NWRUG in three weeks — Beyond Stimulus: Simplifying JavaScript in Rails with Helium

[Rob Whittaker]

Hi folks,

Our next NWRUG is in three weeks on 20 November back at Colony, One Silk Street, our own Darren "Daz" Jones Townsend will give us a guided tour of their declarative alternative to Stimulus:

Stimulus has been a core part of Rails for nearly four years, transforming how we use JavaScript in our applications. But as great as it is, Stimulus controllers can sometimes feel clunky and awkward to work with. But what if we could do better?

In this talk, I’ll share how I set out to improve the developer experience by creating Helium — a tiny declarative JavaScript library that does everything a Stimulus controller can do, but directly in your views using simple data attributes (think Tailwind for JS).

I’ll demonstrate how it works, show some real-world examples, and rework a few common Stimulus controllers to highlight the cleaner, more expressive syntax Helium offers and hopefully show that it might be time to ditch Stimulus...

We’ll be at the venue from 6:30pm with the talk starting at 7pm. Afterwards we’ll retire to a nearby establishment for a drink and some pizza, kindly provided by our sponsors Fatsoma and thoughtbot.

Register here if you would like to attend. Full details on this (and all our events) over on our website.

See you soon!

Rob and Tekin

[Rob Whittaker]

Hi folks, we’re just a few days away until our next event.

Come hear our very own Darren "Daz" Jones giving us a guided tour of their declarative alternative to Stimulus.

There will also be pizza kindly provided by Fatsoma, the first round of after-talk drinks provided by thoughtbot, and the usual Ruby-related chat.

Register here if you plan on attending.

—Rob

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[Rob Whittaker]

Final call for tomorrow’s NWRUG!

We’ll be at Colony One at our usual time of 6:30pm.

Please do register if you’re joining us so we can make sure we have enough pizza: https://buytickets.at/nwrug/1927303

—Rob

On Thu, Oct 30, 2025 at 10:51 AM 'Rob Whittaker' via North West Ruby User Group (NWRUG) <nwrug-...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

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