Ruby Weekly

Provide something useful, on a regular basis, then gradually try to sell something. It took me well over 2 years before I made money from it. It takes an extremely long time to build your subscriber base too. I am talking about month over month, you will be sending newsletter blasts to 5, 10, the 30 people, then one month 1000 people will sign up. Takes will power to push through. Just the name of the game. So, start early, and do not expect much. If you are looking for good examples, check out http://www.devopsweekly.com/ & http://rubyweekly.com/. Subscribe to them and check out the format. They are both free, and provide high quality curated content, but have "sponsored" (clearly marked) parts. This should give you some inspiration.

There is pretty much zero barrier to entry. Register a domain, create a one-page static website on AWS S3/CF, which will host your signup form (and list archive for seo reasons), then use http://mailchimp.com/ to run the list. You could have it up and running in an afternoon. Finding high quality curated content is the hard part.

I would suggest picking something you know tons about, or something fairly new. Take golang for example, there is tons of information churn, so you want someone in the know, to tell you about interesting things. This is the underlining principle for devopsweekly and rubyweekly. You do not even need to be an expect, just put in the time to track down interesting bits, over the last week. This can and should take many…

Sloth Finder helps you encounter the most amazing weekly Ruby articles around your favorite Ruby and Rails topics for the past decade sourced from [Ruby Weekly](https://rubyweekly.com/). This tool was made because the creator, a Sloth in human form, was interested in all the greatest articles around his favorite weird Ruby niche, so he built a primitive search and looked for:

``` api, openapi, automation, rest, graphql, rpc, soap, webhook, scrap, event-driven, serializ ```

What followed was a wealth of articles full of knowledge, understanding of his niche, and potential for connecting to potential leads and partners. Instead of calling it a day, he decided to share the tool with us, the people (which basically means his 100 minute hack turned into a 20 hour project if you include all the side quests and write-ups related to it).

https://slothfinder.apishop.io/

He has also open-sourced it on GitHub. Here are some reasons for you to look at the code:

- You want to see how to deploy a Rails project on the cheapest [render.com](http://render.com) non-free plan running on SQLite (making it cheaper than usual). After I already embarked on render.com, I found that [someone else documented how they experimented with something similar and ran Python on SQLite on fly.io for basically free](https://github.com/irskep/cheapo_website), so this might be another solution if you are interested in hosting your hobby projects. - You want a simple Ruby scraper template to scrape simply…

I would suggest Django over RoR; RoR contains more magic (but RoR seems to offer more convenience for someone experienced with RoR since it is based on convention vs configuration.) Also, I have heard that Rails changes very fastly sometimes, so you may have difficulty catching up if you are a student (but at the same time, it has a livelier community, so that might be a plus -- check out http://rubyweekly.com/ ).

With Django, the core structure is simpler to understand, and you may continue working on your site after a few week's break easily. This is a little bit like the difference bt. Python and Ruby/Perl; I find Ruby/Perl more flexible (there is more than one way to do it), Python to be more strict (there is usually a single best way).

To sum up, I don't think it would make a difference if you were a full time developer working on the project every day, but for a student, occasionally working on a project, Django would be easier to get accustomed to, after not working on the project for a given time.

PS: I suggest you to take a look at Flask (Python) or Sinatra (Ruby) too; they might be easier to start with. Your experience with Flask would help with Django, too (or vice versa).

Since Google Reader shut down, I've basically switched my behaviour to subscribing to sites via email and especially looking out for good curated weekly emails.

Here are my favourites at the moment:

iOS Dev Weekly : https://iosdevweekly.com/

Data Science Weekly : http://www.datascienceweekly.org/

Clojure Gazette : http://www.clojuregazette.com/

Ruby Weekly : http://rubyweekly.com/

Green Ruby : http://greenruby.org/

Founders Cabin : http://founderscabin.io/

SaaS Weekly : http://hiten.com/issues/

Also, shameless plug, I just started a weekly newsletter about Machine Learning, Data Science, Data Engineering:

http://datacoder.aidanf.net/

My favorites:

https://labnotes.org/ - fantastic, weekly summary on design, frontend, architecture, business, and some humor.

http://rubyweekly.com/ - a roundup of announcements, new gems, talks and more

http://www.evilmadscientist.com/tag/linkdump/ - monthly list of links related to science, hardware hacking, geekery

http://randsinrepose.com/ - a few posts a month, great advice and thinking about tech and team management.

http://consumeconsume.com/ - funny pictures of irony and shock, which always give me great material for tech presentations

For RSS->email I use IFTTT

What other development-related weekly newsletters can you recommend? Currently I'm subscribed to:

Hacker NewLetter - http://www.hackernewsletter.com

Status Code - http://statuscode.org/

Pycoders Weekly - http://pycoders.com/

Ruby Weekly - http://rubyweekly.com/

Python Weekly - http://www.pythonweekly.com/

JavaScript Weekly - http://javascriptweekly.com/

Coder Weekly - http://www.coderweekly.com/

HTML 5 Weekly - http://html5weekly.com/

JavaScript Weekly - http://javascriptweekly.com/

Are there other newsletters worth subscribing to?