Reading Roundup: CSS, Product Process, Testing, and Rails Tooling

Hi folks, Here’s a short roundup of articles I read this week. Quick takeaways below so you can scan fast and dive deeper where it helps.

Articles

• Building a Multi-Stage Timetable with Modern CSS
  Practical walkthrough of using grid, subgrid, round, and mod to build a multi-stage timetable layout with fewer hacks and more predictable alignment.
  Read it here
  

• Pitfalls When Adopting Shape Up
  A clear list of real world traps teams hit when trying to adopt Shape Up, with concrete recommendations like include senior technical people in shaping and separate framing from shaping to avoid churn.
  Read it here
  

• Don’t Make Me Think Testing Intuitive Expectations
  A thoughtful piece arguing for Don’t Make Me Think principles in test APIs and introducing Intuitive Expectations as a way to make tests simpler, chainable, and less mentally taxing.
  Read it here
  

• Self Hosting Rails Applications Design Decisions
  Deep dive into the tradeoffs of self hosting Rails: Docker images for reproducible installs, one database patterns to avoid extra services, trigger file patterns for host container coordination, and pragmatic tradeoffs around scaling and backups.
  Read it here
  

• How To Rev Up Your Rails Development with MCP
  Practical guide to the rails-mcp-server gem and how MCP gives AI agents richer, project aware context so they can make safer, more relevant suggestions for legacy Rails apps.
  Read it here
  

Just sharing a few reads I found useful. If one of these sparks something, I’d love to hear what you build or how you adapt the ideas.