The Bike Shed

Stephanie is back with a book recommendation: "Thinking in Systems" by Donella Meadows. This book has helped to bolster her understanding of complex systems in environmental, organizational, and software contexts, particularly through user interactions and system changes. Joël describes his transformative experience watching last week's total solar eclipse. Together, they explore how systems thinking influences software development and team dynamics by delving into practical applications in writing and reading code, suggesting that understanding complex systems can aid developers in navigating and optimizing codebases and team interactions. Transcript:  JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn, and together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: I have a book recommendation today [laughs]. JOËL: Oh, I love book recommendations. STEPHANIE: It's been a little while, so I wanted to share what I've been reading that I think might be interesting to this audience. I'm reading Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. Joël, are you familiar with systems thinking theory at all? JOËL: Very superficially. Hearing people talk about it on, I guess, X, now Twitter. STEPHANIE: Yeah. Well, what I like about this book is the subtitle is A Primer on Thinking in Systems [chuckles], which is perfect for me as someone who also just kind of understood it very loosely, as just like, oh, like, I dunno, you look at things holistically and look at the stuff, not just its parts but from a higher perspective. JOËL: Yeah. Is that accurate sort of your pre-book reading overview? Or do you think there's a bigger thing, a bigger idea there that the book unpacks? STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think I'm only, like, a third of the way through so far. But what I have enjoyed about it is that, you know, in some ways, like, intuitively, that makes a lot of sense about, like, oh yeah, you want to make sure that you see the forest for the trees, right? But one thing I've been surprised by is how it's also teaching me more technical language to talk about complex systems. And, in this case, she is talking about, essentially, living systems or systems that change over time where things are happening. I think that can be a little bit confusing when we also are, you know, talking about computer systems, but, in this case, you know, systems like environments, or communities, or even, you know, companies or organizations, which is actually where I'm finding a lot of the content really valuable. But some of the language that I've learned that I am now trying to integrate a little bit more into how I view a lot of just, like, daily problems or experiences involve things like feedback loops that might be reinforcing or balancing and different, like, inputs and output flows and what is driving those things. So, I've appreciated just having more precise language for things that I think I kind of intuited but didn't exactly know how to, like, wrap up in a way to communicate to someone. JOËL: Do you think the idea of thinking in terms of things like self-balancing versus sort of diverging input loops is something that's useful when actually writing code? Or do you think of it a little bit more in terms of, like, teams and how they organize general problem-solving approaches, things like that? STEPHANIE: I think the answer is both. I actually gave this quite a bit of thought because I was trying to wrap my head around her definition of a system and how we talk about systems sometimes, like, a codebase, for example. And the conclusion I came to is that, really, it's not just the code static by itself that we care about. It's how it gets exercised, how users use it, how developers change it, how we interact with it when we, like, run tests, for example. So, that was really helpful in kind of thinking about some of the problems we see in engineering organizations as a result of software being a thing that is used and written by humans, as opposed to it just existing in memories [chuckles] or, like, it's in a storage system somewhere. Like, that means it's kind of lifeless, and it's not changing anymore. But the point of kind of this framework is trying to understand it as it changes. JOËL: So, kind of that blurry line between humans and computers and where those two overlap is where a lot of that systems thinking almost, like, mental model or vocabulary has been most helpful for you. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I would say so. So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: So, I did the thing. I traveled to see the total solar eclipse this past weekend. It was mind-blowing. It was incredibly cool. I really loved it. For any of our listeners who have never seen a solar eclipse, in the coming years, have an opportunity to see one. I'd say it's worth traveling to see because it is really impressive. STEPHANIE: Cool. What did it look like when it happened, when it was 100% eclipsed? JOËL: So, what really impressed me was the fact that, like, most of the cool stuff happens in that, like, last half a percent. So, like, 95% eclipsed, still not that impressive. If that's all I'd seen, I would be disappointed. And then, in that last little bit, all of a sudden, everything goes dark. It's sort of, like, that twilight past sunset. You've got a glow on the horizon. The stars are out. STEPHANIE: Wow. JOËL: The animals are behaving like it's past sunset. They're getting ready to go to sleep. STEPHANIE: Whoa. JOËL: The sun itself is just a black dot with this, like, big fiery ring around it. Like all those pictures, icons, photos you see online, or drawings that look over the top, those things are real. That's what it looks like. STEPHANIE: Wow, that's really neat. Could you see it without looking through the eclipse viewers? JOËL: So, when you hit totality, you can look at it with a naked eye, and it is, yeah, magnificent. STEPHANIE: Oh, that's so cool. How long did it last? JOËL: So, it depends where you are in the path of totality. I was pretty much dead center. And it lasts, I think, three and a half minutes is what we had. STEPHANIE: That's so cool. So, for me, here in Chicago, we did not have complete totality. It was about, like, 95%. So, I was watching it, just from that perspective. And I would say, yeah, it was not nearly as cool as what you described. It kind of just was like, oh, it got dark. It almost looked like I was viewing the world through sunglasses. I did have one of those viewers that I used to, like, look at the sun and see how much of it had been covered. But yeah, it was cool. But what you said, I think now I feel like, wow, I really should have [laughter] traveled. I could have traveled just a few hours, you know, to, like, Indianapolis or something to have been on the path. That would have been really neat. And I don't think the next one will be until 2044 or something like that. JOËL: Yeah. And that's the thing, right? I think if you're within a few hours of the path of a total eclipse, it is absolutely worth traveling to totality. The downside of that is that everybody else has the same idea. And so, you will be fighting traffic and a lot of things, especially if it goes through some, like, populated areas, like it did this time. STEPHANIE: Yeah. Well, that's really neat that you got to see that. That's, I don't know, it sounds like not exactly once in a lifetime, but definitely very rare. JOËL: For sure. I think with this experience now; I would definitely consider traveling again if there's one, like, anywhere near where I live, or, you know, maybe even, like, planning a vacation around going somewhere else to see one because it's short. You know, you're there for three minutes, and you see something cool. But that was really impressive. So, something that really struck me when you were talking earlier about systems thinking is that you mentioned that it gave you a sort of a new vocabulary to talk about things. It almost gave you a sort of different way of thinking or some other mental models that you could use to apply when you are interacting in that sort of fussy boundary between people and code. And I think that this idea of having language and having mental models is something that is incredibly valuable for us as programmers in a few different areas. And I'd be curious to see particularly for when we're reading other code, reading code that someone else has written or, you know, yourself from six months ago, do you have any sort of mental models that you like to reach for or techniques that you like to use to sort of give yourself that almost vocabulary to understand what somebody else is trying to do with their code? STEPHANIE: Yeah, I would say so. You know, as you were talking about, like, how do you read code? I was thinking about how I read code is different from how I would read a book [laughs]. I almost rarely just read everything line by line and, like, file by file, you know, in some order that has been presented to me. I am usually a lot more involved. It's almost, like, more like a choose your own adventure kind of book [chuckles], where it's like, oh, go to this page to check if you want to check out what happened down this code path [chuckles]. JOËL: Right, right. Oh, if you're reading a novel, are you the kind of person that will read the ending first? STEPHANIE: Absolutely not. [laughter] JOËL: You have strong opinions here. STEPHANIE: Even when I, like, really want to... okay, sometimes I will, like, maybe just kind of flip to the back and just see, like, oh, how many more pages or chapters do I have [laughs] left? If I am itching to know what might happen. But I definitely don't start a book by reading the end. I think there are people who do that, and maybe that works for them, but I don't un

Joël conducted a thoughtbot mini-workshop on query plans, which Stephanie found highly effective due to its interactive format. They then discuss the broader value of interactive workshops over traditional talks for deeper learning. Addressing listener questions, Stephanie and Joël explore the strategic use of if and else in programming for clearer code, the importance of thorough documentation in identifying bugs, and the use of Postgres' EXPLAIN ANALYZE, highlighting the need for environment-specific considerations in query optimization. Episode mentioning query plans (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/418) Query plan visualizer (https://explain.dalibo.com/) RailsConf 2024 (https://railsconf.org/) Episode 349: Unpopular Opinions (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/349) Squint test (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE) Episode 405: Retro on Sandi Metz rules (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/405) Structuring conditionals in a wizard (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/structuring-conditionals-in-a-wizard) Episode 417: Module docs (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/417) Episode 416: Multidimensional numbers (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/416) ruby-units gem (https://github.com/olbrich/ruby-units) Solargraph (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=castwide.solargraph) parity (https://github.com/thoughtbot/parity) Transcript: STEPHANIE:  Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville, and together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: Just recently, I ran a sort of mini workshop for some colleagues here at thoughtbot to dig into the idea of query plans and, how to read them, how to use them. And, initially, this was going to be more of a kind of presentation style. And a colleague and I who were sharing this decided to go for a more interactive format where, you know, this is a, like, 45-minute slot. And so, we set it up so that we did a sort of intro to query plans in about 10 minutes then 15 minutes of breakout rooms, where people got a chance to have a query plan. And they had some sort of comprehension questions to answer about it. And then, 15 minutes together to have each group share a little bit about what they had discovered in their query plan back with the rest of the group, so trying to balance some understanding, some application, some group discussion, trying to keep it engaging. It was a pretty fun approach to sharing information like that. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I wholeheartedly agree. I got to attend that workshop, and it was really great. Now that I'm hearing you kind of talk about the three different components and what you wanted people attending to get out of it, I am impressed because [laughs] there is, like, a lot more thought, I think, that went into just participant engagement that reflecting on it now I'm like, oh yeah, like, I think that was really effective as opposed to just a presentation. Because you had, you know, sent us out into breakout rooms, and each group had a different query that they were analyzing. You had kind of set up links that had the query set up in the query analyzer. I forget what the tool was called that you used. JOËL: I forget the name of it, but we will link it in the show notes. STEPHANIE: Yeah. It was helpful for me, though, because, you know, I think if I were just to have learned about it in a presentation or even just looked at, you know, screenshots of it on a slide, that's different still from interacting with it and feeling more confident to use it next time I find myself in a situation where it might be helpful. JOËL: It's really interesting because that was sort of the goal of it was to make it a bit more interactive and then, hopefully, helping people to retain more information than just a straight up, like, presentation would be. I don't know how you feel, I find that often when I go to a place like, let's say, RailsConf, I tend to stay away from more of the workshop-y style events and focus more on the talks. Is that something that you do as well? STEPHANIE: Yeah. I have to confess that I've never attended a workshop [laughs] at a conference. I think it's partly my learning style and also partly just honestly, like, my energy level when I'm at the conference. I kind of just want to sit back. It's on my to-do list. Like, I definitely want to attend one just to see what it's like. And maybe that might even inspire me to want to create my own workshop. But it's like, once I'm in it, and, you know, like, everyone else is also participating, I'm very easily peer pressured [laughs]. So, in a group setting, I will find myself enjoying it a lot more. And I felt that kind of same way with the workshop you ran for our team. Though, I will say a funny thing that happened was that when I went out into my breakout group with another co-worker, and we were trying to grok this query that you gave us, we found out that we got the hardest one, the most complicated one [laughs] because there were so many things going on. There was, like, multiple, like, you know, unions, some that were, like, nested, and then just, like, a lot of duplication as well, like, some conditions that were redundant because of a different condition happening inside of, like, an inner statement. And yeah, we were definitely scratching our heads for a bit and were very grateful that we got to come back together as a group and be like, "Can someone please help? [laughs] Let's figure out what's going on here." JOËL: Sort of close that loop and like, "Hey, here's what we saw. What does everybody else see?" STEPHANIE: Yeah, and I appreciated that you took queries from actual client projects that you were working on. JOËL: Yeah, that was the really fun part of it was that these were not sort of made-up queries to illustrate a point. These were actual queries that I had spent some time trying to optimize and where I had had to spend a lot of time digging into the query plans to understand what was going on. And it sounds like, for you, workshops are something that is...they're generally more engaging, and you get more value out of them. But there's higher activation energy to get started. Does that sound right? STEPHANIE: Yeah, that sounds right. I think, like, I've watched so many talks now, both in person and on YouTube, that a lot of them are easily forgettable [laughs], whereas I think a workshop would be a lot more memorable because of that interactivity and, you know, you get out of it what you put in a little bit. JOËL: Yeah, that's true. Have you looked at the schedule for RailsConf 2024 yet? And are there any workshops on there that you're maybe considering or that maybe have piqued your interest? STEPHANIE: I have, in fact, and maybe I will check off attending a workshop [laughs] off my bucket list this year. There are two that I'm excited about. Unfortunately, they're both at the same time slot, so I -- JOËL: Oh no. You're going to have to choose. STEPHANIE: I know. I imagine I'll have to choose. But I'm interested in the Let's Extend Rails With A Gem by Noel Rappin and Vision For Inclusion Workshop run by Todd Sedano. The Rails gem one I'm excited about because it's just something that I haven't had to do really in my dev career so far, and I think I would really appreciate having that guidance. And also, I think that would be motivation to just get that, like, hands-on experience with it. Otherwise, you know, this is something that I could say that I would want to do and then never get [chuckles] around to it. JOËL: Right, right. And building a gem is the sort of thing that I think probably fits better in a workshop format than in a talk format. STEPHANIE: Yeah. And I've really appreciated all of Noel's content out there. I've found it always really practical, so I imagine that the workshop would be the same. JOËL: So, other than poring over the RailsConf schedule and planning your time there, what has been new for you this week? STEPHANIE: I have a really silly one [laughs]. JOËL: Okay. STEPHANIE: Which is, yesterday I went out to eat dinner to celebrate my partner's birthday, and I experienced, for the first time, robots [laughter] at this restaurant. So, we went out to Hot Pot, and I guess they just have these, like, robot, you know, little, small dish delivery things. They were, like, as tall as me, almost, at least, like, four feet. They were cat-themed. JOËL: [laughs] STEPHANIE: So, they had, like...shaped like cat...they had cat ears, and then there was a screen, and on the screen, there was, like, a little face, and the face would, like, wink at you and smile. JOËL: Aww. STEPHANIE: And I guess how this works is we ordered our food on an iPad, and if you ordered some, like, side dishes and stuff, it would come out to you on this robot cat with wheels. JOËL: Very fun. STEPHANIE: This robot tower cat. I'm doing a poor job describing it because I'm still apparently bewildered [laughs]. But yeah, I was just so surprised, and I was not as...I think I was more, like, shocked than delighted. I imagine other people would find this, like, very fun. But I was a little bit bewildered [laughs]. The other thing that was very funny about this experience is that these robots were kind of going down the aisle between tables, and the aisles were not quite big enough for, like, two-way traffic. And so, there were times where I would be, you know, walking up to go use the restroom, and I would turn the corner and find myself, like, face to face with one of these cat robot things, and, like, it's starting to go at me. I don't know if it will stop [laughs], and I'm the kind of person who doesn't want to find out. JOËL: [laughs] STEPHANIE: So, to avoid colliding with this, you know, food delivery robot, I just, like, ran away from it [laughs]. JOËL: You don't know

Stephanie revisits the concept of "spiking"—a phase of exploration to determine the feasibility of a technical implementation or to address unknowns in feature requests—sharing her recent experiences with a legacy Rails application. Joël brings a different perspective by discussing his involvement with a client project that heavily utilizes the dry-rb suite of gems, highlighting the learning curve associated with adapting to new patterns and libraries. Joël used to be much more idealistic and has moved to be more pragmatic. Stephanie has moved the other way. So together, Stephanie and Joël engage in a philosophical discussion on being an idealistic versus a pragmatic programmer. They explore the concept of programming as a blend of science and art, where technical decisions are not only about solving problems but also about expressing ideas and building shared understandings within a team. Spike tasks episode (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/414) dry-rb (https://dry-rb.org/) Working with Maybe talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43eM4kNbb6c) Problem solving with maybe (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/problem-solving-with-maybe) Programming as Theory Building (https://pablo.rauzy.name/dev/naur1985programming.pdf) The Pragmatic Programmer (https://pragprog.com/titles/tpp20/the-pragmatic-programmer-20th-anniversary-edition/) Transcript:  JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn, and together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, a few weeks ago, we did an episode on spiking in response to a listener question. And I wanted to kind of revisit that topic for a little bit because I've been doing a lot of spiking on my client project. And for those who are not familiar, the way that I understand or define spikes is kind of as an exploration phase to figure out if a technical implementation might work. Or if you have a feature request with some unknowns, you can spend some time-boxed spiking to figure out what those unknowns might be. And I'm working on your typical legacy Rails application [laughs]. And I think one thing that we talked about last time was this idea of, at what point does spiking end up being just working on the feature [laughs]? And I think that's especially true in an older codebase, where you kind of have to go down a few rabbit holes, maybe, just to even find out if something will trip you up down the line. And the way I approached that this time around was just, like, identifying the constraints and putting a little flag there for myself. Like, these were rabbit holes that I could go down, but, you know, towards the initial beginning phase of doing the spiking, I decided not to. I just kind of bookmarked it for later. And once I had identified the main constraints, that was when I was like, okay, like, what kind of solutions can I come up with for these constraints? And that actually then helped me kind of decide which ones we're pursuing a little bit more to get, like, the information I needed to ultimately make a decision about whether this was worth doing, right? It kind of kept me...I'm thinking about, you know, when you are bowling with those safety guards [laughs], it keeps your ball from just rolling into the gutter. I think it helped with not going too deep into places that I may or may not be super fruitful while also, I think, giving me enough information to have a more realistic understanding of, like, what this work would entail. JOËL: Would you say that this approach that you're taking is inspired or maybe informed by the conversation we had on the episode? STEPHANIE: I was especially interested in avoiding the kind of binary of like, no, we can't do this because the system just, you know, isn't able to support it, or it's just too...it would be too much work. That was something I was really, like you said, kind of inspired by after that conversation because I wanted to avoid that trap a little bit. And I think another really helpful framing was the idea of, like, okay, what would need to be done in order to get us to a place where this could be possible? And that's why I think identifying those constraints was important because they're not constraints forever. Like, we could do something about them if we really wanted to, so kind of avoiding the, like, it's not possible, right? And saying like, "It could be. Here's all the things that we need to do in order to make it possible." But I think that helped shift the conversation, especially with stakeholders and stuff, to be a little bit more realistic and collaborative. So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: So, I'm also on a new client project, and a thing that's been really interesting in this codebase is that they've been using the dry-rb suite of gems pretty heavily. And I've seen a lot about the suite of gems. I've read about them. Interestingly, this is kind of the first time that I've been on a codebase that sort of uses them as a main pattern in the app. So, there's been a bit of a learning curve there, and it's been really interesting. STEPHANIE: This is exciting to me because I know you have a lot of functional programming background, also, so it's kind of surprising that you're only now, you know, using something that explicit from functional languages in Ruby. And I'm curious: what's the learning curve, if not the paradigm? Like, what are you kind of encountering? JOËL: I think there's a little bit of just the translation. How do these gems sort of approach this? So, they have to do a couple of, like, clever Ruby things to make some of these features work. Some of these also will have different method names, so a lot of just familiarizing myself with the libraries. Like, oh, well, this thing that I'm used to having called a particular thing has a slightly different name here or maybe not having all of the utilities. I was like, oh, how do we traverse with this particular library? Then you have to, like, look it up. So, it's a lot of like, how do I do this thing I know how to do in, let's say, Elm? How do I translate that into Ruby? But then, also, some of the interplay of how that works in code that also does some very kind of imperative side effecty things also written by a team that is getting used to the pattern. And so, you'll sort of see things where people are pulling things in, but maybe you don't fully understand the deeper underlying approach that's meant to be used. STEPHANIE: Have you noticed any use cases where the dry-rb patterns really shine in your application? JOËL: A thing that's nice is that I think it really forces you to think about your edge cases in a way that sometimes Ruby developers play very fast and loose with "Yeah, whatever, it will never be nil." Push to production immediately start getting NoMethodError in your bug tracker. I never do this, by the way, but you know. STEPHANIE: [laughs]. JOËL: Speaking from a friend's experience [laughs]. STEPHANIE: Asking for a friend, yeah [laughs]. JOËL: I think a thing that I've sort of had to figure out sort of every time I deal with these patterns in different languages is just the importance of good composition and good separation. Because you're adding these sort of wrapper context around things, if you're constantly wrapping and unwrapping, you're like, check things inside, and then do the next thing, and then unwrap again and branch and check and do the next thing, that code becomes really clunky in a way that you just sort of expect to do if you're just writing code in regular Ruby with a nil. But it doesn't really work with a dry-rb maybe or a result. So, the pattern that I have found that works really well is to extract sort of every operation that can be, let's say, that could fail so that it would give you a result back. Extract that out into its own separate function that will construct a success or a failure, and then have your sort of main code that wants to then do a bunch of these things together. All it does is use some of the dry-rb helper methods to compose all of these together, whether that's just some sort of, like, do notation, or binding, or fmap, or something like that, which allows you to have sort of individual chunks that can fail, and then one sort of aggregator piece of code that just finds a way to combine all of them nicely. And that avoids you having to do all this repetition. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. JOËL: It's a pattern, I think; I had to learn the hard way when I was working with Elm. Because if you're taking a potential nullable value and then you want to do things with it but then that potential operation is also nullable because the input was potentially null, and then that just sort of propagates all the way down the chain. So, my whole chain of functions now is doing checks for nullability. And in Ruby, I could just be like, no, I checked it in the first function. I can then just trust that it's not null down the chain. Elm doesn't do the like, trust me, bro. The compiler will force you to validate every time, and then the code just blows up, and it gets really painful. So, I had to start thinking about new models of thinking that would separate out code that actually needs to care and code that doesn't need to care about nullability. And I wrote an article about that. That turned into actually a conference talk as well. And these sort of ideas have served me really well at Elm. And I think these translate pretty well to dry-rb as well. That's something that I'm exploring, but the principles seem like they're not tied to a particular language. STEPHANIE: Yeah, and it's kind of cool that you experienced all of that in working with Elm, where a compiler was there to yell at you [laughs] and kind of forcing you to...I don't know if do the r

Joël shares his recent project challenge with Tailwind CSS, where classes weren't generating as expected due to the dynamic nature of Tailwind's CSS generation and pruning. Stephanie introduces a personal productivity tool, a "thinking cap," to signal her thought process during meetings, which also serves as a physical boundary to separate work from personal life. The conversation shifts to testing methodologies within Rails applications, leading to an exploration of testing philosophies, including developers' assumptions about database cleanliness and their impact on writing tests. Avdi’s classic post on how to use database cleaner (https://avdi.codes/configuring-database_cleaner-with-rails-rspec-capybara-and-selenium/) RSpec change matcher (https://rubydoc.info/gems/rspec-expectations/RSpec%2FMatchers:change) Command/Query separation (https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CommandQuerySeparation.html) When not to use factories (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/speed-up-tests-by-selectively-avoiding-factory-bot) Why Factories? (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/why-factories) Transcript:  STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: I'm working on a new project, and this is a project that uses Tailwind CSS for its styling. And I ran into a bit of an annoying problem with it just getting started, where I was making changes and adding classes. And they were not changing the things I thought they would change in the UI. And so, I looked up the class in the documentation, and then I realized, oh, we're on an older version of the Tailwind Rails gem. So, maybe we're using...like, I'm looking at the most recent docs for Tailwind, but it's not relevant for the version I'm using. Turned out that was not the problem. Then I decided to use the Web Inspector and actually look at the element in my browser to see is it being overwritten somehow by something else? And the class is there in the element, but when I look at the CSS panel, it does not show up there at all or having any effects. And that got me scratching my head. And then, eventually, I figured it out, and it's a bit of a facepalm moment [laughs]. STEPHANIE: Oh, okay. JOËL: Because Tailwind has to, effectively, generate all of these, and it will sort of generate and prune the things you don't need and all of that. They're not all, like, statically present. And so, if I was using a class that no one else in the app had used yet, it hadn't gotten generated. And so, it's just not there. There's a class on the element, but there's no CSS definition tied to it, so the class does nothing. What you need to do is there's a rake task or some sort of task that you can run that will generate things. There's also, I believe, a watcher that you can run, some sort of, like, server that will auto-generate these for you in dev mode. I did not have that set up. So, I was not seeing that new class have any effect. Once I ran the task to generate things, sure enough, it worked. And Tailwind works exactly how the docs say they do. But that was a couple of hours of my life that I'm not getting back. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's rough. Sorry to hear. I've also definitely gone down that route of like, oh, it's not in the docs. The docs are wrong. Like, do they even know what they're talking about? I'm going to fix this for everyone. And similarly have been humbled by a facepalm solution when I'm like, oh, did I yarn [laughs]? No, I didn't [laughs]. JOËL: Uh-huh. I'm curious, for you, when you have sort of moments where it's like the library is not behaving the way you think it is, is your default to blame yourself, or is it to blame the library? STEPHANIE: [laughs]. Oh, good question. JOËL: And the follow-up to that is, are you generally correct? STEPHANIE: Yeah. Yep, yep, yep. Hmm, I will say I externalize the blame, but I will try to at least do, like, the basic troubleshooting steps of restarting my server [laughter], and then if...that's as far as I'll go. And then, I'll be like, oh, like, something must be wrong, you know, with this library, and I turn to Google. And if I'm not finding any fruitful results, again, you know, one path could be, oh, maybe I'm not Googling correctly, but the other path could be, maybe I've discovered something that no one else has before. But to your follow-up question, I'm almost, like, always wrong [laughter]. I'm still waiting for the day when I, like, discover something that is an actual real problem, and I can go and open an issue [chuckles] and, hopefully, be validated by the library author. JOËL: I think part of what I heard is that your debugging strategy is basic, but it's not as basic as Joël's because you remember to restart the server [chuckles]. STEPHANIE: We all have our days [laughter]. JOËL: Next time. So, Stephanie, what is new in your world? STEPHANIE: I'm very excited to share this with you. And I recognize that this is an audio medium, so I will also describe the thing I'm about to show you [laughs]. JOËL: Oh, this is an object. STEPHANIE: It is an object. I got a hat [laughs]. JOËL: Okay. STEPHANIE: I'm going to put it on now. It's a cap that says "Thinking" on it [laughs] in, like, you know, fun sans serif font with a little bit of edge because the thinking is kind of slanted. So, it is designy, if you will. It's my thinking cap. And I've been wearing it at work all week, and I love it. As a person who, in meetings and, you know, when I talk to people, I have to process before I respond a lot of the time, but that has been interpreted as, you know, maybe me not having anything to say or, you know, people aren't sure if I'm, you know, still thinking or if it's time to move on. And sometimes I [chuckles], you know, take a long time. My brain is just spinning. I think another funny hat design would be, like, the beach ball, macOS beach ball. JOËL: That would be hilarious. STEPHANIE: Yeah. Maybe I need to, like, stitch that on the back of this thinking cap. Anyway, I've been wearing it at work in meetings. And then, when I'm just silently processing, I'll just point to my hat and signal to everyone what's [laughs] going on. And it's also been really great for the end of my work day because then I take off the hat, and because I've taken it off, that's, like, my signal, you know, I have this physical totem that, like, now I'm done thinking about work, and that has been working. JOËL: Oh, I love that. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's been working surprisingly well to kind of create a bit more of a boundary to separate work thoughts and life thoughts. JOËL: Because you are working from home and so that boundary between professional life and personal life can get a little bit blurry. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I will say I take it off and throw it on the floor kind of dramatically [laughter] at the end of my work day. So, that's what's new. It had a positive impact on my work-life balance. And yeah, if anyone else has the problem of people being confused about whether you're still thinking or not, recommend looking into a physical thinking cap. JOËL: So, you are speaking at RailsConf this spring in Detroit. Do you plan to bring the thinking cap to the conference? STEPHANIE: Oh yeah, absolutely. That's a great idea. If anyone else is going to RailsConf, find me in my thinking cap [laughs]. JOËL: So, this is how people can recognize Bikeshed co-host Stephanie Minn. See someone walking around with a thinking cap. STEPHANIE: Ooh. thinkingbot? JOËL: Ooh. STEPHANIE: Have I just designed new thoughtbot swag [laughter]? We'll see if this catches on. JOËL: So, we were talking recently, and you'd mentioned that you were facing some really interesting dilemmas when it came to writing tests and particularly how tests interact with your test database. STEPHANIE: Yeah. So, I recently, a few weeks ago, joined a new client project and, you know, one of the first things that I do is start to run those tests [laughs] in their codebase to get a sense of what's what. And I noticed that they were taking quite a long time to get set up before I even saw any progress in terms of successes or failures. So, I was kind of curious what was going on before the examples were even run. And when I tailed the logs for the tests, I noticed that every time that you were running the test suite, it would truncate all of the tables in the test database. And that was a surprise to me because that's not a thing that I had really seen before. And so, basically, what happens is all of the data in the test database gets deleted using this truncation strategy. And this is one way of ensuring a clean slate when you run your tests. JOËL: Was this happening once at the beginning of the test suite or before every test? STEPHANIE: It was good that it was only running once before the test suite, but since, you know, in my local development, I'm running, like, a file at a time or sometimes even just targeting a specific line, this would happen on every run in that situation and was just adding a little bit of extra time to that feedback loop in terms of just making sure your code was working if that's part of your workflow. JOËL: Do you know what version of Rails this project was in? Because I know this was popular in some older versions of Rails as a strategy. STEPHANIE: Yeah. So, it is Rails 7 now, recently upgraded to Rails 7. It was on Rails 6 for a little while. JOËL: Very nice. I want to say that truncation is generally not necessary as of Rails...I forget if it's 5 or 6. But back in the day, specifically for what are now called system tests, the sort of, like, Capybara UI-driven browser tests, you had, effectively, like, two threads that were trying to access the database. And so, you couldn't have your

Stephanie introduces her ideal setup for enjoying coffee on a bike ride. Joël describes his afternoon tea ritual. Exciting news from the hosts: both have been accepted to speak at RailsConf! Stephanie's presentation, titled "So, Writing Tests Feels Painful. What now?" aims to tackle the issues developers encounter with testing while offering actionable advice to ease these pains. Joël's session will focus on utilizing Turbo to create a Dungeons & Dragons character sheet, combining his passion for gaming with technical expertise. Their conversation shifts to artificial intelligence and its potential in code refactoring and other applications, such as enhancing the code review process and solving complex software development problems. Joël shares his venture into combinatorics, illustrating how this mathematical approach helped him efficiently refactor a database query by systematically exploring and testing all potential combinations of query segments. Transcript:  JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn, and together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, today I went out for a coffee on my bike, and I feel like I finally have my perfect, like, on-the-go coffee setup. We have this thoughtbot branded travel mug. So, it's one of the little bits of swag that we got from the company. It's, like, perfectly leak-proof. I'll link the brand in the show notes. But it's perfectly leak-proof, which is great. And on my bike, I have a little stem bag, so it's just, like, a tiny kind of, like, cylindrical bag that sits on the, like, vertical part of my handlebars that connects to the rest of my bag. And it's just, like, the perfect size for a 12-ounce coffee. And so, I put my little travel mug in there, and I just had a very refreshing morning. And I'd gone out on my bike for a little bit, stopping by for coffee and headed home to work. And I got to drink my coffee during my first meeting. So, it was a wonderful way to start the day. JOËL: Do you just show up at the coffee shop with your refillable mug and say, "Hey, can you pour some coffee in this?" STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think a lot of coffee places are really amenable to bringing your own travel mugs. So yeah, it's really nice because I get to use less plastic. And also, you know, when you get a to-go mug, it is not leak-proof, right? It could just slosh all over the place and spill, so not bike-friendly. But yeah, bring your own mug. It's very easy. JOËL: Excellent. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: Also, warm beverages. Who would have thought? It's almost like it's cold in North America or something. I've been really enjoying making myself tea in the afternoons recently. And I've been drinking this brand of tea that is a little bit extra. Every flavor of tea they have comes with a description of how the tea feels. STEPHANIE: Ooh. JOËL: I don't know who came up with these, but they're kind of funny. So, one that I particularly enjoy is described as feels like stargazing on an empty beach. STEPHANIE: Wow. That's very specific. JOËL: They also give you tasting notes. This one has tastes of candied violet, elderberry, blackberry, and incense. STEPHANIE: Ooh, that sounds lovely. Are you drinking, like, herbal tea in the afternoon, or do you drink caffeinated tea? JOËL: I'll do caffeinated tea. I limit myself to one pot of coffee that I brew in the morning, and then, whenever that's done, I switch to tea. Tea I allow myself anything: herbal, black tea; that's fine. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I can't have too much caffeine in the afternoon either. But I do love an extra tea. I wish I could remember, like, what even was in this tea or what brand it was, but once I had a tea that was a purplish color. But then, when you squeeze some lemon in it, or I guess maybe anything with a bit of acid, it would turn blue. JOËL: Oh, that's so cool. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I'll have to find what this tea was [laughs] and update the podcast for any tea lovers out there. But yeah, it was just, like, a little bit of extra whimsy to your regular routine. JOËL: I love adding a little whimsy to my day, even if it's just seeing a random animated GIF that a coworker has sent or Tuple has some of the, like, reactions you can send if you're pairing with someone. And I don't use those very often, so whenever one of those comes through, and it's like, ship it or yay, that makes me very happy. STEPHANIE: Agreed. JOËL: This week is really fun because as we were prepping for this episode, we both realized that there is a lot that's been new in our world recently. And Stephanie, in particular, you've got some pretty big news that recently happened to you. STEPHANIE: Yeah, it turns out we're making the what's new in your world segment the entire episode today [laughs]. But my news is that I am speaking at RailsConf this year, so that is May 7th through 9th in Detroit. And so, yeah, I haven't spoken at a RailsConf before, only a RubyConf. So, I'm looking forward to it. My talk is called: So, Writing Tests Feels Painful. What now? JOËL: Wait, is writing tests ever painful [laughs]? STEPHANIE: Maybe not for you, but for the rest of us [laughs]. JOËL: No, it absolutely is. I, right before this recording, came from a pairing session where we were scratching our heads on an, like, awkward-to-write test. It happens to all of us. STEPHANIE: Yeah. So, I was brainstorming topics, and I kind of realized, especially with a lot of our consulting experience, you know, we hear from developers or even maybe, like, engineering managers a lot of themes around like, "Oh, like, development is slowing down because our test suite is such a headache," or "It's really slow. It's really flaky. It's really complicated." And that is a pain point that a lot of tech leaders are also looking to address for their teams. But I was really questioning this idea that, like, it always had to be some effort to improve the test suite, like, that had to be worked on at some later point or get, like, an initiative together to fix all of these problems, and that it couldn't just be baked into your normal development process, like, on an individual level. I do think it is really easy to feel a lot of pain when trying to write tests and then just be like, ugh, like, I wish someone would fix this, right? Or, you know, just kind of ignore the signals of that pain because you don't know, like, how to manage it yourself. So, my talk is about when you do feel that pain, really trying to determine if there's anything you can do, even in just, like, the one test file that you're working in to make things a little bit easier for yourself, so it doesn't become this, like, chronic issue that just gets worse and worse. Is there something you could do to maybe reorganize the file as you're working in it to make some conditionals a little bit clearer? Is there any, like, extra test setup that you're like, "Oh, actually, I don't need this anymore, and I can just start to get rid of it, not just for this one example, but for the rest in this file"? And do yourself a favor a little bit. So yeah, I'm excited to talk about that because I think that's perhaps, like, a skill that we don't focus enough on. JOËL: Are you going to sort of focus in on the side of things where, like, a classic TDD mantra is that test pain reflects underlying code complexity? So, are you planning to focus on the idea of, oh, if you're feeling test pain, maybe take some time to refactor some of the code that's under test, maybe because there's some tight coupling? Or are you going to lean a little bit more into maybe, like, the Boy Scout rule, you know, 'Leave the campsite cleaner than you found it' for your test files? STEPHANIE: Ooh, I like that framing. Definitely more of the former. But one thing I've also noticed working with a lot of client teams is that it's not always clear, like, how to refactor. I think a lot of intermediate developers start to feel that pain but don't know what to do about it. They don't know, like, maybe the code smells, or the patterns, or refactoring strategies, and that can certainly be taught. It will probably pull from that. But even if you don't know those skills yet, I'm wondering if there's, like, an opportunity to teach, like, developers at that level to start to reflect on the code and be like, "Hmm, what could I do to make this a little more flexible?" And they might not know the names of the strategies to, like, extract a class, but just start to get them thinking about it. And then maybe when they come across that vocabulary later, it'll connect a lot easier because they'll have started to think about, you know, their experiences day to day with some of the more conceptual stuff. JOËL: I really like that because I feel we've probably all heard that idea that test pain, especially when you're test driving, is a sign of maybe some anti-patterns or some code smells in the underlying code that you're testing. But translating that into something actionable and being able to say, "Okay, so my tests are painful. They're telling me something needs to be refactored. I'm looking at this code, and I don't know what to refactor." It's a big jump. It's almost the classic draw two circles; draw the rest of the owl meme. And so, I think bridging that gap is something that is really valuable for our community. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's exactly what I hope to do in my talk. So, Joël, you [chuckles] also didn't quite mention that you have big news as well. JOËL: So, I also got accepted to speak at RailsConf. I'm giving a talk on Building a Dungeons & Dragons Character Sheet Using Turbo. STEPHANIE: That's really awesome. I'm excited because I want to learn more about Turbo. I want someone else to tell

Joël talks about his difficulties optimizing queries in ActiveRecord, especially with complex scopes and unions, resulting in slow queries. He emphasizes the importance of optimizing subqueries in unions to boost performance despite challenges such as query duplication and difficulty reusing scopes. Stephanie discusses upgrading a client's app to Rails 7, highlighting the importance of patience, detailed attention, and the benefits of collaborative work with a fellow developer. The conversation shifts to Ruby's reduce method (inject), exploring its complexity and various mental models to understand it. Joël and Stephanie discuss when it's preferable to use reduce over other methods like each, map, or loops and the importance of understanding the underlying operation you wish to apply to two elements before scaling up with reduce. The episode also touches on monoids and how they relate to reduce, suggesting that a deep understanding of functional programming concepts can help simplify reduce expressions. Rails 7 EXPLAIN ANALYZE (https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/rails-7-1-adds-options-to-activerecord-relation-explain) Blocks, symbol to proc, and symbols arguments for reduce (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/blocks-procs-and-enumerable) Ruby tally (https://medium.com/@baweaver/ruby-2-7-enumerable-tally-a706a5fb11ea) Performance considerations for reduce in JavaScript (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/Reduce#when_to_not_use_reduce) Persistant data structures (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTClDj9Zl1g) Avoid passing a block to map and reduce (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/avoid-putting-logic-in-map-blocks) Functional Programming with Bananas, Lenses, Envelopes and Barbed Wire (https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/6142049/meijer91functional.pdf) monoids (https://blog.ploeh.dk/2017/10/06/monoids/) iteration anti-patterns (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/iteration-as-an-anti-pattern) Joël’s talk on “constructor replacement” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSMB3rsufC8) Transcript:  STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: I've been doing a bunch of fiddling with query optimization this week, and I've sort of run across an interesting...but maybe it's more of an interesting realization because it's interesting in the sort of annoying way. And that is that, using ActiveRecord scopes with certain more complex query pieces, particularly unions, can lead to queries that are really slow, and you have to rewrite them differently in a way that's not reusable in order to make them fast. In particular, if you have sort of two other scopes that involve joins and then you combine them using a union, you're unioning two sort of joins. Later on, you want to change some other scope that does some wares or something like that. That can end up being really expensive, particularly if some of the underlying tables being joined are huge. Because your database, in my case, Postgres, will pull a lot of this data into the giant sort of in-memory table as it's, like, building all these things together and to filter them out. And it doesn't have the ability to optimize the way it would on a more traditional relation. A solution to this is to make sure that the sort of subqueries that are getting unioned are optimized individually. And that can mean moving conditions that are outside the union inside. So, if I'm chaining, I don't know, where active is true on the outer query; on the union itself, I might need to move that inside each of the subqueries. So, now, in the two or three subqueries that I'm unioning, each of them needs to have a 'where active true' chained on it. STEPHANIE: Interesting. I have heard this about using ActiveRecord scopes before, that if the scopes are quite complex, chaining them might not lead to the most performant query. That is interesting. By optimizing the subqueries, did you kind of change the meaning of them? Was that something that ended up happening? JOËL: So, the annoying thing is that I have a scope that has the union in it, and it does some things sort of on its own. And it's used in some places. There are also other places that will try to take that scope that has the union on it, chain some other scopes that do other joins and some more filters, and that is horribly inefficient. So, I need to sort of rewrite the sort of subqueries that get union to include all these new conditions that only happen in this one use case and not in the, like, three or four others that rely on that union. So, now I end up with some, like, awkward query duplication in different call sites that I'm not super comfortable about, but, unfortunately, I've not found a good way to make this sort of nicely reusable. Because when you want to chain sort of more things onto the union, you need to shove them in, and there's no clean way of doing that. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think another way I've seen this resolved is just writing it in SQL if it's really complex and it becoming just a bespoke query. We're no longer trying to use the scope that could be reusable. JOËL: Right. Right. In this case, I guess, I'm, like, halfway in between in that I'm using the ActiveRecord DSL, but I am not reusing scopes and things. So, I sort of have the, I don't know, naive union implementation that can be fine in all of the simpler use cases that are using it. And then the query that tries to combine the union with some other fancy stuff it just gets its own separate implementation different than the others that it has optimized. So, there are sort of two separate paths, two separate implementations. I did not drop down to writing raw SQL because I could use the ActiveRecord DSL. So, that's what I've been working with. What's new in your world this week? STEPHANIE: So, a couple of weeks ago, I think, I mentioned that I was working on a Rails 7 upgrade, and we have gotten it out the door. So, now the client application I'm working on is on Rails 7, which is exciting for the team. But in an effort to make the upgrade as incremental as possible, we did, like, back out of a few of the new application config changes that would have led us down a path of more work. And now we're kind of following up a little bit to try to turn some of those configs on to enable them. And it was very exciting to kind of, like, officially be on Rails 7. But I do feel like we tried to go for, like, the minimal amount of work possible in that initial big change. And now we're having to kind of backfill a little bit on some of the work that was a little bit more like, oh, I'm not really sure, like, how big this will end up being. And it's been really interesting work, I think, because it requires, like, two different mindsets. Like, one of them is being really patient and focused on tedious work. Like, okay, what happens when we enable this config option? Like, what changes? What errors do we see? And then having to turn it back off and then go in and fix them. But then another, I think, like, headspace that we have to be in is making decisions about what to do when we come to a crossroads around, like, okay, now that we are starting to see all the changes that are coming about from enabling this config, is this even what we want to do? And it can be really hard to switch between those two modes of thinking. JOËL: Yeah. How do you try to balance between the two? STEPHANIE: So, I luckily have been pairing with another dev, and I've actually found that to be really effective because he has, I guess, just, like, a little bit more of that patience to do the more tedious, mundane [laughs] aspects of, like, driving the code changes. And I have been riding along. But then I can sense, like, once he gets to the point of like, "Oh, I'm not sure if we should keep going down this road," I can step in a little bit more and be like, "Okay, like, you know, I've seen us do this, like, five times now, and maybe we don't want to do that." Or maybe being like, "Okay, we don't have a really clear answer, but, like, who can we talk to to find out a little bit more or get their input?" And that's been working really well for me because I've not had a lot of energy to do more of that, like, more manual or tedious labor [chuckles] that comes with working on that low level of stuff. So yeah, I've just been pleasantly surprised by how well we are aligning our superpowers. JOËL: To use some classic business speech, how does it feel to be in the future on Rails 7? STEPHANIE: Well, we're not quite up, you know, up to modern days yet, but it does feel like we're getting close. And, like, I think now we're starting to entertain the idea of, like, hmm, like, could we be even on main? I don't think it's really going to happen, but it feels a little bit more possible. And, in general, like, the team thinks that that could be, like, really exciting. Or it's easier, I think, once you're a little bit more on top of it. Like, the worst is when you get quite behind, and you end up just feeling like you're constantly playing catch up. It just feels a little bit more manageable now, which is good. JOËL: I learned this week a fun fact about Rails 7.1, in particular, which is that the analyze method on ActiveRecord queries, which allowed you to sort of get SQL EXPLAIN statements, now has the ability to pass in a couple of extra parameters. So, there are symbols, and you can pass in things like analyze or verbose, which allows you to get sort of more data out of your EXPLAIN query, which can be quite nice when you're debugging for performance. So, if you're in the future and you're on Rails 7.1 and you want sort of the in-depth query plans, you don't need to copy the SQL into a

Stephanie shares about her vacation at Disney World, particularly emphasizing the technological advancements in the park's mobile app that made her visit remarkably frictionless. Joël had a conversation about a topic he loves: units of measure, and he got to go deep into the idea of dimensional analysis with someone this week. Together, Joël and Stephanie talk about module documentation within software development. Joël shares his recent experience writing module docs for a Ruby project using the YARD documentation system. He highlights the time-consuming nature of crafting good documentation for each public method in a class, emphasizing that while it's a demanding task, it significantly benefits those who will use the code in the future. They explore the attributes of good documentation, including providing code examples, explaining expected usage, suggesting alternatives, discussing edge cases, linking to external resources, and detailing inputs, outputs, and potential side effects. Multidimensional numbers episode (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/416) YARD docs (https://yardoc.org/) New factory_bot documentation (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/new-docs-for-factory_bot) Dash (https://kapeli.com/dash) Solargraph (https://solargraph.org/) Transcript:  JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn, and together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, I recently was on vacation, and I'm excited [chuckles] to tell our listeners all about it. I went to Disney World [laughs]. And honestly, I was especially struck by the tech that they used there. As a person who works in tech, I always kind of have a little bit of a different experience knowing a bit more about software, I suppose, than just your regular person [laughs], citizen. And so, at Disney World, I was really impressed by how seamlessly the like, quote, unquote, "real life experience" integrated with their use of their branded app to pair with, like, your time at the theme park. JOËL: This is, like, an app that runs on your mobile device? STEPHANIE: Yeah, it's a mobile app. I haven't been to Disney in a really long time. I think the last time I went was just as a kid, like, this was, you know, pre-mobile phones. So, I recall when you get into the line at a ride, you can skip the line by getting what's called a fast pass. And so, you kind of take a ticket, and it tells you a designated time to come back so that you could get into the fast line, and you don't have to wait as long. And now all this stuff is on your mobile app, and I basically did not wait in [laughs] a single line for more than, like, five minutes to go on any of the rides I wanted. It just made a lot of sense that all these things that previously had more, like, physical touchstones, were made a bit more convenient. And I hesitate to use the word frictionless, but I would say that accurately describes the experience. JOËL: That's kind of amazing; the idea that you can use tech to make a place that's incredibly busy also feel seamless and where you don't have to wait in line. STEPHANIE: Yeah and, actually, I think the coolest part was it blended both your, like, physical experience really well with your digital one. I think that's kind of a gripe I have as a technologist [laughs] when I'm just kind of too immersed in my screen as opposed to the world around me. But I was really impressed by the way that they managed to make it, like, a really good supplement to your experience being there. JOËL: So, you're not hyped for a future world where you can visit Disney in VR? STEPHANIE: I mean, I just don't think it's the same. I rode a ride [laughs] where it was kind of like a mini roller coaster. It was called Expedition Everest. And there's a moment, this is, like, mostly indoors, but there's a moment where the roller coaster is going down outside, and you're getting that freefall, like, drop feeling in your stomach. And it also happened to be, like, drizzling that day that we were out there, and I could feel it, you know, like, pelting my head [laughs]. And until VR can replicate that experience [chuckles], I still think that going to Disney is pretty fun. JOËL: Amazing. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: I'm really excited because I had a conversation about a topic that I like to talk about: units of measure. And I got to go deep into the idea of dimensional analysis with someone this week. This is a technique where you can look at a calculation or a function and sort of spot-check whether it's correct by looking at whether the unit for the measure that would come out match what you would expect. So, you do math on the units and ignore the numbers coming into your formula. And, you know, let's say you're calculating the speed of something, and you get a distance and the amount of time it took you to take to go that distance. And let's say your method implements this as distance times time. Forget about doing the actual math with the numbers here; just look at the units and say, okay, we've got our meters, and we've got our seconds, and we're multiplying them together. The unit that comes out of this method is meters times seconds. You happen to know that speeds are not measured in meters times seconds. They're measured in meters divided by seconds or meters per second. So, immediately, you get a sense of, like, wait a minute, something's wrong here. I must have a bug in my function. STEPHANIE: Interesting. I'm curious how you're representing that data to, like, know if there's a bug or not. In my head, when you were talking about that, I'm like, oh yeah, I definitely recall doing, like, math problems for homework [laughs] where I had, you know, my meters per second. You have your little fractions written out, and then when you multiply or divide, you know how to, like, deal with the units on your piece of paper where you're showing your work. But I'm having a hard time imagining what that looks like as a programmer dealing with that problem. JOËL: You could do it just all in your head based off of maybe some comments that you might have or the name of the variable or something. So, you're like, okay, well, I have a distance in meters and a time in seconds, and I'm multiplying the two. Therefore, what should be coming out is a value that is in meters times seconds. If you want to get fancier, you can do things with value objects of different types. So, you say, okay, I have a distance, and I have a time. And so, now I have sort of a multiplication of a distance and a time, and sort of what is that coming out as? That can sometimes help you prevent from having some of these mistakes because you might have some kind of error that gets raised at runtime where it's like, hey, you're trying to multiply two units that shouldn't be multiplied, or whatever it is. You can also, in some languages, do this sort of thing automatically at the type level. So, instead of looking at it yourself and sort of inferring it all on your own based off of the written code, languages like F# have built-in unit-of-measure systems where once you sort of tag numbers as just being of a particular unit of measure, any time you do math with those numbers, it will then tag the result with whatever compound unit comes from that operation. So, you have meters, and you have seconds. You divide one by the other, and now the result gets tagged as meters per second. And then, if you have another calculation that takes the output of the first one and it comes in, you can tell the compiler via type signature, hey, the input for this method needs to be in meters per second. And if the other calculation sort of automatically builds something that's of a different unit, you'll get a compilation error. So, it's really cool what it can do. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that is really neat. I like all of those built-in guardrails, I suppose, to help you, you know, make sure that your answer is correct. Definitely could have used that [chuckles]. Turns out I just needed a calculator to take my math test with [laughs]. JOËL: I think what I find valuable more than sort of the very rigorous approach is the mindset. So, anytime you're dealing with numbers, thinking in your mind, what is the unit of this number? When I do math with it with a different number, is it the same unit? Is it a different unit? What is the unit of the thing that's coming out? Does this operation make sense in the domain of my application? Because it's easy to sometimes think you're doing a math operation that makes sense, and then when you look at the unit, you're like, wait a minute, this does not make sense. And I would go so far as to say that, you know, you might think, oh, I'm not doing a physics app. I don't care about units of measure. Most numbers in your app that are actually numbers are going to have some kind of unit of measure associated to them. Occasionally, you might have something where it's just, like, a straight-up, like, quantity or something like that. It's a dimensionless number. But most things will have some sort of unit. Maybe it's a number of dollars. Maybe it is an amount of time, a duration. It could be a distance. It could be all sorts of things. Typically, there is some sort of unit that should attach to it. STEPHANIE: Yeah. That makes sense that you would want to be careful about making sure that your mathematical operations that you're doing when you're doing objects make sense. And we did talk about this in the last episode about multidimensional numbers a little bit. And I suppose I appreciate you saying that because I think I have mostly benefited from other people having thought in that mindset before and encoding, like I mentioned, those guardrails. So, I can recall an app where I w

Joël discusses the challenges he encountered while optimizing slow SQL queries in a non-Rails application. Stephanie shares her experience with canary deploys in a Rails upgrade. Together, Stephanie and Joël address a listener's question about replacing the wkhtml2pdf tool, which is no longer maintained. The episode's main topic revolves around the concept of multidimensional numbers and their applications in software development. Joël introduces the idea of treating objects containing multiple numbers as single entities, using the example of 2D points in space to illustrate how custom classes can define mathematical operations like addition and subtraction for complex data types. They explore how this approach can simplify operations on data structures, such as inventories of T-shirt sizes, by treating them as mathematical objects. EXPLAIN ANALYZE visualizer (https://explain.dalibo.com/) Canary in a coal mine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_species#Canaries) Episode 413: Developer Tales of Package Management (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/413) Docs for media-specific CSS (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media) Episode 386: Value Objects Revisited: The Tally Edition (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/386) Money gem (https://github.com/RubyMoney/money) Transcript: STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: I've recently been trying to do some performance enhancements to some very slow queries. This isn't a Rails app, so we're sort of combining together a bunch of different scopes. And the way they're composing together is turning out to be really slow. And I've reached for a tool that is just really fun. It's a visualizer for SQL query plans. You can put the SQL keywords in front of a query: 'EXPLAIN ANALYZE,' and it will then output a query plan, sort of how it's going to attempt to do the work. And that might be like, oh, we're going to use this index on this table to join on this other thing, and then we're going to...maybe this is a table that we think we're going to do a sequential scan through and, you know, it builds out a whole thing. It's a big block of text, and it's kind of intimidating to look at. So, there are a few websites out there that will do this. You just paste a query plan in, and they will build you a nice, little visualization, almost like a tree of, like, tasks to be done. Oftentimes, they'll also annotate it with metadata that they pulled from the query plan. So, oh, this particular node is the really expensive one because we're doing a sequential scan of this table that has 15 million rows in it. And so, it's really useful to then sort of pinpoint what are the areas that you could optimize. STEPHANIE: Nice. I have known that you could do that EXPLAIN ANALYZE on a SQL query, but I've never had to do it before. Is this your first time, or is it just your first time using the visualizer? JOËL: I've played around with EXPLAIN ANALYZE a little bit before. Pro tip: In Rails, if you've got a scope, you can just chain dot explain on the end, and instead of running the query, it will run the EXPLAIN version of it and return the query plan. So, you don't need to, like, turn into SQL then manually run it in your database system to get the EXPLAIN. You can just tack a dot explain on there to get the query plan. It's still kind of intimidating, especially if you've got a really complex query that's...this thing might be 50 lines long of EXPLAIN with all this indentation and other stuff. So, putting it into a sort of online visualizer was really helpful for the work that I was doing. So, it was my first time using an online visualizer. There are a few out there. I'll link to the one that I used in the show notes. But I would do that again, would recommend. STEPHANIE: Nice. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, I actually just stepped away from being in the middle of doing a Rails upgrade [chuckles] and releasing it to production just a few minutes before getting on to record with you on this podcast. And the reason I was able to do that, you know, without feeling like I had to just monitor to see how it was going is because I'm on a project where the client is using canary deploys. And I was so pleasantly surprised by how easy it made this experience where we had decided to send the canary release earlier this morning. And the way that they have it set up is that the canary goes to 10% of traffic. 10% of the users were on Rails 7 for their sessions. And we saw a couple of errors in our error monitoring service. And we are like, "Okay, like, let's take a look at this, see what's going on." And it turns out it was not too big of a deal because it had to do with, like, a specific page. And, for the most part, if a user did encounter this error, they probably wouldn't again after refreshing because they had, like, a 90% chance [chuckles] of being directed to the previous version where everything is working. And we were kind of making that trade-off of like, oh, we could hotfix this right now on the canary release. But then, as we were starting to debug a little bit, it was a bit hairier than we expected originally. And so, you know, I said, "I have to hop on to go record The Bike Shed. So, why don't we just take this canary down just for the time being to take that time pressure off? And it's Friday, so we're heading into the weekend. And maybe we can revisit the issue with some fresh eyes." So, I'm feeling really good, actually. And I'm glad that we were able to do something that seems scary, but there were guardrails in place to make it a lot more chill. JOËL: Yay for the ability to roll back. You used the term canary release. That's not one that I'm familiar with. Can you explain what a canary release is? STEPHANIE: Oh yeah. Have you heard of the phrase 'Canary in the coal mine'? JOËL: I have. STEPHANIE: Okay. So, I believe it's the same idea where you are, in this case, releasing a potentially risky change, but you don't want to immediately make it available to, like, all of your users. And so, you send this change to, like, a small reach, I suppose, and give it a little bit of a test and see [chuckles] what comes back. And that can help inform you of any issues or risks that might happen before kind of committing to deploying a potentially risky change with a bigger impact. JOËL: Is this handled with something like a feature flag framework? Or is this, like, at an infrastructure level where you're just like, "Hey, we've got the canary image in, like, one container on one server, and then we'll redirect 10% of traffic to that to be served by that one and the other 90% to be served by the old container or something like that"? STEPHANIE: Yeah, in this case, it was at the infrastructure level. And I have also seen something similar at a feature flag level, too, where you're able to have some more granularity around what percent of users are seeing a feature. But I think with something like a Rails upgrade, it was nice to be able to have that at that infrastructure level. It's not necessarily, like, a particular page or feature to show or not show. JOËL: Yeah, I think you would probably want that at a higher level when you're changing over the entire app. Is this something that you had to custom-build yourself or something that just sort of came out of the box with some of the infrastructure tools you're using? STEPHANIE: It came out of the box, actually. I just joined this client project this week and was very delighted to see just some really great deployment infrastructure and getting to meet the DevOps engineers, too, who built it. And they're really proud of it. They kind of walked us through our first release earlier this week. And he was telling me, the DevOps engineer, that this was actually his favorite part of the job, is walking people through their first release and being their buddy while they do it. Because I think he gets to also see users interact with the tool that he built, and he had a lot of pride in that, so it was a very delightful experience. JOËL: That's so wonderful. I've been on so many projects where the sort of infrastructure side of things is not the team's strong point, and releasing can be really scary. And it's great to hear the opposite of that. We recently received a question for Stephanie based on an earlier episode. So, the question asks, "In episode 413, Stephanie discussed a recent issue she encountered with wkhtml2pdf. The episode turned into a deeper discussion about package management, but I don't think it ever cycled back to the conclusion. I'm curious: how did Stephanie solve this dilemma? We're facing the same issue on a project that my team maintains. It's an old codebase, and there are bits of old code that use wkhtml2pdf to generate print views of our data in our application. The situation is fairly dire. wkhtml2pdf is no longer maintained. In fact, it won't even be available to install from our operating system's package repositories in June. We're on FreeBSD, but I assume the same will be eventually true for other operating systems. And so, unless you want to maintain some build step to check out and compile the source code for an application that will no longer receive security updates, just living with it isn't really an option. There are three options we're considering. One, eliminate the dependency entirely. Based on user feedback, it sounds like our old developers were using this library to generate PDFs when what users really wanted was an easy way to print. So, instead of downloading a PDF, just ensure the screen has a good print style sheet and register an onload handler to call window dot print

Stephanie has a delightful and cute Ruby thing to share: Honeybadger, the error monitoring service, has created exceptionalcreatures.com, where they've illustrated and characterized various common Ruby errors into little monsters, and they're adorable. Meanwhile, Joël encourages folks to submit proposals for RailsConf. Together, Stephanie and Joël delve into the nuances of adapting to and working within new codebases, akin to aligning with a shared mental model or vision. They ponder several vital questions that every developer faces when encountering a new project: the balance between exploring a codebase to understand its structure and diving straight into tasks, the decision-making process behind adopting new patterns versus adhering to established ones, and the strategies teams can employ to assist developers who are familiarizing themselves with a new environment. Honeybadger's Exceptional Creatures (https://www.exceptionalcreatures.com/) RailsConf CFP coaching sessions (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScZxDFaHZg8ncQaOiq5tjX0IXvYmQrTfjzpKaM_Bnj5HHaNdw/viewform) HTTP Cats (https://http.cat/) Support and Maintenance Episode (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/409) Transcript:  JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: I have a delightful and cute Ruby thing to share I'd seen just in our internal company Slack. Honeybadger, the error monitoring service, has created a cute little webpage called exceptionalcreatures.com, where they've basically illustrated and characterized various common Ruby errors into little monsters [laughs], and I find them adorable. I think their goal is also to make it a really helpful resource for people encountering these kinds of errors, learning about them for the first time, and figuring how to triage or debug them. And I just think it's a really cool way of, like, making it super approachable, debugging and, you know, when you first encounter a scary error message, can be really overwhelming, and then Googling about it can also be equally [chuckles] overwhelming. So, I just really liked the whimsy that they kind of injected into something that could be really hard to learn about. Like, there are so many different error messages in Ruby and in Rails and whatever other libraries you're using. And so, that's kind of a...I think they've created a one-stop shop for, you know, figuring out how to move forward with common errors. And I also like that it's a bit of a collective effort. They're calling it, like, a bestiary for all the little creatures [laughs] that they've discovered. And I think you can, like, submit your own favorite Ruby error and any guidance you might have for someone trying to debug it. JOËL: That's adorable. It reminds me a little bit of HTTP status codes as cat memes site. It has that same energy. One thing that I think is really interesting is that because it's Honeybadger, they have stats on, like, frequency of these errors, and a lot of these ones are tied to...I think they're picking some of the most commonly surfaced errors. STEPHANIE: Yeah, there's little, like, ratings, too, for how frequently they occur, kind of just like, I don't know, Pokémon [laughs] [inaudible 02:31]. I think it's really neat that they're using something like a learning from their business or maybe even some, like, proprietary information and sharing it with the world so that we can learn from it. JOËL: I think one thing that's worth specifying as well is that these are specific exception classes that get raised. So, they're not just, like, random error strings that you see in the wild. They don't often have a whole lot of documentation around them, so it's nice to see a dedicated page for each and a little bit of maybe how this is used in the real world versus maybe how they were designed to be used. Maybe there's a line or two in the docs about, you know, core Ruby when a NoMethodError should be raised. How does NoMethodError actually get used, you know, in real life, and the exceptions that Honeybadger is capturing. That's really interesting to see. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I like how each page for the exception class, and I'm glad you made that distinction, is kind of, like, crowdsourced guidance and information from the community, so I think you could even, you know, contribute to it if you wanted. But yeah, just a fun, little website to bring you some delight when you're on your next head-smacking, debugging adventure [laughs]. JOËL: And I love that it brings some joy to the topic, but, honestly, I think it's a pretty good reference. I could see myself linking to this anytime I want to have a deeper discussion on exceptions. So, maybe there's a code review, and maybe I want to suggest that we raise a different error than the one that we're doing. I could see myself in that GitHub comment being like, "Oh, instead of, you know, raising an exception here, why don't we instead raise a NoMethodError or something like that?" And then link to the bestiary page. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: So, just recently, RailsConf announced their call for proposals. It's a fairly short period this year, only about three-ish weeks long. So, I've been really encouraging colleagues to submit and trying to be a resource for people who are interested in speaking at conferences. We did a Q&A session with a fellow thoughtboter, Aji Slater, who's also a former RailsConf speaker, about what makes for a good talk, what is it like to submit to a call for proposals, you know, kind of everything from the process from having an idea all the way to stage presence and delivering. And there's a lot of great questions that got asked and some good discussion that happened there. STEPHANIE: Nice. Yeah, I think I have noticed that you are doing a lot more to help, especially first-time speakers give their first conference talk this year. And I'm wondering if there's anything you've learned or any hopes and dreams you have for kind of the amount of time you're investing into supporting others. JOËL: What I'd like to see is a lot of people submitting proposals; that's always a great thing. And, a proposal, even if it doesn't get accepted, is a thing that you can resubmit. And so, having gone through the effort of building a proposal and especially getting it maybe peer-reviewed by some colleagues to polish your idea, I think is already just a really great exercise, and it's one that you can shop around. It's one that you can maybe convert into a blog post if you need to. You can convert that into some kind of podcast appearance. So, I think it's a great way to take an idea you're excited about and focus it, even if you can't get into RailsConf. STEPHANIE: I really like that metric for success. It reminds me of a writer friend I have who actually was a guest on the show, Nicole Zhu. She submits a lot of short stories to magazines and applications to writing fellowships, and she celebrates every rejection. I think at the end of the year, she, like, celebrates herself for having received, you know, like, 15 rejections or something that year because that meant that she just went for it and, you know, did the hard part of doing the work, putting yourself out there. And that is just as important, you know, if not more than whatever achievement or goal or the idea of having something accepted. JOËL: Yeah, I have to admit; rejection hurts. It's not a fun thing to go through. But I think even if you sort of make it to that final stage of having written a proposal and it gets rejected, you get a lot of value out of that journey sort of regardless of whether you get accepted or not. So, I encourage more people to do that. To any of our listeners who are interested, the RailsConf call for proposals goes through February 13th, 2024. So, if you are listening before then and are inspired, I recommend submitting. If you're unsure of what makes for a good CFP, RailsConf is currently offering coaching sessions to help craft better proposals. They have one on February 5th, one on February 6th, and one on February 7th, so those are also options to look into if this is maybe your first time and you're not sure. There's a signup form. We'll link to it in the show notes. STEPHANIE: So, another update I have that I'm excited to get into for the rest of the episode is my recent work on our support and maintenance team, which I've talked about on the show before. But for any listeners who don't know, it's a kind of sub-team at thoughtbot that is focused on helping maintain multiple client projects at a time. But, at this point, you know, there's not as much active feature development, but the work is focused on keeping the codebase up to date, making any dependency upgrades, fixing any bugs that come up, and general support. So, clients have a team to kind of address those things as they come up. And when I had last talked about it on the podcast, I was really excited because it was a bit of a different way of working. I felt like it was very novel to be, you know, have a lot of different projects and domains to be getting into. And knowing that I was working on this team, like, short-term and, you know, it may not be me in the future continuing what I might have started during my rotation, I thought it was really interesting to be optimizing towards, like, completion of a task. And that had kind of changed my workflow a bit and my process. JOËL: So, now that you've been doing work on the support and maintenance team for a while and you've kind of maybe gotten more comfortable with it, how are you generally feeling about this idea of sort of jumping into new codebases all the time? STEPHANIE: It is both fun and more chall

Joël shares his recent experience with Turbo, a JavaScript framework that simplifies adding interactivity to websites without extensive JavaScript coding. Stephanie gives an update on her quest to work from her office more, and the birds have arrived—most notably, chickadees. Stephanie and Joël address a listener question from Edward about the concept of a "spike" in software development. They discuss the nature of spikes, emphasizing that they are typically throwaway work aimed at learning and de-risking rather than producing final code, and explore how spikes can lead to better decision-making and prioritization in software development, especially in complex codebases. Transcript: STEPHANIE:  Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: I'm pretty excited because this week, I actually got to use a little bit of Turbo for the first time. Turbo is Rails'...I guess it's not technically just for Rails. It's a sort of unobtrusive JavaScript framework that allows you to build a lot of interactive functionality without actually having to write a lot of JavaScript yourself, just by writing some HTML in a certain way. And you can add a lot of functionality and interactivity to your site without having to drop to custom writing some JavaScript. STEPHANIE: Cool. Yeah, that is exciting. I personally have not gotten to use too much of it in a production/client setting; only played around with it a little bit on my own to keep up with what's new and just kind of reading about how other people are excited to use it. So, what are your first impressions so far? JOËL: It's pretty nice. It, you know, works as advertised. My situation, I was rendering a calendar view of a lot of events, and this is completely server-rendered. And I realized, wait a minute, there are some days where I've got, like, 20 events, and I really, like, I want my calendar squares to say sort of equally sized. So, I wanted to limit myself to only showing four or five events per calendar day. And so, I added a little link at the bottom of the calendar day that says, you know, "See more." And when you click that link, it does some Turbo stuff, and it pulls in other events so that you can now sort of expand it to get the whole day. So, it's just a little bit of interactivity that you kind of get for free with Turbo just by wrapping a particular HTML tag around it and having the Turbo library loaded. STEPHANIE: That's cool. I'm excited to try it out next time I'm working on a Rails project that just needs a little bit of that interactivity, you know, just to make that experience a little bit richer. And it seems like a really good, like, low-effort way to add some of those enhancements. Based on what you described, it sounds really easy. JOËL: Yeah, I was impressed with just how low effort it all was, which is what you want, right? It works out of the box. So, for anyone who's kind of curious about it, Turbo Frames is the little bit that I used, and it worked really well. Oh, something I'm actually excited about it as well; it plays nicely with clients that have disabled JavaScript. So, this link that I click to pull in the rest of the events, if somebody has JavaScript disabled, or if they command-click or control-click to open in a new tab, it doesn't just do nothing like it would often do in many sort of front-end framework-y places that have hijacked the URL click handler. Instead, it actually opens up the full list of items in a new page, just as if you'd clicked a normal link. So, it really gives you that progressive enhancement feel where I can click a link, and it goes to another page with a list of all the 30 events if I don't have JavaScript. But if I do, maybe I get a slightly better experience where, instead of taking me to a new page, it just expands the list, and I get to see the full list. So, it plays nicely on both sides. STEPHANIE: That's really cool. As someone who's just starting to dabble in some alternative browsers outside of the main popular ones [chuckles], I have noticed how many websites do not work for me anymore [laughs]. And that sounds, like, nice from a user perspective. JOËL: So, other than dabbling with the new browsers, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: A few weeks ago, I talked about [laughs] sitting more at my desk and, you know, various incentives that I gave myself to do that. And I'd like to say that I've been doing a pretty good job [laughs]. So, what's new in my world is that I've followed up on my commitment to sit at my desk more, feel a little bit more organized in my workday. And that's especially true because the birds have finally discovered my bird feeder [laughs]. JOËL: Oh, that's really cool. STEPHANIE: There were a few weeks where I was not really getting any visitors, and, you know, I was just like, when are they going to come and eat this delicious birdseed that I've [laughs] put out for them? And it seems like a flock of chickadees that normally like to hang out on the apple tree in my backyard have figured out this new source of food, and they'll sometimes, five of them at a time, will come, and sometimes they even fight [laughs] to get on the ledge to hang out at the bird feeder. And yeah, it turns out that the six pounds of bird feed that I bought, I'll start to turn through [laughs] that a little bit quicker now, so I'm excited about that and just to also see other birds and species come and go as time goes on. So, that's been an exciting new development. JOËL: So, the six pounds of birdseed might not last you through the winter. STEPHANIE: I was debating between six pounds and, like, a 20-pound bag [laughs], which that would have been a lot. And so far, I think the six pounds has been serving me well. We'll see how long it lasts, but yeah, it's finally starting. I might have to refill it soon, so, you know, I was hopefully not going to have to store all that bird feed [laughs] just, like, in my house for a long time. JOËL: Any birds that have shown up that have been particularly fun to watch or that are maybe your favorites? STEPHANIE: I mentioned the chickadees because they seem to come as a group, and I really like watching them interact with each other. It's just kind of like bird TV, you know, it's not just a single bird. It's just watching these animals that are a collective do their thing. And I've been enjoying that a lot. JOËL: Now I'm just imagining a reality TV but the Chickadee edition. STEPHANIE: Oh yeah, definitely. I know some people put, like, cameras at their bird feeders to either live stream, which is funny because most of the time, there's nothing happening [laughs]. Usually, the birds are really in and out. Or they'll have, like, a really fancy camera to take, like, really beautiful up-close photos. There's a blog that I discovered recently where someone posts about the birds that visit them at their place in Michigan. I'll link to it in the show notes, but it's really cool to see these, like, up-close and personal photos of basically the bird's mouth. Sometimes, they're open [laughs], so you can see right in them. I don't know; maybe there's a time where I'll get so into it that I'll create my own bird feeder blog. JOËL: Well, if you do, you should definitely share it with the listeners on the podcast. Speaking of listeners on the podcast, we've recently had a listener question from Edward that I thought was a really interesting topic, and I wanted to take a whole episode to dig into. And Edward asks about the concept of a spike. Sometimes, we're asked to investigate a complex new feature, and you might want to do some evaluation on the feasibility and complexity and build out just enough of it to make a well-informed opinion. And ideally, you're doing that in a way that reduces risk of spending too much time with unproven impact. The problem is that in any reasonably complex codebase, that investigation work can be most of the work needed to build the feature. And Edward gives an example: if you're adding a system admin role, the core of the work is adding a new role with all of the abilities, but the real work is ensuring that it interacts with the entire system in the appropriate way. So, how do you manage making sure that you're doing spikes well? And Edward asks if this is something that we've experienced a sort of feeling that we're doing 90% of the work in the spike. He also asks, does this say something about the codebase that you're working on? If it's hard to spike in it, does that say something about the underlying codebase, or are we just all doing spikes wrong? So yeah, I'm curious, Stephanie: do you occasionally spike things out in code on your projects? STEPHANIE: Yeah, I do. I think one piece that was left a little bit unsaid is that I think spiking usually comes up when the team can't really estimate how long a task will take, you know, assuming that you use estimates on your team [chuckles]. That calls for a spike ticket, right? And someone will spend some time. And I think on some teams, this is usually time-boxed as well to maybe do a proof of concept or, yeah, do some of that initial exploration. JOËL: Before we go too deep, I think it's probably useful to define spike in that I think it's a little bit easy and probably varies from team to team and even from a developer to developer. I think, for me, when I think of a spike, it's throwaway work. The code that I write will not get shipped, and this is not code that will just get improved later. It is entirely throwaway work. And the purpose of it is to learn something about the project that's being done. Typically, it's in a sort of de-risking fashion, so to say, look, we've got a feature that's got a lot of unknown

Stephanie shares her task of retiring a small, internally-used link-shortening app. She describes the process as both celebratory and a bit mournful. Meanwhile, Joël discusses his deep dive into ActiveRecord, particularly in the context of debugging. He explores the complexities of ActiveRecord querying schemas and the additional latency this introduces. Together, the hosts discuss the nuances of package management systems and their implications for developers. They touch upon the differences between system packages and language packages, sharing personal experiences with tools like Homebrew, RubyGems, and Docker. Transcript: JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, this week, I got to have some fun working on some internal thoughtbot work. And what I focused on was retiring one of our just, like, small internal self-hosted on Heroku apps in favor of going with a third-party service for this functionality. We basically had a tiny, little app that we used as a link-shortening service. So, if you've ever seen a tbot.io short link out in the world, we were using our just, like, an in-house app to do that, you know, but for various reasons, we wanted to...just it wasn't worth maintaining anymore. So, we wanted to just use a purchased service. But today, I got to just, like, do the little bit of, like, tidying up, you know, in preparation to archive a repo and kind of delete the app from Heroku, and I hadn't done that before. So, it felt a little bit celebratory and a little bit mournful even [laughs] to, you know, retire something like that. And I was pairing with another thoughtbot developer, and we used a pairing app called Tuple. And you can just send, like, fun reactions to each other. Like, you could send, like, a fire emoji [laughs] or something if that's what you're feeling. And so, I sent some, like, confetti when we clicked the, "I understand what deleting this app means on GitHub." But I joked that "Actually, I feel like what I really needed was a, like, a salute kind of like thank you for your service [laughs] type of reaction." JOËL: I love those moments when you're kind of you're hitting those kind of milestone-y moments, and then you get to send a reaction. I should do that more often in Tuple. Those are fun. STEPHANIE: They are fun. There's also a, like, table flip reaction, too, is one that I really enjoy [laughs], you know, you just have to manifest that energy somehow. And then, after we kind of sent out an email to the company saying like, "Oh yeah, we're not using our app anymore for link shortening," someone had a great suggestion to make our archived repo public instead of private. I kind of liked it as a way of, like, memorializing this application and let community members see, you know, real code in a real...the application that we used here at thoughtbot. So, hopefully, if not me, then someone else will be able to do that and maybe publish a little blog post about that. JOËL: That's exciting. So, it's not currently public, the repo, but it might be at some point in the future. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's right. JOËL: We'll definitely have to mention it on a future episode if that happens so that people following along with the story can go check out the code. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: I've been doing a deep dive into how ActiveRecord works. Particularly, I am debugging some pretty significant slowdowns in querying ActiveRecord models that are backed not by a regular Postgres database but instead a Snowflake data warehouse via an ODBC connection. So, there's a bunch of moving pieces going on here, and it would just take forever to make any queries. And sure, the actual reported query time is longer than for a local Postgres database, but then there's this sort of mystery extra waiting time, and I couldn't figure out why is it taking so much longer than the actual sort of recorded query time. And I started digging into all of this, and it turns out that in addition to executing queries to pull actual data in, ActiveRecord needs to, at various points, query the schema of your data store to pull things like names of tables and what are the indexes and primary keys and things like that. STEPHANIE: Wow. That sounds really cool and something that I have never needed to do before. I'm curious if you noticed...you said that it takes, I guess, longer to query Snowflake than it would a more common Postgres database. Were you noticing this performance slowness locally or on production? JOËL: Both places. So, the nice thing is I can reproduce it locally, and locally, I mean running the Rails app locally. I'm still talking to a remote Snowflake data warehouse, which is fine. I can reproduce that slowness locally, which has made it much easier to experiment and try things. And so, from there, it's really just been a bit of a detective case trying to, I guess, narrow the possibility space and try to understand what are the parts that trigger slowness. So, I'm printing timestamps in different places. I've got different things that get measured. I've not done, like, a profiling tool to generate a flame graph or anything like that. That might have been something cool to try. I just did old-school print statements in a couple of places where I, like, time before, time after, print the delta, and that's gotten me pretty far. STEPHANIE: That's pretty cool. What do you think will be an outcome of this? Because I remember you saying you're digging a little bit into ActiveRecord internals. So, based on, like, what you're exploring, what do you think you could do as a developer to increase some of the performance there? JOËL: I think probably what this ends up being is finding that the Snowflake adapter that I'm using for ActiveRecord maybe has some sort of small bug in it or some implementation that's a little bit too naive that needs to be fine-tuned. And so, probably what ends up happening here is that this finishes as, like, an open-source pull request to the Snowflake Adapter gem. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's where I thought maybe that might go. And that's pretty cool, too, and to, you know, just be investigating something on your app and being able to make a contribution that it benefits the community. JOËL: And that's what's so great about open source because not only am I able to get the source to go source diving through all of this, because I absolutely need to do that, but also, then if I make a fix, I can push that fix back out to the community, and everybody gets to benefit. STEPHANIE: Cool. Well, that's another thing that I look forward to hearing more on the development of [laughs] later if it pans out that way. JOËL: One thing that has been interesting with this Snowflake work is that there are a lot of moving parts and multiple different packages that I need to install to get this all to work. So, I mentioned that I might be doing a pull request against the Snowflake Adapter for ActiveRecord, but all of this talks through a sort of lower-level technology protocol called ODBC, which is a sort of generic protocol for speaking to data stores, and that actually has two different pieces. I had to install two different packages. There is a sort of low-level executable that I had to install on my local dev machine and that I have to install on our servers. And on my Mac, I'm installing that via Homebrew, which is a system package. And then to get Ruby bindings for that, there is a Ruby gem that I install that allows Ruby code to talk to ODBC, and that's installed via RubyGems or Bundler. And that got me thinking about sort of these two separate ecosystems that I tend to work with every day. We've got sort of the system packages and the, I don't know what you want to call them, language packages maybe, things like RubyGems, but that could also be NPM or whatever your language of choice is, and realizing that we kind of have things split into two different zones, and sometimes we need both and wondering a little bit about why is that difference necessary. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I don't have an answer to that [laughs] question right now, but I can say that that was an area that really tripped me up, I think, when I was first a fledgling developer. And I was really confused about where all of these dependencies were coming from and going through, you know, setting up my first project and being, like, asked to install Postgres on my machine but then also Bundler, which then also installs more dependencies [laughs]. The lines between those ecosystems were not super clear to me. And, you know, even now, like, I find myself really just kind of, like, learning what I need to know to get by [laughs] with my day-to-day work. But I do like what you said about these are kind of the two main layers that you're working with in terms of package management. And it's really helpful to have that knowledge so you can troubleshoot when there is an issue at one or the other. JOËL: And you mentioned Postgres. That's another one that's interesting because there are components in both of those ecosystems. Postgres itself is typically installed via a system package manager, so something like Homebrew on a Mac or apt-get on a Linux machine. But then, if you're interacting with Postgres in a Ruby app, you're probably also installing the pg gem, which are Ruby's bindings for Postgres to allow Ruby to talk to Postgres, and that lives in the package ecosystem on RubyGems. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I've certainly been in the position of, you know, again, as consultants, we oftentimes are also setting up new laptops entirely [laughs] like client laptops and such and bundling and the pg gem is installed. And then at leas

Joël shares a unique, time-specific bug he encountered, which causes a page to crash only in January. This bug has been fixed in previous years, only to reemerge due to subsequent changes. Stephanie talks about her efforts to bring more structure to her work-from-home environment. She describes how setting up a bird feeder near her desk and keeping chocolates at her desk serve as incentives to work more from her desk. Together, Stephanie and Joël take a deep dive into the challenges of breaking down software development tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks. They explore the concept of 'vertical slice' development, where features are implemented in thin, fully functional segments, contrasting it with the more traditional 'horizontal slice' approach. This discussion leads to insights on collaborative work, the importance of iterative development, and strategies for efficient and effective software engineering. thoughtbot Live Streams (https://www.youtube.com/@thoughtbot/streams?themeRefresh=1) Stephanie’s Live Stream (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWmCOMbOxTs) Joël’s Talk on Time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54Hs2E7zsQg) Finish the Owl Meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/572078-how-to-draw-an-owl) Full Stack Slices (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/break-apart-your-features-into-full-stack-slices) Elephant Carpaccio (https://blog.crisp.se/2013/07/25/henrikkniberg/elephant-carpaccio-facilitation-guide) Outside-in Feature Development (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/testing-from-the-outsidein) Working Iteratively (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/working-iteratively) Transcript:  STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world in the year 2024? JOËL: Yeah, it's 2024. New year, new me. Or, in this case, maybe new year, new bugs? I'm working on a project where I ran into a really interesting time-specific bug. This particular page on the site only crashes in the month of January. There's some date logic that has a weird boundary condition there, and if you load that page during the month of January, it will crash, but during the entire rest of the year, it's fine. STEPHANIE: That's a fun New Year's tradition for this project [laughs], fixing this bug [laughs] every year. JOËL: It's been interesting because I looked a little bit at the git history of this bug, and it looks like it's been fixed in past Januarys, but then the fix changes the behavior slightly, so people bring the behavior back correct during the rest of the year that also happens to reintroduce the bug in January, and now I'm back to fixing it in January. So, it is a little bit of a tradition. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that is really funny. I was also recently debugging something, and we were having some flakiness with a test that we wrote. And we were trying to figure out because we had some date/time logic as well. And we were like, is there anything strange about this current time period that we are in that would potentially, you know, lead to a flaky test? And we were looking at the clock and we're like, "I don't think it's like, you know, midnight UTC or anything [laughs] like that." But, I mean, I don't know. It's like, how could you possibly think of, like, all of the various weird edge cases, you know, related to that kind of thing? I don't think I would ever be like, huh, it's January, so, surely, that must [laughs] mean that that's this particular edge case I'm seeing. JOËL: It's interesting because I feel like there's a couple of types of time-specific bugs that we see pretty frequently. If you're near the daylight savings boundary, let's say a week before sometimes, or whatever you're...if you're doing, like, a week from now logic or something like that, typically, I'll see failures in the test suite or maybe actual crashes in the code a week before springing forward and a week before falling back. And then, like you said, sometimes you see failures at the end of the day, Eastern time for me, when you approach that midnight UTC time boundary. I think this is the first time I've seen a failure in January due to the month being, like, a month boundary...or it's a year boundary really is what's happening. STEPHANIE: Yeah. That just sounds like another [laughs] thing you have to look out for. I'm curious: are you going to fix this bug for real or leave it for [laughs] 2025? JOËL: I've got a fix that I think is for real and that, like, not only fixes the break in January but also during the rest of the year gives the desired behavior. I think part of what's really interesting about this bug is that there are some subtle behavioral changes between a few different use cases where this code is called, part of which depend on when in the year you're calling it and whether you want to see it for today's date versus you can also specify a date that you want to see this report. And so, it turns out that there are a lot more edge cases than might be initially obvious. So, this turned into effectively a product discussion, and realizing, wait a minute, the code isn't telling the full story. There's more at a product level we need to discuss. And actually, I think I learned a lot about the product there. So, while it was maybe a surprising and kind of humorous bug to come across, I think it was actually a really good experience. STEPHANIE: Nice. That's awesome. That's a pretty good way to start the year, I would say. JOËL: I'd say so. How about you? What's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, I don't know, I think towards the end of the year, last year, I was in a bit of a slump where I was in that work-from-couch phase of [laughs] the year, you know, like, things are slowing down and I, you know, winter was starting here. I wanted to be cozy, so I'd, you know, set up on the couch with a blanket. And I realized that I really wasn't sitting at my desk at all, and I kind of wanted to bring a little bit of that structure back into my workday, so I [chuckles] added some incentives for me to sit at my desk, which include I recently got a bird feeder that attaches to the window in my office. So, when I sit at my desk, I can hopefully see some birds hanging out. They are very flighty, so I've only seen birds when I'm, like, in the other room. And I'm like, oh, like, there's a bird at the bird feeder. Like, let me get up close to, like, get to admire them. And then as soon as I, like [laughs], get up close to the window, they fly away. So, I'm hoping that if I sit at my desk more, I'll spontaneously see more birds, and maybe they'll get used to, like, a presence closer to the window. And then my second incentive is I now have little chocolates at my desk [laughs]. JOËL: Nice. STEPHANIE: I've just been enjoying, like, a little treat and trying to keep them as a...okay, I've worked at my desk for an hour, and now I get a little reward for that [laughs]. JOËL: I like that. Do you know what kind of species of birds have been coming to your feeder? STEPHANIE: Ooh, yes. So, we got this birdseed mix called Cardinal and Friends [laughs]. JOËL: I love that. STEPHANIE: So, I have seen, like, a really beautiful red male cardinal come by. We get some robins and some chickadees, I think. Part of what I'm excited for this winter is to learn more how to identify more bird species. And I usually like to be out in nature and stuff, and winter is a hard time to do that. So, this is kind of my way of [chuckles] bringing that more into my life during the season. So, this is our first episode after a little bit of a break for the holidays. There actually has been some content of ours that has been published out in the world on the internet [laughs] during this time. And just wanted to point out in the few weeks that there weren't any Bike Shed episodes, I ended up doing a thoughtbot Rails development livestream with thoughtbot CEO Chad Pytel, and that was my first-time live streaming code [laughs]. And it was a really cool experience. I'm glad I had this podcast experience. So, I'm like, okay, well I have, you know, that, like, ability to do stuff kind of off script and present in the moment. But yeah, that was a really cool thing that I got to do, and I feel a little bit more confident about doing those kinds in the future. JOËL: And for those who are not aware, Chad does–I think it's a weekly live stream on Fridays where he's doing various types of code. So, he's done some work on some internal projects. He did a series where he upgraded, I think, a Rails 2 app all the way to Rails 7, typically with a guest who's another teammate from thoughtbot working on a thing. So, for those of our listeners that might find interesting, we'll put a link in the show notes where you can go see that. I think it's on YouTube and on Twitch. STEPHANIE: Yes. JOËL: What did you pair on? What kind of project were you doing for the livestream? STEPHANIE: So, we were working on thoughtbot's internal application called Hub, which is where we have, like, our internal messaging features. It's where we do a lot of our business operations-y things [laughs]. So, all of the, like, agency work that we do, we use our in-house software for that, and so Chad and I were working on a feature to introduce something that would help out with how we staff team members on projects. In other content news [laughs], Joël, I think you have something to share as well. JOËL: Yeah. So, we've mentioned on past episodes that I gave a talk at RubyConf this past November all about what the concept of time actually means within a program and the different ways of representing it, and the fact that time isn't really a single thing but actually kind of multiple related quantities. And over the holiday break, the talks from that conference got published.

Stephanie is hosting a holiday cookie swap. Joël talks about participating in thoughtbot's end-of-the-year hackathon, Ralphapalooza. We had a great year on the show! The hosts wrap up the year and discuss their favorite episodes, the articles, books, and blog posts they’ve read and loved, and other highlights of 2023 (projects, conferences, etc). Olive Oil Sugar Cookies With Pistachios & Lemon Glaze (https://food52.com/recipes/82228-olive-oil-sugar-cookies-recipe-with-pistachios-lemon) thoughtbot’s Blog (https://thoughtbot.com/blog) Episode 398: Developing Heuristics For Writing Software (https://www.bikeshed.fm/398) Episode 374: Discrete Math (https://www.bikeshed.fm/374) Episode 405: Sandi Metz’s Rules (https://www.bikeshed.fm/405) Episode 391: Learn with APPL (https://www.bikeshed.fm/391) Engineering Management for the Rest of Us (https://www.engmanagement.dev/) Confident Ruby (https://pragprog.com/titles/agcr/confident-ruby/) Working with Maybe from Elm Europe (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43eM4kNbb6c) Sustainable Rails Book (https://sustainable-rails.com/) Episode 368: Sustainable Web Development (https://www.bikeshed.fm/368) Domain Modeling Made Functional (https://pragprog.com/titles/swdddf/domain-modeling-made-functional/) Simplifying Tests by Extracting Side Effects (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/simplify-tests-by-extracting-side-effects) The Math Every Programmer Needs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzYYT40T8G8) Mermaid.js sequence diagrams (https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/sequenc) Sense of Belonging and Software Teams (https://www.drcathicks.com/post/sense-of-belonging-and-software-teams) Preemptive Pluralization is (Probably) Not Evil (https://www.swyx.io/preemptive-pluralization) Digging through the ashes (https://everythingchanges.us/blog/digging-through-the-ashes/) Transcript: JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: I am so excited to talk about this. I'm, like, literally smiling [chuckles] because I'm so pumped. Sometimes, you know, we get on to record, and I'm like, oh, I got to think of something that's new, like, my life is so boring. I have nothing to share. But today, I am excited to tell you about [chuckles] the holiday cookie swap that I'm hosting this Sunday [laughs] that I haven't been able to stop thinking about or just thinking about all the cookies that I'm going to get to eat. It's going to be my first time throwing this kind of shindig, and I'm so pleased with myself because it's such a great idea. You know, it's like, you get to share cookies, and you get to have all different types of cookies, and then people get to take them home. And I get to see all my friends. And I'm really [chuckles] looking forward to it. JOËL: I don't think I've ever been to a cookie swap event. How does that work? Everybody shows up with cookies, and then you leave with what you want? STEPHANIE: That's kind of the plan. I think it's not really a...there's no rules [laughs]. You can make it whatever you want it to be. But I'm asking everyone to bring, like, two dozen cookies. And, you know, I'm hoping for a lot of fun variety. Myself I'm planning on making these pistachio olive oil cookies with a lemon glaze and also, maybe, like, a chewy ginger cookie. I haven't decided if I'm going to go so extra to make two types, but we'll see. And yeah, we'll, you know, probably have some drinks and be playing Christmas music, and yeah, we'll just hang out. And I'm hoping that everyone can kind of, like, take home a little goodie bag of cookies as well because I don't think we'll be going through all of them. JOËL: Hearing you talk about this gave me an absolutely terrible idea. STEPHANIE: Terrible or terribly awesome? [laughs] JOËL: So, imagine you have the equivalent of, let's say, a LAN party. You all show up with your laptops. STEPHANIE: [laughs] JOËL: You're on a network, and then you swap browser cookies randomly. STEPHANIE: [laughs] Oh no. That would be really funny. That's a developer's take on a cookie party [laughs] if I've ever heard one. JOËL: Slightly terrifying. Now I'm just browsing, and all of a sudden, I guess I'm logged into your Facebook or something. Maybe you only swap the tracking cookies. So, I'm not actually logged into your Facebook, but I just get to see the different ad networks it would typically show you, and you would see my ads. That's maybe kind of fun or maybe terrifying, depending on what kind of ads you normally see. STEPHANIE: That's really funny. I'm thinking about how it would just be probably very misleading and confusing for those [laughs] analytics spenders, but that's totally fine, too. Might I suggest also having real cookies to munch on as well while you are enjoying [laughs] this browser cookie-swapping party? JOËL: I 100% agree. STEPHANIE: [laughs] JOËL: I'm curious: where do you stand on raisins in oatmeal cookies? STEPHANIE: Ooh. JOËL: This is a divisive question. STEPHANIE: They're fine. I'll let other people eat them. And occasionally, I will also eat an oatmeal cookie with raisins, but I much prefer if the raisins are chocolate chips [chuckles]. JOËL: That is the correct answer. STEPHANIE: [laughs] Thank you. You know, I understand that people like them. They're not for me [laughs]. JOËL: It's okay. Fans can send us hate mail about why we're wrong about oatmeal cookies. STEPHANIE: Yeah, honestly, that's something that I'm okay with being wrong about on the internet [laughs]. So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: So, as of this recording, we've just recently done thoughtbot's end-of-the-year hackathon, what we call Ralphapalooza. And this is sort of a time where you kind of get to do pretty much any sort of company or programming-related activity that you want as long as...you have to pitch it and get at least two other colleagues to join you on the project, and then you've got two days to work on it. And then you can share back to the team what you've done. I was on a project where we were trying to write a lot of blog posts for the thoughtbot blog. And so, we're just kind of getting together and pitching ideas, reviewing each other's articles, writing things at a pretty intense rate for a couple of days, trying to flood the blog with articles for the next few weeks. So, if you're following the blog and as the time this episode gets released, you're like, "Wow, there's been a lot of articles from the thoughtbot blog recently," that's why. STEPHANIE: Yes, that's awesome. I love how much energy that the blog post-writing party garnered. Like, I was just kind of observing from afar, but it sounds like, you know, people who maybe had started posts, like, throughout the year had dedicated time and a good reason to revisit them, even if they had been, you know, kind of just, like, sitting in a draft for a while. And I think what also seemed really nice was people were just around to support, to review, and were able to make that a priority. And it was really cool to see all the blog posts that are queued up for December as a result. JOËL: People wrote some great stuff. So, I'm excited to see all of those come out. I think we've got pretty much a blog post every day coming out through almost the end of December. So, it's exciting to see that much content created. STEPHANIE: Yeah. If our listeners want more thoughtbot content, check out our blog. JOËL: So, as mentioned, we're recording this at the end of the year. And I thought it might be fun to do a bit of a retrospective on what this year has been like for you and I, Stephanie, both in terms of different work that we've done, the learnings we've had, but maybe also look back a little bit on 2023 for The Bike Shed and what that looked like. STEPHANIE: Yes. I really enjoyed thinking about my year and kind of just reveling and having been doing this podcast for over a year now. And yeah, I'm excited to look back a little bit on both things we have mentioned on the show before and things maybe we haven't. To start, I'm wondering if you want to talk a little bit about some of our favorite episodes. JOËL: Favorite episodes, yes. So, I've got a couple that are among my favorites. We did a lot of good episodes this year. I really liked them. But I really appreciated the episode we did on heuristics, that's Episode 398, where we got to talk a little bit about what goes into a good heuristic, how we tend to come up with them. A lot of those, like, guidelines and best practices that you hear people talk about in the software world and how to make your own but then also how to deal with the ones you hear from others in the software community. So, I think that was an episode that the idea, on the surface, seemed really basic, and then we went pretty deep with it. And that was really fun. I think a second one that I really enjoyed was also the one that I did with Sara Jackson as a guest, talking about discrete math and its relevance to the day-to-day work that we do. That's Episode 374. We just had a lot of fun with that. I think that's a topic that more developers, more web developers, would benefit from just getting a little bit more discrete math in their lives. And also, there's a clip in there where Sara reinterprets a classic marketing jingle with some discrete math terms in there instead. It was a lot of fun. So, we'd recommend people checking that one out. STEPHANIE: Nice. Yes. I also loved those episodes. The heuristics one was really great. I'm glad you mentioned it because one of my favorite episodes is kind of along a similar vein. It's one of the more recent ones that we did. It's Episode 405, where we did a bit of a retro on Sandi Metz' Rules For Developers. And those essentially are heuristics, right? And we got

Joël shares his experiences with handling JSON in a Postgres database. He talks about his challenges with ActiveRecord and JSONB columns, particularly the unexpected behavior of storing and retrieving JSON data. Stephanie shares her recent discovery of bookmarklets and highlights a bookmarklet named "Check This Out," which streamlines searching for books on Libby, an ebook and audiobook lending app. The conversation shifts to using constants in code as a form of documentation. Stephanie and Joël discuss how constants might not always accurately reflect current system behavior or logic, leading to potential misunderstandings and the importance of maintaining accurate documentation. Bookmarklets (https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/what-are-bookmarklets/) "Check This Out" Bookmarklet (https://checkthisout.today/) Libby (https://libbyapp.com/interview/welcome#doYouHaveACard) Productivity Tricks (https://www.bikeshed.fm/403) 12 Factor App Config (https://12factor.net/config) A Hierarchy of Documentation (https://challahscript.com/hiearchy_of_documentation) Sustainable Rails (https://sustainable-rails.com/) rails-erd gem (https://github.com/voormedia/rails-erd) Transcript STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: What's new in my world is JSON and how to deal with it in a Postgres database. So, I'm dealing with a situation where I have an ActiveRecord model, and one of the columns is a JSONB column. And, you know, ActiveRecord is really nice. You can just throw a bunch of different data at it, and it knows the column type, and it will do some conversions for you automatically. So, if I'm submitting a form and, you know, form values might come in as strings because, you know, I typed in a number in a text field, but ActiveRecord will automatically parse that into an integer because it knows we're saving that to an integer column. So, I don't need to do all these, like, manual conversions. Well, I have a form that has a string of JSON in it that I'm trying to save in a JSONB column. And I expected ActiveRecord to just parse that into a hash and store it in Postgres. That is not what happens. It just stores a raw string, so when I pull it out again, I don't have a hash. I have a raw string that I need to deal with. And I can't query it because, again, it is a raw string. So, that was a bit of an unexpected behavior that I saw there. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that is unexpected. So, is this a field that has been used for a while now? I'm kind of surprised that there hasn't been already some implementations for, like, deserializing it. JOËL: So, here's the thing: I don't think you can have an automatic deserialization there because there's no way of knowing whether or not you should be deserializing. The reason is that JSON is not just objects or, in Ruby parlance, hashes. You can also have arrays. But just raw numbers not wrapped in hashes are also valid JSON as are raw strings. And if I just give you a string and say, put this in a JSON field, you have no way of knowing, is this some serialized JSON that you need to deserialize and then save? Or is it just a string that you should save because strings are already JSON? So, that's kind of on you as the programmer to make that distinction because you can't tell at runtime which one of these it is. STEPHANIE: Yeah, you're right. I just realized it's [laughs] kind of, like, an anything goes [laughs] situation, not anything but strings are JSON, are valid JSON, yep [laughs]. That sounds like one of those things that's, like, not what you think about immediately when dealing with that kind of data structure, but... JOËL: Right. So, the idea that strings are valid JSON values, but also all JSON values can get serialized as strings. And so, you never know: are you dealing with an unserialized string that's just a JSON value, or are you dealing with some JSON blob that got serialized into a string? And only in one of those do you want to then serialize before writing into the database. STEPHANIE: So, have you come to a solution or a way to make your problem work? JOËL: So, the solution that I did is just calling a JSON parse before setting that attribute on my model because this value is coming in from a form. I believe I'm doing this when I'm defining the strong parameters for that particular form. I'm also transforming that string by parsing it into a hash with the JSON dot parse, which then gets passed to the model. And then I'm not sure what JSONB serializes as under the hood. When you give it a hash, it might store it as a string, but it might also have some kind of binary format or some internal AST that it uses for storage. I'm not sure what the implementation is. STEPHANIE: Are the values in the JSONB something that can be variable or dynamic? I've seen some people, you know, put that in getter so that it's just kind of done for you for anyone who needs to access that field. JOËL: Right now, there is a sort of semi-consistent schema to that. I think it will probably evolve to where I'll pull some of these out to be columns on the table. But it is right now kind of an everything else sort of dumping ground from an API. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's okay, too, sometimes [laughs]. JOËL: Yeah. So, interesting journey into some of the fun edge cases of dealing with a format whose serialized form is also a valid instance of that format. What's been new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, I discovered something new that has been around on the internet for a while, but I just haven't been aware of it. Do you know what a bookmarklet is? JOËL: Oh, like a JavaScript code that runs in a bookmark? STEPHANIE: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, in your little browser bookmark where you might normally put a URL, you can actually stick some JavaScript in there. And it will run whenever you click your bookmark in your browser [chuckles]. So, that was a fun little internet tidbit that I just found out about. And the reason is because I stumbled upon a bookmarklet made by someone. It's called Check This Out. And what it does is there's another app/website called Libby that is used to check out ebooks and audiobooks for free from your local public library. And what this Check This Out bookmarklet does is you can kind of select any just, like, text on a web page, and then when you click the bookmarklet, it then just kind of sticks it into the query params for Libby's search engine. And it takes you straight to the results for that book or that author, and it saves you a few extra manual steps to go from finding out about a book to checking it out. So, that was really neat and cute. And I was really surprised that you could do that. I was like, whoa [laughs]. At first, I was like, is this okay? [laughs] If you, like, you can't read, you know, you don't know what the JavaScript is doing, I can see it being a little sketchy. But –- JOËL: Be careful of executing arbitrary JavaScript. STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah. When I did look up bookmarklets, though, I kind of saw that it was, you know, just kind of a fun thing for people who might be learning to code for the first time to play around with. And some fun ideas they had for what you could do with it was turning all the font on a web page to Comic Sans [laughs]. So yeah, I thought that was really cute. JOËL: Has that inspired you to write your own? STEPHANIE: Well, we did an episode a while ago on productivity tricks. And I was thinking like, oh yeah, there's definitely some things that I could do to, you know, just stick some automated tasks that I have into a bookmarklet. And that could be a really fun kind of, like, old-school way of doing it, as opposed to, you know, coding my little snippets or getting into a new, like, Omnibar app [laughs]. JOËL: So, something that is maybe a little bit less effort than building yourself a browser extension or something like that. STEPHANIE: Yeah, exactly. JOËL: I had a client project once that involved a...I think it was, like, a five-step wizard or something like that. It was really tedious to step through it all to manually test things. And so, I wrote a bookmarklet that would just go through and fill out all the fields and hit submit on, like, five pages worth of these things. And if anything didn't work, it would just pause there, and then you could see it. In some way, it was moving towards the direction of, like, an automated like Capybara style test. But this was something that was helping for manual QA. So, that was a really fun use of a bookmarklet. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I like that. Like, just an in-between thing you could try to speed up that manual testing without getting into, like you said, an automated test framework for your browser. JOËL: The nice thing about that is that this could be used without having to set up pretty much anything, right? You paste a bit of JavaScript into your bookmark bar, and then you just click the button. That's all you need to do. No need to make sure that you've got Ruby installed on your machine or any of these other things that you would need for some kind of testing framework. You don't need Selenium. You don't need ChromeDriver. It just...it works. So, I was working...this was a greenfield startup project. So, I was working with a non-technical founder who didn't have all these things, you know, dev tooling on his machine. So, he wanted to try out things but not spend his days filling out forms. And so, having just a button he could click was a really nice shortcut. STEPHANIE: That's really cool. I like that a lot. I wasn't even thinking about how I might be able to bring that in more into just my daily work, as opposed to just something kind of fun. But that's an awesome idea. And I hope that mayb

Stephanie recommends "Blue Eye Samurai" and a new ceramic pot (donabe) for cooking. Joël talks about the joy of holding a warm beverage in a unique mug. Stephanie discusses her shift to a part-time support and maintenance role at thoughtbot, contrasting it with her full-time development work. She highlights the importance of communication, documentation, and workplace flexibility in this role. Stephanie appreciates the professional growth opportunities and aligns this flexible work style with her long-term career goals. Blue Eye Samurai (https://www.netflix.com/title/81144203) Donabe pots (https://jinenstore.com/collections/nagatani-en) thoughtbot’s Support & Maintenance services (https://thoughtbot.com/services/rails-maintenance) Transcript: JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: I have a TV show recommendation this week. I think this is my first time having TV or movies to recommend, so this will be fun. My partner and I just finished watching Blue Eye Samurai on Netflix, which is an animated historical Samurai drama. But the really cool thing about it is that the protagonist she's a woman who is disguising herself as a man, and she is half Japanese and half White, which the show takes place during Edo, Japan. And so that was a time when Japan was locked down, and there were no outsiders allowed in the country. And so, to be mixed race like that was to be, like, kind of, like, demonized and to be really excluded and shamed. And so, the main character is on, like, a revenge mission. And it was such a cool show. I was kind of, like, on the edge of my seat the whole time. And it's very beautifully animated. There were just a lot of really awesome things about it. And I think it's very different from what I've been seeing on TV these days. JOËL: Is this a single-season show? STEPHANIE: So far, there's just one season. I think it's pretty new, yeah. It's very watchable in a couple of weekends. [laughter] JOËL: Dangerously so. STEPHANIE: Yeah, exactly [laughs]. JOËL: How do you feel about the way they end the arc in season one? Do they kind of leave you on a cliffhanger, or does it feel like a pretty satisfying place? STEPHANIE: Ooh, I think both, which is the sweet spot, in my opinion, where it's not, like, cliffhanger for the sake of, like, ugh, now I feel like I have to just watch the next part to see what happens because I was left unsatisfied. I like when seasons are kind of like chapters of the story, right? And the characters are also well written, too, and really fleshed out even, you know, some of the side characters. They all have their arcs that are really satisfying. And, again, I just was left very impressed. JOËL: I guess that's the power of good storytelling. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I was reading a review of the show. And that was kind of the theme of–it was just that, like, this is really good storytelling, and I would have to agree. Yeah, I highly recommend checking it out. It was very fun. It was very bloody, but [chuckles], for me, it being animated actually made it a little more palatable for me [laughs]. The fight scenes, the action scenes were really cool. I think the way that it's been described is kind of, like, you know, if you like historical dramas, or if you like things like Game of Thrones, there's kind of something for everyone. I recommend checking it out. Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: Listeners of the show don't know this, but you and I are on a video call while we're recording this. And you'd commented earlier that I was holding a cool mug. It's got a rock climbing hold as a handle, which is pretty fun. I enjoy a lot of bouldering. That makes it a fun mug. But I was recently thinking about just how much pleasure I get from holding a mug with a warm beverage. It's such a small thing, but it makes me so happy. And that got me thinking more broadly about what are things in life that are kind of like that. They're small things that have, like, an outsized impact on your happiness. Do you have anything like that? STEPHANIE: Oh yes, absolutely. You were talking about the warmth of a hot beverage in your hands. And I was thinking about something similar, too, because I'm pretty sure this time of year last year, I talked about something that was new in my world that was just, like, a thing that I got to make winter more tolerable for me here in Chicago, and I think it was, like, a heated blanket [laughs]. And I am similarly in that space this year of like, what can I do or get to make this winter better than last winter? So, this year, what I got that I'm really excited to use— it actually just came in the mail—is this ceramic pot called the donabe that's kind of mainly used for Japanese cooking, especially, like, hot pot. And so, it will be a huge improvement to my soup game this year [laughs]. Similarly, it's kind of, like, one of those small things where you can take it from the stovetop where you're cooking straight to the table, and I'm so looking forward to that. It's kind of like your hot beverage in your hand but, like, three times the size [laughs]. JOËL: Right. The family-style version of it. STEPHANIE: Yeah, exactly. So, that's what I'm really looking forward to this year as something that is just, like, I don't know, a little small upgrade to my regular soup routine. But I think I will get a lot of pleasure [laughs] out of it. JOËL: What do you normally cook in that style of pot? Is it typically you do a hot pot in there, or is it meant for soups? STEPHANIE: Yeah, it holds heat really well, so I think that's why it's used for soup a lot. And the one that I got specifically has a little ceramic steamer plate as well. And so, I'm looking forward to having, like, this setup that's made for steaming, where you don't have to have any, like, too many extra bits. And, again, it can go from stove to table, and that's one less thing I [chuckles] need to wash. JOËL: I love it. So, something else that is kind of new in your world is you'd mentioned on a recent episode you'd wrapped up with your current client. And you've rotated on to not exactly a new client but a new almost line of business. You're doing a rotation with our support and maintenance team. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is like? STEPHANIE: Yeah. I'm excited to share more about it because this is my first time on this team doing this work. And it's pretty new for thoughtbot, too. I think it's only, like, a year old that we have had this sub-team of the one that you and I are on, Boost. In the sub-team, support and maintenance is focused on providing flexible part-time work for clients who are just needing some dedicated hours, not necessarily for, you know, a lot of, like, intense new feature work, but making sure that things are running smoothly. A lot of the clients, you know, have had Rails apps that are several years old, that are chugging along [chuckles], just need that, like, attention every now and then to make sure that upgrades are happening, fix any bugs, kind of as the app just continues to work and provide value. And then, occasionally, there is a little bit of feature work. But the interesting thing about being on this team is that instead of being on one client full-time, you are working on a lot of different clients at the same time, and a lot of them are on retainers. So, they maybe have, like, 20 hours a month of work that gets filled with kind of whatever tasks need to be done during that time. So yeah, I recently joined a few days ago and have been very surprised by kind of this style of work. It's different from what I'm used to. JOËL: That seems pretty different than the sort of traditional thoughtbot client engagement. Typically, if I'm a client and I'm hiring a team from thoughtbot, as a client, I get sort of a dedicated team. And they're probably either building some things for me or maybe working with my team and sort of full-time building features. Whereas if I hire the support and maintenance team, it sounds like it's a bit more ad hoc. And it's things I assume it's like, oh, we probably need to upgrade our Rails version since a new release came out last month. Can you do that? Here's a small bug that was reported. Can somebody fix that? Things along those lines. Is that pretty approximate of what the experience is for a client? STEPHANIE: Yeah, I would say so. I think the other surprising thing has been there have been a little bit of more DevOps type of tasks as well mixed in there. Because oftentimes, these are smaller clients who maybe have, like, a few developers actively working on new features and that type of stuff. But there is, like, so much of the connecting work that needs to happen when you have an application. And if you don't have a full in-house team for that, that often gets put on developers' plates. But it's kind of nice to have this flexible support and maintenance team, again, to, like, do the work as it comes up. A lot of it is not necessarily, like, stuff that can be planned in advance. It's kind of like, oh, we're hitting, like, our usage limit for this Heroku add-on. Let's evaluate if this is still working for us, if this is a good tier to be on. Like, should we upgrade? Are there other levers we could pull or adjustments we can make? So, that's actually been some of the stuff that I've been working on, too, which is, again, a little bit different from normal development work but also still very much related. And it's all kind of part of the job. And, you know, a lot of the skills are transferable. And to know how to do development in a framework then sets you up, I think, really well to, like, be able to make those kinds of evaluations. JOËL: So, i

Joël recaps his time at RubyConf! He shares insights from his talk about different aspects of time in software development, emphasizing the interaction with the audience and the importance of post-talk discussions. Stephanie talks about wrapping up a long-term client project, the benefits of change and variety in consulting, and maintaining a balance between project engagement and avoiding burnout. They also discuss strategies for maintaining work-life balance, such as physical separation and device management, particularly in a remote work environment. Rubyconf (https://rubyconf.org/) Joël’s talk slides (https://speakerdeck.com/joelq/which-time-is-it) Flaky test summary slide (https://speakerdeck.com/aridlehoover/the-secret-ingredient-how-to-understand-and-resolve-just-about-any-flaky-test?slide=170) Transcript: STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: Well, as of this recording, I have just gotten back from spending the week in San Diego for RubyConf. STEPHANIE: Yay, so fun. JOËL: It's always so much fun to connect with the community over there, talk to other people from different companies who work in Ruby, to be inspired by the talks. This year, I was speaking, so I gave a talk on time and how it's not a single thing but multiple different quantities. In particular, I distinguish between a moment in time like a point, a duration and amount of time, and then a time of day, which is time unconnected to a particular day, and how those all connect together in the software that we write. STEPHANIE: Awesome. How did it go? How was it received? JOËL: It was very well received. I got a lot of people come up to me afterwards and make a variety of time puns, which those are so easy to make. I had to hold myself back not to put too many in the talk itself. I think I kept it pretty clean. There were definitely a couple of time puns in the description of the talk, though. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. You have to keep some in there. But I hear you that you don't want it to become too punny [laughs]. What I really love about conferences, and we've talked a little bit about this before, is the, you know, like, engagement and being able to connect with people. And you give a talk, but then that ends up leading to a lot of, like, discussions about it and related topics afterwards in the hallway or sitting together over a meal. JOËL: I like to, in my talks, give little kind of hooks for people who want to have those conversations in the hallway. You know, sometimes it's intimidating to just go up to a speaker and be like, oh, I want to, like, dig into their talk a little bit. But I don't have anything to say other than just, like, "I liked your talk." So, if there's any sort of side trails I had to cut for the talk, I might give a shout-out to it and say, "Hey, if you want to learn more about this aspect, come talk to me afterwards." So, one thing that I put in this particular talk was like, "Hey, we're looking at these different graphical ways to think about time. These are similar to but not the same as thinking of time as a one-dimensional vector and applying vector math to it, which is a whole other side topic. If you want to nerd out about that, come find me in the hallway afterwards, and I'd love to go deeper on it." And yeah, some people did. STEPHANIE: That's really smart. I like that a lot. You're inviting more conversation about it, which I know, like, you also really enjoy just, like, taking it further or, like, caring about other people's experiences or their thoughts about vector math [laughs]. JOËL: I think it serves two purposes, right? It allows people to connect with me as a speaker. And it also allows me to feel better about pruning certain parts of my talk and saying, look, this didn't make sense to keep in the talk, but it's cool material. I'd love to have a continuing conversation about this. So, here's a path we could have taken. I'm choosing not to, as a speaker, but if you want to take that branch with me, let's have that afterwards in the hallway. STEPHANIE: Yeah. Or even as, like, new content for yourself or for someone else to take with them if they want to explore that further because, you know, there's always something more to explore [chuckles]. JOËL: I've absolutely done that with past talks. I've taken a thing I had to prune and turned it into a blog post. A recent example of that was when I gave a talk at RailsConf Portland, which I guess is not so recent. I was talking about ways to deal with a test suite that's making too many database requests. And talking about how sometimes misusing let in your RSpec tests can lead to more database requests than you expect. And I had a whole section about how to better understand what database requests will actually be made by a series of let expressions and dealing with the eager versus lazy and all of that. I had to cut it. But I was then able to make a blog post about it and then talk about this really cool technique involving dependency graphs. And that was really fun. So, that was a thing where I was able to say, look, here's some content that didn't make it into the talk because I needed to focus on other things. But as its own little, like, side piece of content, it absolutely works, and here's a blog post. STEPHANIE: Yeah. And then I think it turned into a Bike Shed episode, too [laughs]. JOËL: I think it did, yes. I think, in many ways, creativity begets creativity. It's hard to get started writing or producing content or whatever, but once you do, every idea you have kind of spawns new ideas. And then, pretty soon, you have a backlog that you can't go through. STEPHANIE: That's awesome. Any other highlights from the conference you want to shout out? JOËL: I'd love to give a shout-out to a couple of talks that I went to, Aji Slater's talk on the Enigma machine as a German code machine from World War II and how we can sort of implement our own in Ruby and an exploration of object-oriented programming was fantastic. Aji is just a masterful storyteller. So, that was really great. And then Alan Ridlehoover's talk on dealing with flaky tests that one, I think, was particularly useful because I think it's one of the talks that is going to be immediately relevant on Monday morning for, like, every developer that was in that room and is going back to their regular day job. And they can immediately use all of those principles that Alan talked about to deal with the flaky tests in their test suite. And there's, in particular, at the end of his presentation, Alan has this summary slide. He kind of broke down flakiness across three different categories and then talked about different strategies for identifying and then fixing tests that were flaky because of those reasons. And he has this table where he sort of summarizes basically the entire talk. And I feel like that's the kind of thing that I'm going to save as a cheat sheet. And that can be, like, I'm going to link to this and share it all over because it's really useful. Alan has already put his slides up online. It's all linked to that particular slide in the show notes because I think that all of you would benefit from seeing that. The talks themselves are recorded, but they're not going to be out for a couple of weeks. I'm sure when they do, we're going to go through and watch some and probably comment on some of the talks as well. So, Stephanie, what is new in your world? STEPHANIE: Yeah. So, I'm celebrating wrapping up a client project after a nine-month engagement. JOËL: Whoa, that's a pretty long project. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's definitely on the longer side for thoughtbot. And I'm, I don't know, just, like, feeling really excited for a change, feeling really, you know, proud of kind of, like, all of the work that we had done. You know, we had been working with this client for a long time and had been, you know, continuing to deliver value to them to want to keep working with us for that long. But I'm, yeah, just looking forward to a refresh. And I think that's one of my favorite things about consulting is that, you know, you can inject something new into your work life at a kind of regular cadence. And, at least for me, that's really important in reducing or, like, preventing the burnout. So, this time around, I kind of started to notice, and other people, too, like my manager, that I was maybe losing a bit of steam on this client project because I had been working on it for so long. And part of, you know, what success at thoughtbot means is that, like, we as employees are also feeling fulfilled, right? And, you know, what are the different ways that we can try to make sure that that remains the case? And kind of rotating folks on different projects and kind of making sure that things do feel fresh and exciting is really important. And so, I feel very grateful that other people were able to point that out for me, too, when I wasn't even fully realizing it. You know, I had people checking in on me and being like, "Hey, like, you've been on this for a while now. Kind of what I've been hearing is that, like, maybe you do need something new." I'm just excited to get that change. JOËL: How do you find the balance between sort of feeling fulfilled and maybe, you know, finding that point where maybe you're feeling you're running out of steam–versus, you know, some projects are really complex, take a while to ramp up; you want to feel productive; you want to feel like you have contributed in a significant way to a project? How do you navigate that balance? STEPHANIE: Yeah. So, the flip side is, like, I also don't think I would enjoy having to be changing projects all the time like every couple of mon

Stephanie interviews Edward Loveall, a former thoughtbotter, now software developer at Relevant Healthcare. Part of their discussion centers around Edward's blog post on the tech industry's over-reliance on GitHub. He argues for the importance of exploring alternatives to avoid dependency on a single platform and encourages readers to make informed technological choices. The conversation broadens to include how to form opinions on technology, the balance between personal preferences and team decisions, and the importance of empathy and nuance in professional interactions. Both Stephanie and Edward highlight the value of considering various perspectives and tools in software development, advocating for a flexible, open-minded approach to technology and problem-solving in the tech industry. Relevant (https://relevant.healthcare/) Let's make sure Github doesn't become the only option (https://blog.edwardloveall.com/lets-make-sure-github-doesnt-become-the-only-option) And not but (https://blog.edwardloveall.com/and-not-but) Empathy Online (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/empathy-online) Transcript: STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. And today, I'm joined by a very special guest, a friend of the pod and former thoughtboter, Edward Loveall. EDWARD: Hello, thanks for having me. STEPHANIE: Edward, would you share a little bit about yourself and what you're doing these days? EDWARD: Yes, I am a software developer at a company called Relevant Healthcare. We do a lot of things, but the maybe high-level summary is we take very complicated medical data and help federally-funded health centers actually understand that data and help their population's health, which is really fun and really great. STEPHANIE: Awesome. So, Edward, what is new in your world? EDWARD: Let's see, this weekend...I live in a dense city. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it's pretty dense there. And a lot of houses are very tightly packed. And delivery drivers struggle to find the numbers on the houses sometimes because A, they're old and B, there is many of them. And so, we put up house numbers because I live in, like, a three-story kind of building, but there are two different addresses in the same three stories, which is very weird. And so [laughs], delivery drivers are like, "Where is number 10 or 15?" or whatever. And so, there's two different numbers. And so, we finally put up numbers after living here for, like, four years [chuckles]. So, now, hopefully, delivery drivers in the holiday busy season will be able to find our house [laughs]. STEPHANIE: That's great. Yeah, I have kind of a similar problem where, a lot of the times, delivery folks will think that my house is the big building next door. And the worst is those at the building next door they drop off their packages inside the little, like, entryway that is locked for people who don't live there. And so, I will see my package in the window and, you know, it has my name on it. It has, like, my address on it. And [laughs] some strategies that I've used is leaving a note on the door [laughter] that is, like, "Please redeliver my package over there," and, like, I'll draw an arrow to the direction of my house. Or sometimes I've been that person to just, like, buzz random [laughter] units and just hope that they, like, let me in, and then I'll grab my package. And, you know, if I know the neighbors, I'll, like, try to apologize the next time I see them. But sometimes I'll just be like, I just need to get my package [laughs]. EDWARD: You're writing documentation for those people working out in the streets. STEPHANIE: Yeah. But I'm glad you got that sorted. EDWARD: Yeah. What about you? What's new in your world? STEPHANIE: Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about a thing that you and I have been doing lately that I have been enjoying a lot. First of all, are you familiar with the group chat trend these days? Do you know what I'm talking about? EDWARD: No. STEPHANIE: Okay. It's basically this idea that, like, everyone is just connecting with their friends via a group chat now as opposed to social media. But as a person who is not a big group chat person, I can't, like, keep up with [chuckles], like, chatting with multiple people [laughter] at once. I much prefer, like, one-on-one interaction. And, like, a month ago, I asked you if you would be willing to try having a shared note, like, a shared iOS note that we have for items that we want to discuss with each other but, you know, the next time we either talk on the phone or, I don't know, things that are, like, less urgent than a text message would communicate but, like, stuff that we don't want to forget. EDWARD: Yeah. You're, like, putting a little message in my inbox and vice versa. And yeah, we get to just kind of, whenever we want, respond to it, or think about it, or use it as a topic for a conversation later. STEPHANIE: Yeah. And I think it is kind of a playbook from, like, a one-on-one with a manager. I know that that's, like, a strategy that some folks use. But I think it works well in the context of our friendship because it's just gotten, like, richer over time. You know, maybe in the beginning, we're like, oh, like, I don't know, here are some random things that I've thought about. But now we're having, like, whole discussions in the note [laughter]. Like, we will respond to each other, like, with sub-bullets [laughs]. And then we end up not even needing to talk about it on the phone because we've already had a whole conversation about it in the note. EDWARD: Which is good because neither of us are particularly brief when talking on the phone. And [laughs] we only dedicate, like, half an hour every two weeks. It sort of helps clear the decks a little. STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah. So, that's what I recommend. Try a shared note for [laughs] your next friendship hangout. EDWARD: Yeah, it's great. I heartily recommend it. STEPHANIE: So, one of the things that we end up talking about a lot is various things that we've been reading about tech on the web [laughs]. And we share with each other a lot of, like, blog posts, or articles, various links, and recently, something of yours kind of resurfaced. You wrote a blog post about GitHub a little while ago about how, you know, as an industry, we should make sure that GitHub doesn't become our only option. EDWARD: Yeah, this was a post I wrote, I think, back in May, or at least earlier this year, and it got a bunch of traction. And it's a somewhat, I would say, controversial article or take. GitHub just had their developer conference, and it resurfaced again. And I don't have a habit of writing particularly controversial articles, I don't think. Most of my writing history has been technical posts like tutorials. Like, I wrote a whole tutorial on how to write SQL, or I did write one about how to communicate online. But I wasn't, like, so much responding to, like, a particular person's communication or a company's communication. And this is the first big post I've written that has been a lot more very heavily opinionated, very, like, targeted at a particular thing or entity, I guess you'd say. It's been received well, I think, mostly, and I'm proud of it. But it's a different little world for me, and it's a little scary, honestly. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I hear that, having an opinion [laughs], a very strong and maybe, like, a less popular opinion, and publishing that for the world. Could you recap what the thesis of it is for our listeners? EDWARD: Yeah, and I think you did a great job of it, too. I see GitHub or really any singular piece of technology that we have in...I'll say our stack with air quotes, but it's, you know, all the tools that we use and all the things that we use. It's a risk if you only have one of those things, let's say GitHub. Like, if the only way you know how to contribute to a code repository with, you know, 17 people all committing to that repository, if the only way you know how to do that is a pull request and GitHub goes away, and you don't have pull requests anymore, how are you going to contribute to code? It's not that you couldn't figure it out, or there aren't multiple ways or even other pull request equivalents on other sites. But it is a risk to rely on one company to provide all of the things that you potentially need, or even many of the things that you potentially need, without any alternatives. So, I wanted to try to lay out A: those risks, and B: encourage people to try alternatives, to say that GitHub is not necessarily bad, although they may not actually fit what you need for various reasons, or someone else for various reasons. But you should have an alternative in your back pocket so that in case something changes, or you get locked out, or they go away, or they decide to cancel that feature, or any number of other scenarios, you have greatly diminished that risk. So, that's the main thrust of the post. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I really appreciated it because, you know, I think a lot of us probably take GitHub for granted [laughs]. And, you know, every new thing that they kind of add to the platform is like, oh, like, cool, like, I can now do this. In the post, you kind of lay out all of the different features that GitHub has rolled out over the last, you know, couple of years. And when you see it all like that, you know, like, in addition to being, like, a code repository, you now have, like, GitHub Actions for CI/CD, you know, you can deploy static pages with it. It now has, like, an in-browser editor, and then, you know, Copilot, which, like, the more things that they [laughs] roll out, the more it's becoming, like, the one-stop shop, right? That, like, do all of your work here. And I appreciated kind of, like, seeing that and being like, oh, like, is this what I want? EDWARD: Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you mention

Joël got to do some pretty fancy single sign-on work. And when it came time to commit, he documented the ridiculous number of redirects to give people a sense of what was happening. Stephanie has been exploring Rails callbacks and Ruby debugging tools, using methods like save_callbacks and Kernel.caller, and creating a function call graph to better understand and manage complex code dependencies. Stephanie is also engaged in an independent project and seeking strategies to navigate the challenges of solo work. She and Joël explore how to find external support and combat isolation, consider ways to stimulate creativity, and obtain feedback on her work without a direct team. Additionally, they ponder succession planning to ensure project continuity after her involvement ends. They also reflect on the unique benefits of solo work, such as personal growth and flexibility. Stephanie's focus is on balancing the demands of working independently while maintaining a connected and sustainable professional approach. ASCII Sequence Diagram Creator (https://textart.io/sequence) Callback debugging methods (https://andycroll.com/ruby/find-list-debug-active-record-callbacks-in-the-console/) Kernel.caller (https://ruby-doc.org/core-3.0.2/Kernel.html#method-i-caller) Method.source_location (https://ruby-doc.org/core-3.0.2/Method.html#method-i-source_location) Building web apps by your lonesome by Jeremy Smith (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr871vmV4YM) Transcript: STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: I got to do something really fun this week, where I was doing some pretty fancy single sign-on work. And when it came time to commit, I wanted to document the kind of ridiculous number of redirects that happen and give people a sense of what was going on. And for my own self, what I had been doing is, I had done a sequence diagram that sort of shows, like, three different services that are all talking to each other and where they redirect to each other as they all go through the sequence to sign someone in. And I was like, how could I embed that in the commit message? Because I think it would be really useful context for someone trying to get an overview of what this commit is doing. And the answer, for me, was, can I get this sequence diagram in ASCII form somewhere? And I found a website that allows me to do this in ASCII art. It's the textart.io/sequence. And that allows me to create a sequence diagram that gets generated as ASCII art. I can copy-paste that into a commit message. And now anybody else who is like, "What is it that Joël is trying to do here?" can look at that and be like, "Oh, oh okay, so, we got these, like, four different places that are all talking to each other in this order. Now I see what's happening." STEPHANIE: That's super neat. I love the idea of having it directly in your commit message just because, you know, you don't have to go and find a graph elsewhere if you want to understand what's going on. It's right there for you, for future commit explorers [laughs] trying to understand what was going on in this snippet of time. JOËL: I try as much as possible to include those sorts of things directly in the commit message because you never know who's reading the commit. They might not have access to some sort of linked resource. So, if I were like, "Hey, go to our wiki and see this link," like, sure, that would be helpful, but maybe the person reading it doesn't have access to the wiki. Maybe they do have access, but they're not on the internet right now, and so they don't have access to the wiki. Maybe the wiki no longer exists, and that's a dead link. So, as much as possible, I try to embed context directly in my commit messages. STEPHANIE: That's really cool. And just another shout out to ASCII art, you know [laughs], persevering through all the times with our fancy tools. It's still going strong [laughs]. JOËL: Something about text, right? STEPHANIE: Exactly. I actually also have a diagram graph thing to share about what's new in my world that is kind of in a similar vein. Another thoughtboter and former guest on the show, Sara Jackson, shared in our dev channel about this really cool mural graph that she made to figure out what was going on with callbacks because she was working on, you know, understanding the lifecycle of this model and was running into, like, a lot of complex behavior. And she linked to a really neat blog post by Andy Croll, too, that included a little snippet sharing a few callback debugging methods that are provided by ActiveRecord. So, basically, you can have your model and just call double underscore callbacks. And it returns a list of all the callbacks that are defined for that model, and I thought that was really neat. So, I played around with it and copypastad [laughs] the snippet into my Rails console to figure out what's going on with basically, like, the god object of that that I work in. And the first issue I ran into was that it was undefined because it turns out that my application was on an older [laughs] version of Rails than that method was provided on. But, there are more specific methods for the types of callbacks. So, if you are looking specifically for all the callbacks related to a save or a destroy, I think it's save underscore callbacks, right? And that was available on the Rails version I was on, which was, I think, 4. But that was a lot of fun to play around with. And then, I ended up chatting with Sara afterwards about her process for creating the diagram after, you know, getting a list of all these methods. And I actually really liked this hybrid approach she took where, you know, she automated some parts but then also manually, like, went through and stepped through the code and, like, annotated notes for the methods as she was traversing them. And, you know, sometimes I think about, like, wow, like, it would be so cool if this graph just generated automatically, but I also think there is some value to actually creating it yourself. And there's some amount of, like, mental processing that happens when you do that, as opposed to, like, looking at a thing that was just, you know, generated afterwards, I think. JOËL: Do you know what kind of graph Sara generated? Was it some kind of, like, function call graph, or was it some other way of visualizing the callbacks? STEPHANIE: I think it was a function call graph, essentially. It even kind of showed a lot of the dependencies, too, because some of the callback functions were quite complicated and then would call other classes. So, there was a lot of, I think, hidden dependencies there that were unexpected, you know, when you think you're just going to create a regular old [laughs] record. JOËL: Yeah, I've been burned by unexpected callbacks or callbacks that do things that you wouldn't want in a particular context and then creating bad data or firing off external services that you really didn't want, and that can be an unpleasant surprise. I appreciate it when the framework offers debugging tools and methods kind of built-in, so these helpers, which I was not aware of. It's really cool because they allow you to kind of introspect and understand the code that you're going through. Do you have any others like that from Rails or Ruby that you find yourself using from time to time to help better understand the code? STEPHANIE: I think one I discovered recently was Kernel.caller, which gives you the stack trace wherever you are when executing. And that was really helpful when you're not raising an exception in certain places, and you need to figure out the flow of the code. I think that was definitely a later discovery. And I'm glad to have it in my back pocket now as something I can use in any kind of Ruby code. JOËL: That can, yeah, definitely be a really useful context to have even just in, like, an interactive console. You're like, wait a minute, where's this coming from? What is the call stack right now? STEPHANIE: Do you have any debugging tools or methods that you like to use that maybe are under the radar a little bit? JOËL: One that I really appreciate that's built into Ruby is the source location method on the method object, so Ruby has a method object. And so, when you're dealing with some sort of method and, like, maybe it got generated programmatically through metaprogramming, or maybe it's coming from a gem or something like that, and you're just like, where is this define? I'm trying to find it. If you're in your editor and you're doing stuff, maybe you could run some sort of search, or maybe it has some sort of keyword lookup where you can just find the definition of what's under your cursor. But if you're in an interactive console, you can create a method object for that method name and then call dot source location on it. And it will tell you, here's where it's defined. So, very handy in the right circumstances. STEPHANIE: Awesome. That's a great tip. JOËL: Of course, one of the most effective debugging tools is having a pair, having somebody else work with you, but that's not always something that you have. And you and I were talking recently about what it's like to work solo on a project. Because you're currently on a project, you're solo, at least from the thoughtbot side of things. You're embedding with a team, with a client. Are you working on kind of, like, a solo subtask within that, or are you still kind of embedding and interacting with the other teammates on a regular basis? STEPHANIE: Yeah. So, the past couple of weeks, I am working on more of a solo initiative. The other members of my client team are kind of ramping up on some other projects for this next quarter. And since my engagem

Stephanie discovered a new book: The Staff Engineer's Path! Joël's got some D&D goodness. Together, they revisit a decade-old blog post initially published in 2013, which discussed the application of Sandi Metz's coding guidelines and whether these rules remain relevant and practiced among developers today. The Manager’s Path (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/33369254) The Staff Engineer’s Path (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/61058107) Not Another D&D Podcast (https://naddpod.com/) Sandi Metz rules for developers (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/sandi-metz-rules-for-developers) Bike Shed episode on heuristics (https://www.bikeshed.fm/398) In Relentless Pursuit of REST (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HctYHe-YjnE) Transcript: JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, I picked up a new book from the library [laughs], which that in itself is not very new. That is [laughs] a common occurrence in my world. But it was kind of a fun coincidence that I was just walking around the aisles of what's new in nonfiction, and staring me right in the face was an O'Reilly book, The Staff Engineer's Path. And I think in the past, I've plugged The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier on the show. And in recent years, this one was published, and it's by Tanya Reilly. And it is kind of, like, the other half of a career path for software engineers moving up in seniority at those higher levels. And it has been a really interesting companion to The Manager's Path, which I had read even though I wasn't really sure I wanted to be manager [laughs]. And now I think I get that, like, accompaniment of like, okay, like, instead of walking that path, like, what does a staff plus engineer look like? And kind of learning a little bit more about that because I know it can be really vague or ambiguous or look very different at a lot of different companies. And that has been really helpful for me, kind of looking ahead a bit. I'm not too far into it yet. But I'm looking forward to reading more and bringing back some of those learnings to the show. JOËL: I feel like at the end of the year, Stephanie, you and I are probably going to have to sit down and talk through maybe your reading list for the year and, you know, maybe shout out some favorites. I think your reading list is probably significantly longer than mine. But you're constantly referencing cool books. I think that would probably be a fun, either end-of-year episode or a beginning-of-year episode for 2024. One thing that's really interesting, though, about the contrast of these two particular books you're talking about is how it really lines up with this, like, fork in the road that a lot of us have in our careers as we get more senior. You either move into more of a management role, which can be a pretty significant departure from what you have to do as a developer, or you kind of go into this, like, ultra-senior individual contributor path. But how that looks day to day can be very different from your sort of just traditional sitting down and banging out tickets. So, it's really cool there's two books looking at both of those paths. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the mission that they were going for with these books was to kind of illuminate a little bit more about that fork and that decision because, you know, it can be easy for people to maybe just default into one or the other based on what their organization wants for them without, like, fully knowing what that means. And the more senior you get, the more vague and, like, figure it out yourself [laughs] the work becomes. And it can be very daunting to kind of just be thrown into that and be like, well, I'm in this leadership position now. People are looking to me, and I have all this responsibility, but, like, what do I do? Yeah, so I'm kind of enjoying this book, that is...it's not a technical book, which is actually kind of what I like about it. It's actually more of a leadership book, which is really important for that kind of role. Even though, you know, they are still in that IC track, but it does come with a lot of leadership responsibility. JOËL: Yes, leadership in a very different way than management. But—and this may be counterintuitive for some people, especially earlier on in their careers—going further up that individual contributor track doesn't just mean getting more intense technically. It often means you've got to focus on things more like leadership, like being a bit more strategic, aligning technical initiatives with strategic goals. STEPHANIE: Yeah, and having a bigger impact and being a force multiplier, even in both the manager and, like, the staff plus role, like, that, you know, is the thing that ties the rising level. JOËL: Yeah, in many ways, maybe the individual contributor track is slightly misnamed because while, yes, you're not managing a sort of sub-organization within the company, it's still about being a force multiplier. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a really great point [laughs]. Maybe we'll be able to come up with a better [laughs] name for that. JOËL: I've mentioned several times on this podcast that I've been enjoying playing Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, with some friends and some colleagues. And something that was particularly fun that some friends and I did this summer is we hired a professional DM to run one shot for us. And that was just an absolutely lovely experience. Well, as a result of that, I am now subscribed to this guy's newsletter. And he'll do, like, various D&D events at different times. One thing that was really cool that I found out recently...as we're recording this, it's the week before election day in the U.S. And because a lot of voting happens in schools, typically, schools have the day off. And so, this guy sent out an email saying he was offering to run a, like, all day...effectively, a little mini-D&D camp for school-age kids on election day so that you can do your work. You can go vote, and you don't have to...basically, he'll watch your kids for you and, like, get them introduced to playing D&D, which I think is just a really cool thing to do. STEPHANIE: I love that. It's so heartwarming [laughs]. And it's such a great idea because, oftentimes, people are still working, and so they need childcare, like, on those kinds of days. And yeah, I think D&D is such a fun thing for kids to get into, too. You know, it requires so much, like, imagination, and I can imagine it's such a blast. JOËL: I got that email, and I was like, that is such a perfect idea. I love it so much. STEPHANIE: I wanted to plug my D&D recommendation. I'm pretty sure I have mentioned it on the show before. But there is a podcast that I listen to called Not Another D&D Podcast, which is, you know, a live play Dungeons & Dragons podcast campaign that's hosted by these comedians, formerly of CollegeHumor, and it's very fun. I always laugh. They have this, like, a kind of offshoot of the main show that they do called D&D Court, which is very fun. Because, as you were saying, like, you know, you hired a DM to run your game. And I know that...I'm sure lots of people have fun stories about their home games and, like, the drama that happens [laughs] with their friends. JOËL: Absolutely. Absolutely. STEPHANIE: And so, with D&D Court, listeners can write in with their drama or their conflicts and get an official ruling from the hosts about who was right [laughs] in the situation that they write in about. JOËL: So, you get to bring your best rules lawyering to the D&D Court. STEPHANIE: Yeah, exactly [laughs]. JOËL: That sounds kind of amazing. Recently, I had someone reach out to me asking about an older blog post that we'd written about the Sandi Metz Rules. This blog post was initially published in 2013, so ten years ago, and was talking about some guidelines that Sandi Metz at the time was talking about that she was using in some of her code. And we talked about how our experience was applying those to some of our work as well. And so, the question was, you know, ten years later, is that still something that thoughtbot developers like to follow in their code? We'll link to the article in the show notes. But I'll just read out the rules here real quick. So, there's four of them. The first one is a class can be no longer than 100 lines of code. The second is a method can be no longer than five lines of code. The third is pass no more than four parameters into a method, and hash options count, so no getting clever with those. And then, finally, controllers can only instantiate one object. You only get one instance variable. And views can only talk to that one instance variable. Had you or are you familiar with these rules? Is that something that you think about or use in your daily writing of code? STEPHANIE: Yeah. So, when you proposed this topic, I had to revisit these rules. And I can't recall if I had seen them before. They seemed familiar. And I've read, you know, a couple of Sandi Metz's books, so maybe those were places where she had mentioned them. But the one thing that really struck me when I was first reading the rules was how declarative they were in terms of, like, kind of just telling you what the results should be without really saying how. So, for example, the one where you said, you know, a method should not be more than five lines [laughs], I had the silly thought of, like, well, you could just, you know, stuff everything into a single line [laughs] and just completely disregard line limit if you wanted, and it would technically still follow the rule. JOËL: If they didn't want us to do that, they wouldn't give us semicolons in Ruby. STEPHANIE: Exactly [laughs]. So, that is kind of

Joël was selected to speak at RubyConf in San Diego! After spending a month testing out living in Upstate New York, Stephanie is back in Chicago. Stephanie reflects on a recent experience where she had to provide an estimate for a project, even though she didn't have enough information to do so accurately. In this episode, Stephanie and Joël explore the challenges of providing estimates, the importance of acknowledging uncertainty, and the need for clear communication and transparency when dealing with project timelines and scope. RubyConf 2023 (https://rubyconf.org/) How to estimate well (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/how-to-estimate-feature-development-time-maybe-don-t) XKCD hard problems (https://xkcd.com/1425/) Transcript: STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: Big piece of news in my world: I recently got accepted to speak at RubyConf in San Diego next month in November. I'm really excited. I'm going to be talking about the concept of time and how that's actually multiple different things and the types of interactions that do and do not make sense when working with time. STEPHANIE: Yay. That's so exciting. Congratulations. I am very excited about this topic. I'm wondering, is this something that you've been thinking about doing for a while now, or was it just an idea that was sparked recently? JOËL: It's definitely a topic I've been thinking about for a long time. STEPHANIE: Time? [laughs] JOËL: Haha. STEPHANIE: Sorry, that was an easy one [laughs]. JOËL: The idea that we often use the English word time to refer to a bunch of, like, fundamentally different quantities and that, oftentimes, that can sort of blur into one another. So, the idea that a particular point in time might be different from a duration, might be different from a time of day, might be different to various other quantities that we refer to generically as time is something that's been in the back of my mind for quite a while. But I think turning that into a conference talk was a more recent idea. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I'm curious, I guess, like, what was it that made you feel like, oh, like, this would be beneficial for other people? Did everything just come together, and you're like, oh, I finally have figured out time [laughs]; now I have this very clear mental model of it that I want to share with the world? JOËL: I think it was sparked by a conversation I had with another member of the thoughtbot team. And it was just one of those where it's like, hey, I just had this really interesting conversation pulling on this idea that's been in the back of my mind for years. You know, it's conference season, and why not make that into a talk proposal? As often, you know, the best talk proposals are, at least for me, I don't always think ahead of time, oh, this would be a great topic. But then, all of a sudden, it comes up in a conversation with a colleague or a client, or it becomes really relevant in some work that I'm doing. It happens to be conference season, and like, oh, that's something I want to talk about now. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I like that a lot. I was just thinking about something I read recently. It was about creativity and art and how long a piece of work takes. And someone basically said it really just takes your whole life sometimes, right? It's like all of your experiences accumulated together that becomes whatever the body of work is. Like, all of that time spent maybe turning the idea in your head or just kind of, like, sitting with it or having those conversations, all the bugs you've probably encountered [laughs] involving date times, and all of that coalescing into something you want to create. JOËL: And you build this sort of big web of ideas, not all that makes sense to talk about in a conference talk. So, one of the classic sources of bugs when dealing with time are time zone and daylight savings. I've chosen not to include those as part of this talk. I think other people have talked about them. I think it's less interesting or less connected to the core idea that I have that, like, there are different types of time. Let's dig into what that means for us. So, I purposefully left that out. But there's definitely a lot that could be said for those. STEPHANIE: Awesome. Well, I really look forward to watching your talk when it is released to the public. JOËL: So, our listeners won't be able to tell, but we're on a video call right now. And I can see from your background that you are back at home in Chicago. It's been a few weeks since we've recorded together. And, in the last episode we did, you were trying out living somewhere in Upstate New York. How was that experience? And what has the transition back to Chicago been for you? STEPHANIE: Yeah, thanks for asking. I was in Upstate New York for the whole month of September. And then I took the last two weeks off of work to, you know, just really enjoy being there and make sure I got to do everything that I wanted to do out there before I came home to, you know, figure out, like, is this a place where I want to move? And yeah, this is my first, like, real full week back at work, back at home. And I have to say it's kind of bittersweet. I think we really enjoyed our time out there, my partner and I. And coming back home, especially, you know, when you're in a stage of life where you're wanting to make a change, it can be a little tough to be like, uh, okay, like, now I have to go back [laughs] to what my life was like before. But we've been very intentional about trying to bring back some of the things that we enjoyed being out there, like, back into just our regular day-to-day lives. So, over the weekend, we were making sure that we wanted to spend some time in nature because that's something that we were able to do a lot of during our time in New York. And, yeah, I think just bringing a bit of that, like, vacation energy into day-to-day life so the grind of kind of work doesn't become too much. JOËL: Anything in particular that you've tried to bring back from that experience to your daily life in Chicago? STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think, you know, when you're in a new place, everything is very exciting and, like, novel. Before work or, like, during my breaks, I would go out into the world and take a little walk and, like, look at the houses on the street that I was staying at. Or there's just a sense of wonder, I suppose, where everywhere you look, you're like, oh, like, this is all new. And I felt very, like, present when I was doing that. And over time, when you've been somewhere for a long time, you lose a little bit of that sense of, like, willingness to be open to new things, or just, like, yeah, that sense of like, oh, like, curiosity, because you feel like you know somewhere and, like, you kind of start to expect oh, like, this street will be exactly like how I've walked a million times [laughs]. But trying to look around a little more, right? Like, be a little aware and be like, oh, like, Halloween is coming around the corner. And so, enjoying that as, like, the thing that I notice around me, even if I am still on the same block, you know, in my same neighborhood, and, yeah, wanting to really appreciate, like, my time here before we leave. Like, I don't want to just spend it kind of waiting for the next thing to happen. Because I'm sure there will also be a time where I miss [laughs] Chicago here once we do decide to move. JOËL: I don't know about you, but I feel like a sense of change, even if it is cyclical, is really helpful for me to kind of maintain a little bit of that wonder, even though I've lived in one place for a decade. So, I live in New England in the Northeast U.S. We have pretty marked seasons that change. And so, seeing that happen, you know, kind of a warm summer, and now we're transitioning into fall, and the weather is getting colder. The trees are turning all these colors. So, there's always kind of within, like, a few weeks or a few months something to look forward to, something that's changing. Life never feels stagnant, even though it is cyclical. And I don't know if that's been a similar experience for you. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I like that a lot because I think one of the issues around feeling kind of stuck here in Chicago was that things were starting to feel stagnant, right? Like, we're wanting to make a big change in our life. That's still on the table, and that's still our plan. But noticing change, even when you think like, ugh, like, this again? [laughs] I think that could really shift your perspective a little bit or at least change how you feel about being somewhere. And that's definitely what I'm trying to do, kind of even when I am in a place of, like, waiting to figure out what the next step is. Speaking of change, I had a recent lesson learned or, I suppose, a story to share with you about a new insight or perspective I had about how I show up at work that I'd like to share. JOËL: What is this new perspective? STEPHANIE: Well, I guess, [chuckles], first of all, I'm curious to get your reaction on this. Have you ever heard anyone tell you estimates are lies? JOËL: Yes, a lot. It's maybe cynical, but there are a lot of cynics in our industry. STEPHANIE: That's true. Part of this story is me giving an estimate that was a lie. So, in some ways, there is a grain of truth to it [laughs]. But I wanted to share with you this experience I had a few weeks ago where I was in kind of a like, project status update meeting. And I was coming to this meeting for the first time actually. And so, it was with a group of people who I hadn't really met before. It was kind of a large meeting. So, there were a handful of people that I wasn't super familiar with. And I was coming