Joël explains his note-taking system, which he uses to capture his beliefs and thoughts about software development. Stephanie recalls feedback from her recent RailsConf talk, where her confidence stemmed from deeply believing in her material despite limited rehearsal. This leads to a conversation about the value of mental models in building a comprehensive understanding of a topic, which can foster confidence and adaptability during presentations and discussions.

The episode then shifts focus to the practical application of enumerators in Ruby, exploring various mental models to understand their functionality better. Joël introduces several metaphors, such as enumerators as cursors, lazy collections, and sequence generators, which help demystify their use cases.

• Episode on note-taking


• What we believe about software


• Ruby Enumerators


• Enumerator Lazy


• Modeling a Paginated API as a lazy stream


• Solving a memory performance issue with enumerator


• Find in batches


• Binary tree implementation with different traversals


• Teaching Ruby to Count

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: So, what's new in my world isn't exactly a new thing. I've talked about it on the podcast here before, and it's my note-taking system. I have a system where I try to capture notes that are things I believe about software or things I think are probably true about software. They're chunked up in really small pieces, such that every note is effectively one small thesis statement and a paragraph of text, and maybe a diagram or a code snippet to support that. And then, it's highly hyperlinked to other notes. So, I sort of build out some thoughts on software that way.

A thing that I've done recently that's been pretty exciting with that is introducing a sort of separate set of notes that connect to my sort of opinion notes. So, I create individual notes for public works that I've done, things like blog posts or conference talks. Because a lot of those are built on top of ideas that have been sitting in my note system for a while. Readers and listeners get to sort of see the final product, but often sort of built up over several months or even a couple of years as I added different notes that kind of circled a topic and then eventually got to a thing.

What I did, though, was actually making those connections explicit. And so I use Obsidian. Obsidian has this cool graph view where it just sort of shows all of the notes, and it circles them with, like, connections between them where the notes connect. So, I can now see in a visual format how my thoughts cluster in different topics, but then also which clusters have talks and blog posts hanging off of them and also which ones don't, which ones are like, oh, I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, and I've not yet written about it in a public forum; maybe that would be a thing to explore. So, seeing that visual got me really excited. I was having a good time.

STEPHANIE: Yes, I have several thoughts coming to mind in response, which is, I know you love a visual. I really like the system of, even if you have created content for it, like, you have a space for, like, thoughts about it to evolve. Because you said, like, sometimes content comes out of notes that you've been...or, like, thoughts you've been having over years, but it's like, even afterwards, I'm sure there will still be new thoughts about it, too. I always have a hard time finding a place for that thing kind of once I, I don't know, it's like some of that stuff is never really considered done, right? So, that is really cool.

And I also was just thinking about an old episode of The Bike Shed back when Chris Toomey and Steph Viccari hosted the podcast called "What We Believe About Software," I think, is the title. And I was just thinking about how, like, if only we could just dump all of your notes [laughs] into some, you know, stream [laughs], and that would be really cool. If we ever do, like, an episode like that, that would be really fun. And I'm sure, you know, you already have this, like, huge bank of ideas [laughs].

JOËL: Yes. It is really fun because I build up...the thoughts are often sort of interconnected, and so they might have a topic, but they are very focused. So, I might have, like, three or four things I believe about a particular topic that cluster together. So, we could...and, actually, I have used, in the past, some of those clusters as initial food for thought for a Bikeshed episode.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's really neat. I like this idea of a kind of just, like, a repository for putting down what you believe about software as kind of, like, guiding principles for yourself as a developer a little bit.

I remember a piece of feedback I got about my RailsConf talk that I gave a few weeks ago, and someone said like, "Oh, you sounded really confident in what you were talking about." And that surprised me because I, like, didn't practice rehearsing giving the talk all that much [laughs]. It's because they had asked like, "Oh, like, did you practice a lot?" or something like that. And I think I realized that I, like, really believed in what I was sharing and kind of that, I think, was perhaps what they were picking up on.

And even though, like, maybe the rehearsal of the presentation itself was not where I had spent a lot of time on, I had spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to share and just building up my confidence around that. So, I thought that was an interesting connection.

JOËL: Yeah, you fully developed the idea. You kind of explored all the side trails, maybe a little bit on your own as well. You're on very familiar terrain. And so, that is a way of building confidence separate from just sort of memorizing a talk.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

JOËL: In a sense, I almost feel like that's a better sense of confidence because then you can sort of...you can roll with the punches. You know, if a slide is out of order or something, sure, it maybe messes up a little bit of the narrative that you're trying to say. But you're not like, "Oh no, what is this content?" You're like, "Oh yeah, this thing," and you can dive right into it. Somebody asks you a question, and you're not like, "Oh no, that was not in the script," because, again, you've sort of mastered your topic. You know the area as a whole, even sort of the blurry edges beyond the talk, and can react in a way that is pretty confident.

STEPHANIE: Yeah. I still definitely fear the open Q&A. I've never done it before, but maybe one day I will be able to because I just, you know, know my topic so well inside and out [laughs] that I can roll with the punches, as you say.

JOËL: Open Q&A is just...it's a roll of the dice. Sometimes, you get some really good conversation topics there, and sometimes, it's just a waste of everyone's time.

STEPHANIE: I like that take [laughs].

JOËL: Maybe that should go into the things I believe about software. So, other than receiving feedback about your RailsConf talk, what is new in your world?

STEPHANIE: Yeah, so I am wrapping up a pretty large project on my client work that we're hoping to release soon. And, in fact, it's actually being released along with a big announcement from the client company to their customers. Essentially, at a conference, they're going to say like, "Hey, like, we now have this new feature." And so, I think there's some hype generated around it. And this past week, we've been doing a lot of internal testing of the feature because there are a lot of employees of my client company who are, like, pretty big users of the product, which is cool because I think we're getting, you know, we have easy access to people who can give us good feedback.

But I am having a hard time with being on the receiving end of the feedback and figuring out, like, what is stuff I need to attend to now before, you know, this big release? And what is stuff that is just kind of, like, general feedback like, "Oh, like, I wish it did this," but, you know, it turns out that that's not really what we were building? And how do I just kind of, like, accept that?

You know, it's coming from a good place, but I can't really help them there, at least right now. And that's hard for me because I like helping people, right? And so, if someone says something like, "Oh, like, I wish it did this," or like, "Oh, that's kind of weird," I'm like, "Oh, I want to just, like, fix that for you right now [laughs]." And I suspect that a lot of other devs can relate to this, especially if, like, you know, you've been working on something for a little bit, and it feels...I'm just going to say i