playbook, Disco

• It's Time for Something New, Anil Dash

What I have watched

You can write devastatingly effective docs, Andrew Hao (LeadDev San Francisco 2022)

Featured quote

Nearly all practitioners said it is very difficult to identify cognitive diversity at the recruitment stage (outside of an applicant’s background). Instead, they stressed the importance of hiring the best people, which requires being unbiased (such as not undervaluing demographic minorities) and ignoring less relevant information (such as being swayed by the charm of a candidate for a non-sales role). Several respondents argued that, rather than recruiting for cognitive diversity (which is hard to assess), they evaluate intellectual curiosity, the willingness to learn from failures, and the ability to form an opinion and express it. — Alex Edmans

Further reading and resources

In English

• The official website of Alex Edmans

• GORM Media

• Practical additive hiring for any team, Dan Johnson (LeadDev San Francisco 2022)

In French

• Inclusion à l’horizon ! Leçons de la création d’un équipage de course au large hors-norme, Anne-Ryslène Zaoual et Vanessa Warnier

• Ordinateur quantique : comprendre le grand défi des « codes correcteurs d’erreurs » et l’avancée récente de Google, Claire Goursaud, Maître de conférence sur l'internet des objets et le calcul quantique, INSA de Lyon, Inria, INSA Lyon – Université de Lyon