Glimmer Web Components (+ Championship Win & General Recipe for Success)

Before I get into the blog post's main subject, I'd like to mention that I recently won the 2024-2025 TGIF Curling League championship with my Curling team (Brooms Up) at the Royal Montreal Curling Club. I brought a championship trophy back home as a result. 

Team "Brooms Up" celebrating the championship win!

Andy Maleh (me) holding the TGIF League Curling Championship trophy (and a Hockey stick beer mug)!

Andy Maleh (me) tossing cheers with others at the Curling club!

It is interesting to note that I only learned the sport of Curling 2.5 years ago (though I've known it as a weird sport that shows up on TV for many years before). So, to win a league championship in Curling this soon (finishing as the 1st team in 14) is a testament to having been able to transfer my general recipe for success from Software Engineering into Sports! In fact, as a result of this recent success in Sports, I have spent the last 3 months learning a new sport that I have always loved, but never played much (I only did a couple of leagues in it over 20+ years) and never played well: Baseball. Hitting a ball in Baseball is known as the most difficult thing to do in sports! I have been very busy the last few months taking classes and participating in a summer league for the easy version of Baseball known as Softball. Yesterday, I caught my first fly out ever! A few weeks ago, I caught my first pop out ever! Before that, I was able to hit my first line drive ever! 

To summarize my "General Recipe for Success" (whether in Sports or Software Engineering):

• Learn the basics from the experts by taking classes with them (including doing any assigned homework): In Sports, I simply took classes at a Curling club to learn Curling and classes at a Batting Cage / Softball / Baseball Store to get started with Softball. In Software Engineering, I did a 4-year Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and a 2-year Master's degree in Software Engineering.
• Practice alone: In Curling, my alone practice happened by arriving early to games or booking practice sessions at the Curling club, and spending time practicing the Curling delivery stance and Curling shots. In Softball, my alone practice has been happening by arriving 45 minutes early to every game and spending that time practicing the batting stance and flow, batting with a batting tee, and throwing a Softball up vertically to practice catching pop ups at different locations. In Software Engineering, my alone practice happened by building open-source software projects while exploring interesting Software Engineering ideas that I wished existed, and by testing my learnings from my university education by building my own computer programs to satisfy some of my own needs (e.g. in college, I built a calculator that figured out when future level-ups would happen in an RPG video game based on experience points by looking at past level-ups).
• Practice with others while humbly asking them for feedback and help: In Curling, I practiced with other people on my league Curling team by booking a Curling practice session together and having the team's "Skip" (best player on the team who plays the most difficult position) watch us and correct us while we tried various Curling shots and sweeping methods. In Softball, I practice with others by arriving early to games to play catch with others, practice fielding, and practice pitching and/or batting. I let experienced players watch my errors and correct them during practice, humbly accepting their feedback and deferring to their expertise. In Software Engineering, I practiced with others by collaborating with other people on open-source software projects, doing book clubs and experimenting with book learnings in code, and asking coworkers for feedback in code reviews while accepting correction and learning from it. In my early years as a Junior Software Developer, I asked experienced Developers to teach me practical principles in computer programming.
• Watch the experts: In Curling, I watch every Curling competition on TV that I could think of (in Canada, it's the Grand Slam of Curling, which happens 5 times a year, the Brier's, which happens once a year, and the World Curling Championship) and I watch Curling games at my local Curling club played by other members. In Baseball, I watch every season's Major League Baseball games on TV (Let's Go Red Sox) and I sometimes watch Softball games in my Softball league that happen before my team's games or afterwards. In Software Engineering, I read open-source software code online and I read old legacy code written by experts at my company to learn from it. I also observe the features of various pieces of Software that I use, including paying attention to the usability and user experience.
• Communicate and collaborate well with your team (including having retrospectives about team performance): As they say, Teamwork Makes the Dream Work! In Curling, our Skip (i.e. captain) gave us very clear instructions for what to do every game. Additionally, he discussed what went right and wrong after every game so that we would all learn from our mistakes and do better next time. In Softball, my team captain and 1st base / 3rd base coaches give us clear instructions of how to play every game. Moreover, after games are done, we have retrospectives about what went wrong and what could be improved by next game. In Software Engineering, my teams favour over-communication instead of stingy communication because saving a few seconds here and there could result in days, weeks, or months that are wasted due to miscommunication. Additionally, we hold regular retrospectives in which we discuss what went right and wrong since the last retrospective. And, we often hop into impromptu meetings when extra communication is needed to ensure better work on a problem.

Now, let's get into the main topic of the blog post. I would like to announce glimmer-web-component as a new Ruby gem that provides a collection of reusable Glimmer Web Components for Glimmer DSL for Web (Ruby on Rails Web Frontend Framework), which were extracted from real Rails web applications. Of course, they are fully customizable with component options and standard CSS/SCSS. 

Version 0.1.0 of the Ruby gem ships with the first Glimmer Web Component: Multi Checkbox Dropdown. It was extracted from my current work Rails web app at Eltropy Canada (formerly Lexop, which got acquired by Eltropy in 2025).

GitHub: https://github.com/AndyObtiva/glimmer-web-components 

Using the Multi Checkbox Dropdown is as easy as utilizing the Ruby keyword `multi_checkbox_dropdown` in the Ruby HTML DSL. At minimum, it takes a `values` keyword argument to figure out what options to display to the user.

Of course, to be able to do anything useful with the user selection, one would have to hook into the `on_change` listener, which takes a Ruby block that receives `selected_values`. 

But, it's even simpler to just rely on bidirectional data-binding. selected_values are automatically pre-populated from @some_presenter.status_filters and stored back on @some_presenter.status_filters upon user selection.

Finally, it is possible to customize the component with many options:

Below is the full list of options, which are defined in the `multi_checkbox_dropdown` Glimmer Web Component code:

Happy Glimmering!