Back to the Future
Hello there!
Last week I was in a meeting where someone joked about switching back to a “dumb phone” to cut down on distractions. It’s a played out joke at this point, but I’m guessing it still strikes an emotional cord with many of us — especially Gen X-ers and Millennials who came of age with the rise of internet-based technology and have been heavily invested in its evolution, and all the benefits— and costs — that come with it.
But it’s the fact that it’s a joke that’s interesting. And that it’s seemingly unimaginable going about a typical week with the most stripped down version of a cell phone (SN: when’s the last time you used the term “cell phone”?). Could we actually function in the world with just our contacts list and a basic messaging app — no emojis?! Would you feel like you’re on vacation? Or like a contestant on Survivor?
I think the place most of us try to land is to have phones with just the right amount of features and apps to keep our lives running smoothly. (I won’t even get into the conversation around fri****n). But the target for exactly what tools any one of us needs vs. what is just noise, or smoke and mirrors (*cough* LLMs *cough*), varies from person to person and is also constantly moving as the tech develops.
I thought about this when I noticed Ruby dev news in the past couple of months about deprecated features being resurrected — like support for alias_attribute in Rails, and old features getting refreshed for the first time in several versions — like the String#unpack1 method Peter mentioned in Ruby Weekly last month.
I was asking a Spinel dev about this pattern which led to some interesting questions. What are the practical reasons a feature sits for a long time and is left alone? What are the reasons that lead to a feature being brought back, and “why now”? What are the new (if any) use cases? What is happening in the world, in the project and in the developer community that call for maintainers to reach back into the vault?
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this! At Spinel we’re thinking about developer tools all the time, how to make the most of them, and how to get our stack as simple and useful as possible. Last month on the blog we gave our take on the classic Rails tool Factories, and we have another practical post comparing two widely used Ruby tools coming up soon! And of course, our Ruby version and project manager rv is a tool we hope will stay relevant to Rubyists for a long time to come. On that note, we’re always open to your input on how to make it even more useful for you — if you’d like to help test our changes, give us feedback, or even help us implement new features, let us know on rv.dev!
-Irene
Marketing Chaos Coordinator at Spinel
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Kasper was featured on the PreVetted Podcast last month: Rails Core to Independent Consultant: Kasper Timm Hansen on Ruby, Testing, and Craft.
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A treat
The decentralized web has been known to spark some future tripping… but if the fediverse is your thing, you may be interested in this npm registry backed by atproto.
Here’s to software tools that stand the test of time,
-André and the Spinel team