The Bike Shed

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379: Feature Flags Apr 11, 2023

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Joël submitted a last-minute submission to RailsConf discreet math, which got picked up! 🎉 He'll be speaking at RailsConf 2023 in Atlanta at the end of April about why it's relevant to developers and all the different practical ways he uses it daily. Stephanie recommends headlamps for in-bed reading sessions and sets up the feature flags topic for today based on a project that must be released to the public in one go. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake. Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Joël's Railsconf talk Episode on Discrete Math Episode on the Fundamentals Strangler fig pattern Flipper gem 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 a few episodes ago, we had a guest, Sara Jackson, on and she was talking about some cool elements of discrete math and how those can be really practically useful to us as developers in our day-to-day work. I was really inspired by that conversation. And the day we recorded that, I think, was the last day that the RailsConf CFP was open. So I went and submitted a last-minute submission to RailsConf for this idea, and it got picked up. So I'm going to be speaking at RailsConf 2023 in Atlanta at the end of April about discrete math and why it's relevant to us as developers, and all the different practical ways that I use it on a daily basis. STEPHANIE: That's awesome. Congrats, Joël. I'm so excited for this talk. JOËL: Thanks. STEPHANIE: Was this an 11:59 p.m. submission? JOËL: Aaah, very close to that, yes. I don't recommend people to do this. But if inspiration hits you on the last day of the CFP, do it; go for it. I'd actually submitted two talk proposals. And I think maybe a little bit of the excitement in the energy for this last-minute one came through because that's the one that the committee picked. STEPHANIE: How did you know that you would want to turn this topic into a talk? JOËL: I think because I was excited to share about this to other people, and we'd kind of already done that on the show. But this is the sort of thing that's like, you know what? I'm kind of feeling a little bit of fire of this idea. I think more people should know about this. I think there's value in sharing this idea more broadly. What are some areas that I could do? I could maybe write a blog post. Oh, RailsConf, that's open until tonight. Let me put together a proposal because I'm excited about sharing this idea. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think we chatted a little bit about discrete math as potentially a fundamental pillar of information or a skill set for developers back in our episode on just the fundamentals of what developers need to know. And I was just thinking as you were talking about it that that was an audio medium, but it's obviously kind of an academic topic. And so to have slides for it and almost make it kind of like a little mini-lecture but more fun [laughs] than sitting in a classroom, I think, could be a really cool application of this topic. JOËL: Yeah, I'm excited to take a very practical look at this. I've got 30 minutes to talk about it. I'm not going to give you the deep mathematical fundamentals. But if there are little bits of discrete math that I can show that are actually practically useful in a day-to-day situation, I think that would be incredibly valuable. So currently working on the talk, but the way I have it structured right now is very scenario-based. So we're going to look at some problems, look at just a tiny little bit of discrete math theory, and then see how that allows us to solve the underlying problem. STEPHANIE: Nice. I won't be attending RailsConf this year, but I really look forward to watching the video when it comes out. JOËL: Thank you. So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So last night I was reading in bed, and I usually stay up a little bit later than my partner. And so he was going to bed, and at that point, I usually turn off the bedside table lamp and either move to the couch to keep reading or just go to bed as well. But I was really engrossed in my book, and I wanted to keep going. But I was so cozy in bed. I really didn't want to move to the couch because then you risk falling asleep on the couch, and nobody likes that. And so I was like, oh man, you know what I would really love? One of those book lights. And I got this really vivid memory of the clip-on ones I used to have as a kid that would clip onto the pages of my book and shine a light onto the page. And I was like, I feel like that technology must have gotten better [laughs] since I was a child. And I was like, okay, now I need to look up some doodad and buy a thing to help me solve this problem of reading in bed after hours. And I was scrolling through my phone for a little bit, but then I was like, well, I want to read right now, not after [chuckles] I've purchased this gadget. And it hit me that we have headlamps that we use for our camping trips and also just if we ever are stuck without electricity. And I grabbed one of those from the junk drawer, and I wore it to bed and was reading my book. And it was a pretty good experience. So I'm actually pretty happy that I didn't need to buy a new thing to solve this problem of mine. And yeah, it turns out that you can just use something that you have at home. JOËL: That's really cool. I feel like when I've used the headlamps before; normally, they're incredibly bright. Did you find that to be a problem for you? STEPHANIE: I was able to adjust the brightness on mine, so it was definitely on the lower end of the setting and, overall, just better than having the nightstand lamp on, which I think just totally brightens the room. And at least this was a more targeted area of light, and it's working so far. He didn't wake up or anything, so I would call that a success. And now I have it in my bedside drawer. And I think I look really silly, but that's okay. No one can see me anyway. [laughs] JOËL: That's kind of the whole point of it, right? STEPHANIE: Exactly. [laughs] So, aside from my bedtime routine, another thing that's new in my world is something project-related. So I wanted to bring this up to you and get your thoughts on the situation. So I want to talk about feature flags because I'm currently working on a pretty big project that has to be released to the public in one go. And so naturally, we reached for using feature flags to be able to release our work to production but not to make it accessible to users so that we could be working on this thing incrementally and not have a huge release where all of this code goes out. But as we've been building the feature, I am realizing that we are having to plug conditional code to check for this feature flag in a lot of different places. So, so far, we've been putting it in controllers. We've been putting it in a menu builder to show the user where they can navigate to. And then we've even been putting it inside of methods to change behavior based on whether the flag is on. And so that was kind of, I think, getting my spider senses a little bit tingling. And then recently, one of the bigger issues that our team had a discussion about was whether to include this conditional check for the flag in queries. So we are building on top of an existing model. But once the feature flag is on and customers are using it, the application will be able to create new records for that model. But they're of a different category with a different value for one of the attributes. And we end up clearing for this model in a lot of one-off places. And so once this thing is on, all of the records that are specific to this new feature will be included whenever we query for this model. And as we've been developing, it's been less of an issue because customers can't access the flow to create these new records. But someone brought up what if we release this, and it turns out that we have an issue and we want to turn it off; we want to roll it back? And at that point, those records will still have been created in the database and will then be included in those queries and what do we do then? And so we started getting into the weeds a little bit of, like, do we want to have some conditional query situation going on? We haven't quite landed on an answer, but things are getting a little hairy. And I am curious if this works. Any thoughts for you? JOËL: That's a really interesting problem to have. You mentioned having all of these conditionals kind of sprinkled everywhere for the feature flag kind of triggered your spidey senses a little bit. Do you have a sense a little bit of maybe why that feels wrong or maybe why you're feeling uncomfortable about this code? STEPHANIE: Yeah, I was thinking about it, and, in my opinion, the ideal world for feature flags would be you have the checks at the boundaries of your code or where a customer could interact with the application. And then you are able to, I guess, branch a little earlier so that they don't go down the flow at all where the changes are being made. And this seems to be a little bit of the opposite, where we end up having to check in a million different places because we aren't keeping that separation as explicit as I think it should be. JOËL: Hmm, so almost like it's not the feature flag that's the problem. The feature flag is just a symptom of tight coupling in the wider system. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's definitely a smell that has emerged. But I also don't think that we have the luxury necessarily to decouple all of the places in the code as we are trying to add this new feature. Have you been in a situation like this before? JOËL: I think tight coupling, in general, is a thing I've seen in a lot of projects. I can't immediately think of a moment where it was highlighted by introducing a feature flag. Sometimes I think what can be tricky is if you have a feature that has a lot of cross-cutting concerns, then it's easy for that to kind of bleed into other things. There are a variety of techniques to try to, like you said, isolate the new code such that you don't need to conditionally branch on it everywhere. I wonder if there might be maybe a few important inflection points that you could introduce some sort of wrapper or push a conditional higher up the decision tree or something like that that might get 50%-80% of the way there and at least eliminate a lot of the pain. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I like the use of inflection points because I think that right now, our strategy has been everywhere as we are making changes, just putting it in as a guard when there's probably some degree of higher level thinking about, okay, we're now changing a bunch of internals of this class, but maybe the change that we're making is its own concept. And it could be a separate class, and that is when we choose to use that class like that as an inflection point. JOËL: I have this vague mental model in my mind of building a mechanical system and wanting to know where do I want it to be rigid and where do I want some sort of joints so that it can flex? And I don't want the entire system to be made out of joints because now it's a pile of spaghetti. It's important to be rigid in a lot of places. But in some places, I do need it to flex. And it's identifying what are those right places where it needs to bend to flex to different scenarios? And to me, that's a metaphor for when do we need abstractions, the ability to choose between different paths, the ability to maybe have some polymorphism? And when do we want to force everything to say, "No, all the code is going to behave in this one way?" STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a great point. I am also kind of stuck on what you said earlier, where the feature is very cross-cutting, and I think that is true for this project at hand. And so that has been very challenging too. There's also a lack of trust that it will just work with the other parts that it's touching because we're actually extending something that was already a bit of a unique flow or a kind of a one-off situation. And it was built very particularly to support that one thing. And now here we are introducing something else for it to support and having to go in and change all of those individual places where we were making those one-off exceptions to now also be able to handle this new thing we're introducing. JOËL: I think, in many cases, I appreciate when people write code in that way and that they didn't try to abstract everything on that first difference. But now that I'm the one coming in doing the second one now, it's time to think, okay, clearly, we're trying to flex here. We probably need some sort of abstraction. Unfortunately, that means it does have to come into the time budget for this feature and say, look, we already have a special case here. Now we're going to add a second special case. We need to take the time to do a little bit of refactoring or a little bit of abstracting in order to make that work properly. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. I think the logic there originally was that, oh, we already have a special case for this thing. So it should be easy [laughs] to now add this other special case that's kind of based off of the original exception. And I actually think that worked against us a little bit because I'm mentioning we're introducing this new feature flag, and I'm also seeing remnants of that old feature flag that didn't get quite cleaned up as well, so just a lot more complexity in the different ways that the flow is going. JOËL: In some ways, you kind of see earlier failures with this exact same approach that you're trying to take. So it's a bit of a warning. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I want to avoid leaving those traces for future developers. There's definitely some degree of regret that I feel for all the times that I've introduced a feature flag and never cleaned [laughs] it up. So seeing just remnants of this same approach, like you mentioned, and wanting to do something differently to make sure that we aren't creating as much trouble for the next time around. JOËL: So you'd brought up cross-cutting concerns earlier. And I think some common situations for that is like, oh, we've got some code that changed in the model where we have to put conditions. But then we also have a parallel condition in the controller and a parallel condition in the view, and maybe even in the routing file, and it quickly becomes a mess. Sometimes you're able to sort of take all of those, and kind of put them in a different part of the app. So you might have a view file that is really complex and has all these conditionals. And maybe you kind of give up trying to make it all work in one file and say, you know what? For this special case, we're going to do it all in a separate view file. And maybe there's one top-level condition that says, if this thing is true, render the second view file; otherwise, render the first one. And now you've only got one condition instead of having it kind of sprinkled all over some other piece. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that actually is the approach we ended up taking for this project. And in this case, we have React on the front end. So we're rendering a completely different React component based on the flag. And that di…

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378: Leadership and Impact as an Individual Contributor Apr 04, 2023

Show notes

Today's episode is "Old News"! Stephanie shares her ergonomic desk setup. Joël talks about the pyramids. Another old thing is the Bike Shed episode two weeks ago about success and fulfillment. Stephanie and Joël realized off-mic that one area they didn't really talk about so much is impact, and that is something that is very fulfilling for both of them. Today, they talk about impact and leadership as individual contributors because leadership is typically associated with management. But they believe that as ICs, at any level, you can be displaying attributes of leadership and show up in that way on teams. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake. Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Success and Fulfillment episode Logitech MX Vertical Rose Wiegley's Lead From Where You Are 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 old in your world? STEPHANIE: I'm glad you asked that question because I don't think we get a chance to talk about things that are exactly the same as they've always been. And so today, I'd like to share my ergonomic desk setup, [laughs] which has been old for about a year or so. And back then, I was having some issues with some back pain and some wrist pain, and I made a few upgrades and since then have not had any issues. And I feel like it's one of those things that I just forgot about because when it stops being a problem, you don't really notice it. And today, I am able to reflect on my old problem of bodily pain while working. And I'm happy to say that things have been much better for a while now. JOËL: Oh, that's amazing. What's one thing you think had the most impact in your setup? STEPHANIE: Oh, I picked up one of those vertical mice for my wrist. I was having some wrist pain, like I mentioned. And I actually solicited some input from other thoughtboters for the best mouse to replace the Apple Magic Mouse that I was using, which I really wanted it to work for me because I liked the way it looked, but nevertheless, that was causing me issues. So I ended up with the Logitech MX vertical, and that has really solved my wrist pain. It is very not cute. [laughs] It kind of looks like a weird big, gray snail. But you know what? You got to do what you got to do. JOËL: That sounds like an art project waiting to happen. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I would love to see; I don't know, a way to make these vertical mice look a little more cute. Maybe I will stick some googly eyes or something on it and then just be like, this is my pet snail [laughs] that works with me every day. JOËL: Do you have a name? STEPHANIE: Not yet. Maybe I'll save it for what's new next week. [laughter] JOËL: Homework assignment. Years ago, I was also having some wrist pain. And I think one of the most impactful things I did was remapping some keys on my keyboard. So I'm a pretty heavy Vim user. And I think just reaching with that pinky for the Escape key all the time was putting a lot of strain on my wrist. So I remapped Caps Lock to control. That's what I did. Yes, because it was reaching down with the pinky for the Control key and remapped escape to hitting J twice. So now I can do those two very common things, Control for some kind of common chord and then Escape because you're always dropping in and out of modes, all from the Home row. And now, both my hands feel great, and I can be happy writing Vim. STEPHANIE: That's really nice. I think when I had asked in Slack about mouse recommendations, someone had trolled me a little bit and said that if I just use my keyboard for everything, then I won't need to use [laughs] a mouse at all. [laughs] So there's also that option too for listeners out there. JOËL: It's true. You go to tmux and Vim, and on a Mac, maybe something like Alfred and a few OS shortcuts, and you can get 90% of the way to keyboard only. STEPHANIE: What about you, Joël? What's old in your world? JOËL: So you know what, something that's really old? Pyramids. STEPHANIE: Wow. [laughter] I should have known that this is where we were headed. JOËL: Long-term listeners of the show will know I'm a huge history nerd. And we think of the pyramids as being old, but they are ridiculously old. A fun fact that I have not learned recently because this is something that is old in my world, but that I learned a while back is that if we look back to Cleopatra, the last Pharaoh, she is closer to us in time than she was to the building of the Great Pyramid. STEPHANIE: No. What? Wow. Okay, yeah, that definitely just messed with my brain a little bit. And now, I have to rethink my understanding of time. JOËL: I think the way the timeline sort of works in my mind is it tends to get compressed the further back you go. So it's like, yeah, I think of modern-ish times, like, yeah, there's like a lot of stuff, and I'm thinking in terms of decades until maybe like the 1900s. And now I start to think in terms of centuries. And they're kind of more or less equivalent, you know, the Victorian Age. It fills about the same amount of space in my mind as like the '60s. And then you get to the point where it's just like millennia. STEPHANIE: Mm-hmm. When you think of Ancient Egypt, do you think Cleopatra and also pyramids, so you kind of conflate? At least I do. I conflate the two a little bit. But yeah, I guess a lot of time passed in between that. [laughs] JOËL: The pyramids are also really cool because they were one of The Seven Wonders of the ancient world, which is sort of, I want to say, like a tourist circuit created by the ancient Greeks, sort of like monuments that they thought were particularly impressive. But they're also the only ones that are still standing; all of the others have been lost to time. STEPHANIE: Wow, it's the real wonder then [laughs] for being able to stand the test of time. JOËL: It's also the oldest of the seven and has managed to survive until today, so very impressive. STEPHANIE: I love that. Just now, when you were talking about thinking about time periods kind of compressed, I definitely fall victim to thinking that the '70s or whatever was just 30 years ago, even though we are solidly in the 2020s and, in reality, it's obviously like 50. But yeah, I think that always freaks me out a little bit. JOËL: Yes, it's no longer the year 2000. STEPHANIE: Turns out. [laughs] So, in case our listeners didn't know. [laughs] JOËL: I think when we were close-ish to the turn of the millennium, it just made mental math so easy because you're at that nice zero point. And then you get to the early 2010s, and it's close enough within a rounding error. And now we just can't pretend about that anymore. STEPHANIE: No, we really can't. JOËL: We need a new anchor point to do that mental math. STEPHANIE: I love that we're talking about what's old in our world because I love a chance to just repeat something that I've said before that I still think is really cool, but I feel like that doesn't get invited as frequently. It's just like, oh, how are you doing? What's new? So yeah, highly recommend asking people what's old in their world? JOËL: Yeah. And beyond that, not just like, what are some new things you're trying? But kind of like what you were talking about earlier, what's something that's stayed stable in your life, something that you've been doing for a while that works for you? STEPHANIE: Yeah, I love it. So another thing that's old is our episode from a couple of weeks ago about success and fulfillment. And you and I realized off-mic that one area we didn't really talk about so much is impact, and that being something that is very fulfilling for both of us. And that kind of got me thinking about impact and leadership. And I especially am interested in this topic as individual contributors because I think that leadership is typically associated with management. But I really believe that as ICs, at any level, really, you can be displaying attributes of leadership and showing up in that way on teams. JOËL: Definitely. I think you can have an impact at every level of the career ladder, not just an impact on a project but an impact on other people. I remember the first internship I did. I was maybe two weeks in, and I had a brand new intern join. It's day two, and I'm already pairing with him and being like, "Hey, I barely know anything about Rails. But if you want help with understanding instance variables, that's the one thing I know, and I can help you." STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, everyone knows something that another person doesn't. And just having that mindset of injecting leadership into things that you do at work, no matter how big or how small, I think is really important. JOËL: I think there's maybe a lie that we tell ourselves, which is that we need to wait to be an expert before we can help other people. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I've certainly fallen into that trap a little bit where I think it's held me back from sharing something because I assumed that the other person would know already or the thing I'm thinking is something I learned but not necessarily something that someone else would find interesting or new. JOËL: Right. Or even somebody's looking for help, and you feel like maybe you're not qualified to help on that problem, even though you probably are. STEPHANIE: One thing that I was really curious about is, can you remember a time when an IC on your team demonstrated leadership, and you were really impressed by it? Like, you thought, like, wow, that was really great leadership on their part, and I'm really glad that they did that. JOËL: Yeah. So I think one way that I really appreciate seeing leadership demonstrated is in client communication. Typically, the teams we have at thoughtbot are structured on a particular project where there's like a team lead who is in charge of the project. It's usually a couple of consultants working together as peers. Depending on the situation, one or the other might take leadership where it's necessary. But I've really appreciated situations where a colleague will just really knock it out of the park with some communication with the client or when they are maybe helping talk through a difficult situation. Or maybe even we realize that there's a risk coming down the pipeline for the project and raising it early and making sure that we de-risk that properly. Those are all things that I really appreciate seeing. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think the way folks engage in channels of communication can have a really big impact. A few things that come to mind for me that I think is really great leadership is when more experienced or senior folks ask questions in public spaces because that kind of cultivates a space where asking questions is okay, and even people who have whatever title or whatever years of experience they still have questions and can signal to other folks in the team that this is okay to do. And the same thing goes for sharing mistakes as well. Also, just signaling that, like, yeah, we mess up, and that's totally normal and okay. And the consequences aren't so scary that people feel a lot of pressure not to make mistakes or share when they happen. JOËL: Yeah. The concept you're describing is very similar to the idea of vulnerability. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that sounds right. JOËL: So kind of modeling that from more senior people helps create a safer environment for the more junior people. STEPHANIE: I think another thing that I really love that others do for me, and something that I want to get better at doing for others, is speaking up when something is a little off because, again, with power dynamics, for people who are newer or less experienced, they might be noticing things, but they don't feel encouraged to speak up about it in a public space or even with their manager. But they might confide in another IC who is maybe a little more senior. And one thing that I really liked that happened on my client project recently is a senior engineer said in Slack, "Hey, I noticed some sentiment from our daily sync meeting that we're cutting it close to our deadline." And he asked like, "Should we shift some priorities around? Or what is more important to make sure that we focus on in the next few weeks before the end of the quarter?" And I was just really glad he said that because I certainly had been feeling it. But I don't know if I necessarily kept a pulse that other people were also feeling it. And so having someone keeping an eye on those things and being receptive to hearing that from folks and then being like, okay, I want to make sure that I bring it up to the manager because it's important. I thought that was really cool. JOËL: Yeah. Now we're almost dialing into sort of emotional awareness of what other people on the team might be feeling and also the ability to think in terms of risks and being proactive about managing those. STEPHANIE: I like your use of the word risks because that definitely feels like something that, in general, people are scared to bring up. But ultimately, it is the signal of someone who is experienced enough to know that it's important to make transparent and then adjust accordingly. Even beyond noticing what folks are feeling, there are also more concrete things that can be noticed as well, like if team members are complaining about CI build time being really long and that being a repeating issue in getting their work done. Or any other development or tooling thing that is causing people issues, having someone notice how frequently that happens and then being like, hey, this is a problem. And here's what I think we should do about it. 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377: Error Handling Mar 28, 2023

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Joël is a mentor for RailsConf and got matched with a speaker. Stephanie has been having trouble stepping away from her work. It's frustrating when chasing down a bug because something's gone wrong, and you spend a whole afternoon figuring out where it is. Joël and Stephanie discuss error handling as a possible solution. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake. Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Mis en Place Writing Errors accumulate at boundaries Retryable errors 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 recently, RailsConf has closed out their CFP, and they've started sending out acceptances and rejections for proposals. And one thing that they do that I think is really nice is that they offer first-time speakers the ability to get matched with a speaker-mentor, somebody else who has given talks before that can help them prep their talk, listen to them rehearse, that kind of thing. And so they had put out a call for mentors last week. I responded to that, and I got matched with a speaker today. STEPHANIE: Cool. Is this your first time being a speaker-mentor? JOËL: First time for RailsConf. I've done it for another conference before. STEPHANIE: That's really exciting. What do you like about playing that role? JOËL: So I very much like prepping and giving talks myself. And I really value if there's something that I'm excited about sharing it, helping others build up that skill as well. So I think it's a great opportunity. I also remember what it was like when I was a first-time speaker and just how very nervous I was and not sure. So I think having someone who can play that role is an opportunity to have a really powerful impact in what's oftentimes, I want to say, a monumental moment. But it's kind of like a milestone marker moment in someone's career, the first time I gave a talk at a conference. So you get to help them to make that moment the best it can be. STEPHANIE: I love that, yeah. You make a really great point that after you've been speaking for a while, you maybe might forget what it felt like to give your first talk and how big of a deal it is. And in general, I think one thing I really love about Ruby Central conferences is how supportive they are of first-time speakers. So even in the CFP, they mentioned that they welcome first-time speakers and want to make sure to accept talks from those folks and then provide them support through this mentor program. And yeah, it just makes me feel really happy. JOËL: Do you remember your first talk? STEPHANIE: I do. So my very first talk I gave virtually at RubyConf in 2021. And then last year was actually my first in-person talk. And I remember even though it was technically my second talk; it was really my first talk in front of an audience. And I saw speakers in the Slack workspace asking questions about the AV setup, and I didn't even think to consider that in my preparation. So it was nice. Even though I didn't get set up with a mentor, to share a space with other experienced speakers and see what kinds of things they were asking about or what kinds of things they were sharing in that Slack space was helpful for me. JOËL: So when you do a proposal, do you typically have an outline already built out, or is it mostly a concept that you're pitching, and then you maybe start with an outline? Or where do you go next after a proposal has been accepted? STEPHANIE: That's a great question. I think first, I procrastinate for several months, [laughs], but I do try to write an outline in the proposal when I submit it so I do have a starting point. And I think that actually helps the CFP committee, too, when they are evaluating proposals to kind of get a better idea of what the talk will be about. And so, in my ideal world, I already have some structure, so by the time I've procrastinated to the point where it's a month or so before the conference itself, [laughs] I have an outline. And I end up writing words, like, I will just write my talk as if it were an essay with this bullet point outline already. And I find that helpful for me because I definitely have a bit of a stream-of-consciousness productivity energy. And so if I just put it all out there, I will then go back and be very ruthless, I suppose, in my editing, and I think that's where the magic happens. So I kind of let myself just word vomit all over the page. And then the real work comes in the editing process and organizing and making sure it sounds the way I would want it to sound when I'm speaking. And yeah, that's how it has worked for me so far. JOËL: So you have a sort of a separate phase for sort of just stream of consciousness dumping and then separately editing. And having those two separate is an important part of your process. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think so. I don't do as well trying to imagine the structure and everything perfectly the first time around and then filling things in. I find that just putting everything out there and, you know, a lot of things get cut. But that works well for me. What about you? What is your typical conference talk writing process? JOËL: I think mine is a little bit more iterative. I tend to put in some pieces that I like and then try to connect them together, try to make sure it's telling a story. I think a lot about the pedagogical side of things, where people are going to be confused, where they're going to have questions, where they might check out. And then very early, start doing kind of draft rehearsals where I'm starting to work on the talk. And I will stop halfway through because, in my mind, I'm trying to seat myself in the audience and be a person who's listening. And there might be a moment where I'm like, wait a minute, you just jump from one thing to another, and I don't get the logical connection here. And I might pause right there in the rehearsal and add in, say, okay, we need a transitional point, or we need to explain a concept between these two. And I keep doing that until I can get through the whole thing and then realize it's way too long and start cutting. And I cut aggressively, and now it's too short. And now I go through it again. And again, people have questions in the audience, hypothetical audience; I am the audience. And so I really kind of inflate it and then cut it down and re-inflate it and cut it down a bunch of times until I'm happy. STEPHANIE: I like that a lot. That sounds right. That sounds very you to work even on a conference talk iteratively. JOËL: It's very time-consuming. So I don't know it's the most efficient way to build a talk, but it's a process that works for me. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's true. And then there's value in the journey, even if the talk ends up changing from the very beginning to the end product. JOËL: So the approach that you described for yourself, I think, where you have a rough draft, and you're separating the editing from almost like a creative process, reminds me a lot of an article that I read called "Mise en Place Writing" by...I'm not sure what their full name is. They go by the handle Swyx. This is an article about their process for writing, but I think it applies to conference talks as well. Have you seen this article? STEPHANIE: I haven't. But that, I think, is similar to how I've thought about it or I've seen or heard other authors talk about their writing process and it being kind of similar where the creative work...they give themselves a lot of grace and just letting it be. And then the, like I mentioned, real work is in the editing process. It's kind of two different mindsets, I think. JOËL: We'll link the article in the show notes. STEPHANIE: I'm curious then how you incorporate visuals into your process because I think that's where my workflow is a little less successful because I'm not really thinking about visuals along with the words, and they do feel more like an afterthought. And I've always been really impressed when people who give talks can have a really visual and dynamic slide presentation. How does that work for you? JOËL: So I think I try to avoid slides that are three bullet points in the slide, and then I'm going to talk about it for three or four minutes for each bullet point. People read those quickly and then check out. I'll oftentimes try to have, like, turn each of those bullet points into a full-on slide. And maybe it's just a title and a fun picture or something like that. What this ends up doing is I kind of really inflate my slide deck. I'm going through maybe 80 or 100 slides in a 30-minute presentation. So it's multiple slides a minute. They move by really quickly. So I usually have either just an image or a header. I will usually start by just sketching it out with headers and then, where it makes sense, using an image. An image can be just for fun, or it can be something like a diagram where it is trying to illustrate a point. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I like that. I think talks with a lot of slides that are mostly just images or something that you can grasp in a few seconds are really engaging because you're keeping it moving, and you don't really let people get bored. And so you show a new slide, and they look at it, but then they are able to direct their attention back to what you're saying. JOËL: It's fun too with images because you can reuse them, and then they become a way to connect people back to a theme or let them know that you're making the same point again. A lot of talks, I will have a central theme that gets repeated. I'll often have a slide with some fun image with my key point on it. And then that slide will show up three or four times in my presentation oftentimes because each of the main points I'm trying to make kind of culminates at that same takeaway. And so for example, in the talk I gave at RubyConf Mini last fall, I had a slide about writing Ruby code being delightful. I think having some children being happy with just a big title being like, "Oh, delightful," or something like that. And after each of my examples where we went from code that was less good to something that was more idiomatic, Ruby that was really fun to work with, I would finish on that slide and be like, hey, our code is now delightful. And hopefully, that helped people with the takeaway of, like, we want to write delightful code. Ruby has tools to do that. And then, hopefully, they either remember the things they can do to get to that point or can look it up and find a talk online. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I watched that talk, and I really vividly remember that slide and the theme that you were trying to hone in on. So I thought it was pretty effective. I think this makes me realize speaking, I mean; speaking is obviously a skill but even the process of creating a talk in that particular medium is also a vast skill and can go...there are so many different styles and flavors. But I really think that what you said will get me thinking next time I'm writing my talk and how I can better incorporate that kind of engagement with the audience and making sure that the way I deliver the talk is just as thoughtful as the content itself. JOËL: Yeah, I've been putting a lot of thought into what makes a good talk and what elements are unique to my process, what elements can be useful to others because now I have to coach someone else on their process and say, "Hey, here's the thing that worked for me. Maybe this will be helpful for you." Or maybe it's just, "Have you tried this?" Or "I think audiences will be asking this question at this moment, what do you think of this?" So that's definitely been top of mind in a whole other dimension for me recently. How about you? What's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So before we started recording, I was heads down deep in the muck of trying to write some tests, some RSpec tests on my client project. And the domain for this client project is really big. There are a lot of models. And I was starting to go deep into the factory setups for our test fixtures. And it was hairy. And I was just going further and further down the rabbit hole to the point where I was skipping lunch. JOËL: Ooooh. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I was like, I couldn't pull myself away from it, and I kind of regret it a little bit. [laughs] And so I was just thinking about, like, how can I incorporate taking breaks a little bit more and feeling better about stepping away from the work when I'm really deep in it? You and I had this standing appointment to record [laughs] a podcast, so that was kind of the signal to me that it was time to try to set it aside. And I did end up taking the dog for a walk around the block beforehand to get some fresh air, but yeah, it was a little rough, I don't know. How do you deal with just being so deep in the code that you don't really want to resurface? JOËL: That's hard because sometimes I'm feeling productive, and I don't want to stop because I feel like I might not get back into the flow quite as easily. Sometimes it's just out of frustration. It's like, oh, I'm just so close to getting this bug done. If I get this one more test to pass, then I'll be good. And I keep doing one more thing. And the next thing I know, I have skipped lunch, and it's late in the afternoon. And it's just like; it's been a frustrating day. STEPHANIE: And you're cranky, yeah, yep. I know that feeling. JOËL: I've stopped being productive for the past hour. But I'll be like, one more thing, one more thing. STEPHANIE: I think I was in that place because I was starting to get deep into the internals of models completely unrelated to the test that I was writing, but that was just where the rabbit hole led me. And I think after this, I will go and ask in Slack for a pair because I think that would be really helpful right now. I've just reached the limits of what I know. And I'm almost positive that someone knows how to do this more efficiently than I do. So that was a bit of a signal to me, but it was very challenging untangling myself out of that headspace. JOËL: Have you ever played the video game Civilization? STEPHANIE: No, I haven't. JOËL: It's a turn-based historical strategy game. The running joke about it is that people get really pulled into it. And they're always just saying, "I'm going to play one more turn, and then I'm going to be done for the evening." And the next thing you know, it's 4:00 a.m. And I think that sometimes applies to fixing one more failure, just getting one more file in that chain of figuring out what the bug is in code. It's a very similar feeling. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. MID-ROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer’s worst nightmare...but it doesn’t have to be. 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376: Success and Fulfillment Mar 21, 2023

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Stephanie has a win and a gripe from her client project this week. In a previous episode, Joël talked about his work exploring how to model dependent side effects, particularly D&D dice rolls. He went from the theoretical to the practical and wrote up a miniature D&D damage dice roll app that you put in a few inputs. Then it will roll all the dice necessary and tell you did you successfully hit your target and, if so, how much damage you did. Together, they discuss how they think about fulfillment at work and what brings them fulfillment as developers. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake. Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Obsidian Joël's DnD dice roll app production site and repo Engineering Management for the Rest of Us The Five Love Languages 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 have a win, I suppose, and a gripe from my client project this week that I would love to share. So my win is that I've been working in React lately. And I might have mentioned this on a previous episode, but it's been a few years for me. So I'm kind of catching up on the new, hot tooling, you know, whatever is popular in that world these days, and having to read a lot of documentation to figure out how to use it and just in general, I think being a little bit outside my comfort zone. And I was working on an existing React component that was untested, and I had to change and extend some functionality in it. And we're also a little bit on a deadline. So there's like a little bit of pressure on the team to be delivering. And so when I got this ticket, I was like, okay, I am seeing this existing component that looks also a few years outdated. It's using some of the older technology that we've kind of moved on from. And I was just like, oh, I really should write tests for this before I go in and change some things just to feel confident that my changes don't break anything because it was pretty gnarly. But I was not in the mood for it. [laughs] And this was like two or three days ago. I was just very grumpy. And I was like, oh man, why do I have to do it? [laughs] I kind of wanted to just get into making the changes so I could deliver on this work. So, spoiler, I did not write the tests that day and just kind of went ahead with the changes. But then, the next morning, I woke up, and I was feeling inspired. I was like, I made those changes, but I'm actually not feeling that confident about it. So let me go back and try to write some tests. And I got to use the new tools I had been looking into, and that was part of my hesitation too. I was like, oh man, this is like a really old component. And I don't want to use the older ones that we're using for testing. But how is it going to play with the newer testing tools that we're using? And so there was just like a lot of, I think, barriers to me feeling excited about writing those tests. But with my renewed energy, I did it. And I feel very happy about it and proud of myself. Yeah, that's my little win. JOËL: That's a roller coaster of a journey there. That sort of deception when you find out that there are no tests for this and somebody else's problem has kind of become your problem. But then you decide you don't want it to be your problem, you know, kick it down the road for somebody else. And then you feel good about yourself, and you decide to backfill the test anyway. And you get that confidence, and now everything's better for everybody. That is quite the journey. STEPHANIE: Exactly. I listened to another podcast recently where they coined this term called tantrum logic, which is basically the idea that when you're kind of grumpy or something happens, and you're like, man, I don't want to do any of this, like, if I can't do it my way, then I don't want to do it at all. [laughs] And just the idea that the way you're thinking about the issue at hand may not be totally grounded in reality. And I think I needed that reset and just a good night's sleep and going to do something else to come back and be like, actually, I do want to write those tests, even if it will be challenging. I'm in a better mind space for it. Mind space? Headspace? [laughs] Headspace for it. And I overcame the tantrum logic. JOËL: A good night's sleep is just such a powerful tool for resetting. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I agree. Shout out to sleep. [laughs] It turns out that it can really have a positive effect on how you feel. JOËL: By the way, this is not an advertisement. We are not sponsored by sleep. We just both love it and recommend it. STEPHANIE: [laughs] To get into my gripe a little bit, so you and I are on the same client project we've mentioned before on the show. And I think I even talked a little bit about receiving a new computer from our client to do our client work on. So now I have many devices at home. And we had also chatted previously about a note-taking app that we both use called Obsidian. And one of the reasons that I really like it is because it's all local storage. So your notes are not being uploaded to the cloud or whatever. But that does make it hard to use on multiple, I mean, not just hard, impossible to use [laughs] on multiple devices unless you pay for it. They have a sync offering where you can use it on multiple devices. And I think it's also encrypted in a certain way. Anyway, sometimes I'll be working on my client laptop and have some idea or thought that I really want to note down, but I don't have Obsidian installed on this machine, and it's not synced to my other Obsidian. And I have just been kind of annoyed about having to go open another computer to write a thought down if I want to document it. And I'm curious how you deal with this problem. JOËL: So the downside of Obsidian not being a cloud product is that you don't just get that sync for free. The upside of it just being markdown files on your hard drive is that you can use any other product or tool that you want to manipulate these files. So I have my Obsidian vault, which is just the term for the directory where it keeps all of these files in a Dropbox directory. And so I have it sync across multiple machines just by being signed into my Dropbox account. STEPHANIE: That's smart. And that sync is pretty smooth for you? You don't have any issues with updating it in one spot and seeing those changes in another? JOËL: I have not had issues with that. Of course, I'm not jumping between machines within 30 seconds of each other. Generally, I'm also connected to the internet. So I haven't had a situation where I make a change to a machine not connected to the internet, and then later on, I edit an old version on a different machine that is connected to the internet, and now we have conflict. I've not run into that problem. STEPHANIE: Okay, cool. That sounds good. It's funny you mentioned that because it's just the other day, off-mic; you and I were on a call doing a little bit of pairing. And you were on both machines at the same time [laughs] because we had to use one for our call. And then you were looking something up on your client computer as well. And the thought of you just using two computers at once was very amusing to me. JOËL: It's the ultimate hacker move in...I was going to say bad, but that's maybe a little bit too judgmental, but yeah, in classic, I feel like police shows, things like that. STEPHANIE: I do have one more thought about note-taking that we haven't talked about before. But I'm really curious, how do you deal with thoughts you have on the road during a time you don't have a device on you? Do you go and write that down somewhere, or what do you do with those? JOËL: I have an absolutely awful solution, which is I add it to my mental stack and hope it doesn't overflow before I get to a computer. STEPHANIE: That's really funny because I used to do something similar where if I had a to-do list or something like that in my head, I would remember the number of items on my list to try to cue me into remembering what those items were. The worst thing that would happen is I would remember that I had three things on my to-do list but could only remember two. And so I had to just [laughs] deal with my existential anxiety about knowing that there was something else that I had forgotten about but could not remember [laughs] for the life of me what it was. JOËL: So I do that trick sometimes for my grocery list if I don't want to write it down. I'll just be like, oh yeah, go to the grocery store, make sure there are five items in my basket when I check out. And similar to you, sometimes I have that problem. I had a light-bulb moment the other day, which is that this trick is actually an example of hashing content. STEPHANIE: [laughs] JOËL: So if you're ever hashing the contents of a file and then wanting to compare if another file is the same and you check the hashes are the same. In a sense, you're kind of hashing your grocery list and your shopping cart and trying to see do they both hash to the same value? Now, a good hashing algorithm has an infinitesimally low chance of a collision. Counting the number of items in your list or cart has a fairly high chance of a collision. You could have a cart and a list that both have five items, but they're not the same items. Yet this comparison would still make you think that they're the same. STEPHANIE: This is a very funny metaphor to me. I think the other issue is that as a human and not a computer, I do not have the mental storage space to then also remember what algorithm [laughs] I'm using to hash my to-do list. JOËL: The algorithm is the count function. STEPHANIE: [laughs] True, true, a more sophisticated algorithm then. [laughs] JOËL: Yes, which is why I keep using this not very safe, but it's good enough. STEPHANIE: Sometimes, we just need to be good enough. So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: So, in a previous episode, I think we talked about some work I was doing exploring how to model dependent side effects, particularly D&D dice rolls. So this week, I went from the theoretical to the practical and wrote up a miniature D&D damage dice roll app that you put in a few inputs, and then it will roll all the dice necessary and tell you did you successfully hit your target, and if so, how much damage did you do? And it takes into account all these edge cases. STEPHANIE: Cool. That's so exciting because I think we mentioned last time how that would be a really interesting exercise to write up that code. Did you get any insight from doing that? JOËL: I think a lot of the insight that I got came from the initial diagramming phase. And I think coding it out really solidified the things that I had learned from the diagramming. Of interest here is that there are effectively or potentially four separate dice-rolling phases that can happen. First, you're rolling to see can you hit your target? And depending on the situation, you're rolling one or two dice. And then after that, you're rolling to see if you do hit, how much damage you do. And you're either rolling one set of dice, or you might be rolling two sets of dice if you happen to do a critical hit. So I think that the diagram that I had clearly showed these are four sets of randomness that have to happen and then how they relate to each other. These two are dependent on each other; these two are independent. I think one thing that was really interesting that I learned from the code is that for something like a dice roller, you usually don't want to see just the result. Because if I just have a button that says how much damage did I do, and then I get a number back that says, "You did zero damage," or "You did three damage," as a person, that's not very satisfying. And I don't know that I fully trust it. I want to see all the intermediate results. So I want to see, oh, did I roll two different dice for that initial two-hit? What were the numbers? And then I can say, okay, well, I need to roll above a five or roll above a 10. And I rolled these two dice, and they were both under 10. That makes sense why I didn't hit. Or I rolled one of them above and one of them below, but I was rolling with disadvantage, which means I have to take the lower of the two numbers. So I could have hit, but I didn't. So I think that is really fun as a user to see the intermediate steps. But also, as a developer, it helps me to be confident that the code I wrote works the way I expect it to. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's really neat. I think what I love about this is that you took something that, in some ways, could be really simple, right? And the implementation could have been just the first thing that you thought of, but you thought very deeply about it and made the dice roller that you wanted in the world. [laughs] I'm curious. Can anyone go check out this repo on the internet? JOËL: Yes. So we can link to the repo in the show notes. And also, the dice roller itself is up online at dnd-damage-roller.netlify.app. And we can link that as well for anybody who wants to go and check it out. STEPHANIE: Awesome. JOËL: I think my goal in this is it's more of a learning exercise. I don't think the world needs another D&D dice roller. There are better ones built into more comprehensive tools. But it was fun for me to work on this, to explore some ideas, and to dig into randomness. I've always had a fascination with random rolls. MID-ROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer’s worst nightmare...but it doesn’t have to be. Airbrake is an award-winning error monitoring, performance, and deployment tracking tool created by developers for developers that can actually help cut your debugging time in half. So why do developers love Airbrake? It has all of the information that web developers need to monitor their application - including error management, performance insights, and deploy tracking! Airbrake’s debugging tool catches all of your project errors, intelligently groups them, and points you to the issue in the code so you can quickly fix the bug before customers are impacted. In addition to stellar error monitoring, Airbrake’s lightweight APM helps developers to track the performance and availability of their application through metrics like HTTP requests, response times, error occurrences, and user satisfaction. Finally, Airbrake Deploy Tracking helps developers track trends, fix bad deploys, and improve code quality. Since 2008, Airbrake has been a staple in the Ruby community and has grown to cover all major programming languages. Airbrake seamlessly integrates with your favorite apps to include modern features like single sign-on and SDK-based installation. From testing to production, Airbrake notifiers have your back. Your time is valuable, so why waste it combing through logs, waiting for user reports, or retrofitting other tools to monitor your application? You literally have nothing to lose. Head on over to airbrake.io/try/bikeshed to create your FREE developer account today! STEPHANIE: So it sounds like the Dice Roller app really scratched an itch for you and was a fulfilling exercise for you and just exploring randomness, like you mentioned, and just a theory that you had about writing good code. I'm curious about how you think about fulfil…

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375: Deleting Code Mar 14, 2023

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thoughtbot had an in-person Summit in the UK! Joël recalls highlights. Stephanie is loving daily sync meetings on a new project. The idea of deleting code has been swimming around in Stephanie's brain recently because she's been feeling nervous about it. Together, Joël and Stephanie explore ways of gaining confidence to delete code while feeling good about it. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake. Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Thoughtbot summit video Gather Town Sustainable Rails episode Chelsea Troy on deleting features Unused elm-review-unused 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 today, 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 just got back from a few days in the UK, where thoughtbot has been having an in-person Summit, where we've brought people from all over the company together to spend a few days just spending time with each other, getting to know each other, getting to connect in person. STEPHANIE: That sounds like it was a lot of fun. I've been hearing really great things about it from folks who've come back. Unfortunately, I couldn't make it this year. I got sick a little bit beforehand and then ended up not being able to go. But it sounds like it was a lot of fun just to get together, especially since we're now a remote company. JOËL: Yeah, I'm really sorry you weren't able to make it there. It would have been amazing to do a Bike Shed co-hosts get-together. STEPHANIE: I know. In the same room, maybe even record. What a concept. [laughs] JOËL: So thoughtbot is a fully remote company, and so that means that getting a chance to have people to come together and build those in-person connections that you don't get, I think, is incredibly valuable. I was really excited to meet both the people that I work with and that I see on my screen every day and people who I don't talk to as often because they're working on different teams or different departments even. STEPHANIE: What was one highlight of the time you spent together? JOËL: I'll give a couple of highlights, one I think is more on the activity side. We went bouldering as a group. This was a really popular activity. We were trying to sign up people for it, and it was so popular we had to make two groups because there were too many people who were interested. And it was really fun. There are people with a whole variety of skill levels. Some people, it was their first time, some people had been doing it for a while. And just getting together and solving problems was a lot of fun. STEPHANIE: Yes, I saw that. That was one of the things I was really looking forward to doing when I was still thinking that I was going to go. And it's cool that it had opportunities for both beginners and people who have been doing it before, which I think, if I recall correctly, Joël, you are a boulderer yourself back home. So that's pretty neat that you were able to, yeah, I don't know, maybe share some of that experience IRL too. JOËL: Yeah, yeah, I think it's great because people were able to help each other. Sometimes you have a different perspective down on the ground than you do up on the wall. And then, in my case, because I've done it a lot, I know a little bit of actual climbing technique. And so I can give some tips on, like, oh, if you're stuck and you don't know how to get past a particular point, or you don't know how to start a particular climb, or your arms are getting tired halfway up, here's maybe a small change you can make that would make things easier for you. STEPHANIE: Honestly, that also sounds like a really good metaphor for pair programming, [laughs] like, looking at things from different perspectives, you know, someone who's on the wall? I don't know what the lingo is. But it's the equivalent of someone driving in coding, the navigator having a little more perspective and being able to point out things that they might not see that's right in front of them. JOËL: I love that metaphor. Now I'm going to think of that both when I pair and the next time I climb. STEPHANIE: I love it. JOËL: I think climbing, when I do it, it's always more fun with a friend, specifically for what you were saying. I climb alone sometimes, but as much as possible, I'll reach out to another friend who climbs and say, "Hey, let's climb together." And then we can alternate on the same route even. STEPHANIE: That's cool. I didn't realize that it could be such a social activity. JOËL: It is very much a social activity, and I think that's part of the fun of it. It's challenging physically but also mentally because it's a puzzle that you solve. But then also, it's a thing that you do with friends. I think another aspect that was a highlight for me was getting a chance to connect with people from other teams, other departments within thoughtbot. I think one thing that was really nice when we were located in an office is that over lunch, or just at the water cooler, or whatever, you would connect with people who were in other teams and who were in different departments. So I might talk to people in People Ops, or in marketing, in operations just sort of in the natural course of the day in a way that I think I don't do quite as much of now that we're more remote. And I tend to talk more with other developers and designers on my team. So I think that was really great to connect with people from other teams and other departments within the company. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I know what you mean. I think I really miss the spontaneous, organic social interaction that you get from working in an office. And I think we've maybe talked about remote work on the podcast before, or previous co-hosts Steph and Chris have also talked about remote work. But it definitely requires a lot more intention to manifest those connections that otherwise would have been a little more organic in person. And so, while you all were at an in-person summit in the UK, there was also a virtual summit hosted for folks who weren't able to travel this time around, and I really appreciated that. I got to spend a day just connecting with other people in Gather Town, which is a web app that's like a virtual space where you have little avatars, and you can run around and meet up with people into virtual meeting rooms on this map. [laughs] I'm not really sure I'm describing it well, but it's very cute. It is almost like a little video game. It's like a cross between a video game and video conferencing [chuckles] software. But yeah, I think I just really appreciated how inclusive thoughtbot has been doing remote work where, like, yes, we really value these in-person gatherings, and we understand that there is a bit of magic that comes from that, but also making sure that no one's left out. And at the end of the day, not everyone can make it, but we were still able to hang out and socialize amongst ourselves in a different way. JOËL: Agreed. I think that inclusivity is part of what makes thoughtbot such a great place to work at. STEPHANIE: Speaking of inclusivity, I mentioned a few weeks ago that I joined a new project recently and had been going through the onboarding and hopping into all these new meetings. One thing that I've really enjoyed about this new client team that I'm on is that in their daily sync meetings, we all share what we're working on. But we also all share something that's new to us, which is a little bit meta because we do that on this podcast. [laughs] But each person just shares maybe something they learned at work but also usually something just totally not work related like a new show that they're watching. There's another person on my team who learns a lot of things from YouTube videos. And so he's always telling us about the new thing he learned about, I don't know, like mushrooms or whatever, or AI [laughs] through YouTube. And yeah, someone else might show a sweater that they just knit themselves. And it's been a very easy way to get to know people, especially when you're meeting a whole new team. And yeah, I've been enjoying it a lot. It's made me feel very welcome and like I know them as people outside of work. JOËL: I love that. Yeah, they're more than just people you're shipping code with. You're able to build that connection. And it sounds like that helps smooth the...maybe we can say the social aspect of onboarding. Because when you onboard onto a project, you're not just onboarding onto a series of codebases and tools; you're also onboarding onto a team, and you need to get to know people and build relationships. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. MID-ROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer’s worst nightmare...but it doesn’t have to be. 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Since 2008, Airbrake has been a staple in the Ruby community and has grown to cover all major programming languages. Airbrake seamlessly integrates with your favorite apps to include modern features like single sign-on and SDK-based installation. From testing to production, Airbrake notifiers have your back. Your time is valuable, so why waste it combing through logs, waiting for user reports, or retrofitting other tools to monitor your application? You literally have nothing to lose. Head on over to airbrake.io/try/bikeshed to create your FREE developer account today! JOËL: So you've been...is it two weeks in a new codebase? Have you gone and deleted any code yet? STEPHANIE: I wish. I am glad you asked this question because this has been a topic that has been swimming around in my head a little bit lately because this new client codebase it's very big and it's quite old. Like, I've been seeing code from 10 years ago. And it's been a really challenging codebase to get onboarded into, actually, because there's so much stuff. In fact, I recently learned that some of their model specs are so big that they have been split out into up to seven different files to cover specs for one model. [laughs] So that has been a lot to grapple with. And I think in my journeys working on a starter ticket, I've just stumbled upon stuff that is very confusing. And then I might follow that thread only to realize that, like, oh, this method that I spent 20 minutes trying to grok turns out it's not actually used anywhere. JOËL: That's a lot of dead code. STEPHANIE: It is a lot of dead code, but I am also not quite feeling confident enough to delete it because I'm new, because I have no idea what consequences that might have. So, yeah, the idea of deleting code has just kind of been swimming around in here because ideally, we would be able to, but, for some reason, I don't know, at least for me, I feel very nervous about it. So it hasn't been something that I've reached for. JOËL: That's a great question because I think in maybe Ruby, in particular, it's not always obvious if code is being used or not. When you do find yourself deleting code, how do you gain the confidence that it was safe to delete that? STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a good question. In the past, when I've done it successfully, I'll probably post a Slack message or something and being like, hey, I noticed this code is not being used anywhere, or I'd like to delete it because why, like, I don't know, because it's been misleading me because it's just not providing any value. And then kind of give it like a day or two, and if no one speaks up about it, then I will usually go ahead. And obviously, get some code review, hopefully, get some other eyes on it just to make sure that whatever assumptions I made were valid, and then go for it. And then just watch [laughs] the deployment afterwards and make sure that there are no new errors, you know, no new complaints or anything like that. And, yeah, I think that has been my process, and I've definitely found success doing that. But I have also experienced a bad result [laughs] from doing that where one time, on my last client project, we were refactoring the signup flow. And we realized that after you signed up, you were redirected to this blank page for like 10 seconds or something. It was completely empty. There was nothing on it except a spinner, I think. [laughs] And then it would then redirect you to the dashboard of the app. And we were like, oh, we can definitely delete this. We have no idea what this is doing. We don't want to try to refactor this as part of the effort that we were doing. And so we deleted it, only to find out later from the marketing team that they had been using that page for something Google Analytics related, and we had to revert that change. And it was a real bummer because I think when we removed it, we felt good about that. We were like, oh yes, deleting code, awesome. And then having to bring it back without a clear plan of how to actually fix the problem that we were trying to solve was a bit of a bummer. JOËL: So, as programmers, we're hired to write code. Why does it feel so good to do the opposite of that, to delete code? STEPHANIE: That's a great question. I actually want to know what you think about this, but before that, I wanted to plug this Slack channel that we have at thoughtbot called Dead Code Society, where people can post their PR diffs showing more red than green, so more lines removed than lines added. And I have been really enjoying that Slack channel. It's very delightful. [laughs] But, Joël, do you have any thoughts about why it feels so good to delete code? JOËL: There are probably a few different reasons. Especially when it's not your own code, you're often not attached to it. There's often, I think, the sense when you go into an existing codebase you're just like, oh, everything's just bad, and I don't understand it. And those other coders who wrote this didn't know how to do their job and kind of be the curmudgeon character. So it just kind of feels good to remove that and maybe rewrite it yourself. I would say that's not a good mindset to go in for deleting code. I think there are positive ways where it is actually a good thing. STEPHANIE: That's fair. Just removing code because you would write it differently is not necessarily a net positive. [laughs] JOËL: But I think...so when I initially asked the question, I said, "We're hired to write code." And I think that's a bit of a false assumption built into the question. We're not hired to write code. We're hired t…

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374: Discrete Math Mar 07, 2023

Show notes

Joël is joined by a very special guest, Sara Jackson, a fellow Software Developer at thoughtbot. A few episodes ago, Stephanie and Joël talked about "The Fundamentals" and how many of the fundamentals of web development line up with a Computer Science degree. Joël made a comment during that episode that his pick for the most underrated CS class that he thinks would benefit most devs is a class called "Discrete Math." Sara weighs in! This episode is brought to you by Airbrake. Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Earlier Bike Shed Episode with Sara The Linux man-pages project Gravity Falls Elm types as sets Folgers ad Brilliant.org's discrete math course mayuko Transcript: AD:thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. 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. And today, I'm joined by a special guest, Sara Jackson, who is a fellow developer here at thoughtbot. SARA: Hello. JOËL: And together, we're here to share a little bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Sara, what's new in your world? SARA: Actually, I recently picked up crocheting. JOËL: That's exciting. What is the first project that you've started working on? SARA: I don't know if you happen to be a fan of animation or cartoons, but I love "Gravity Falls." And there's a character, Mabel, who wears many sweaters. I'm working on a sweater. JOËL: Inspired by this character. SARA: Yes. It is a Herculean endeavor for my first crochet project, but we're in it now. JOËL: That does sound like jumping into it and picking a pretty hard project. Is that the way you typically approach new hobbies or new things, you just kind of jump in and pick up something challenging? SARA: Yeah. I definitely think that's a good description of how I approach hobbies. How about you? JOËL: I think I like to ease into things. I'm the kind of person who, if I pick up a video game, I will play the tutorial. SARA: It's so funny you say that because I'm definitely the type of person who also reads manuals. [chuckles] JOËL: [laughs] I'm sure you've probably, at this point, read many sections of the Unix manual. Longtime listeners might recognize you from a previous episode we did on the history of operating systems. SARA: Yes, I am an avid reader of the man pages. In fact, I wish every command-line tool had man pages or at least more detailed man pages. Reading man pages, reading technical documentation, really, I feel like goes right in line with things like needlework, knitting, crocheting. You're following a very technical pattern description of what you should be doing, how many stitches. It's almost algorithmic. JOËL: Do you feel like the fact that you've read a lot of man pages and now that you're getting into reading crochet patterns, do you feel like that's helped you maybe become a better technical writer when you write documentation? SARA: Definitely. Yes. [laughs] There's a common meme going around on the internet of how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich: open jar, put knife in jar. And you see somebody putting the knife in handle first because it wasn't specific enough. When you're looking at a crochet pattern, it needs to be written very explicitly, and in the same way, technical documentation needs to be like that too. It needs to be accessible for every audience, well, most audiences. JOËL: That's a big challenge because you want to give enough detail that, like you said, you don't accidentally use the wrong end of the knife to spread your peanut butter. But at the same time, if you give all the little details, you lose the forest for the trees. And people who know how to use a knife are going to struggle to use your documentation. SARA: That is true. That's why I think it is very valuable to do something that you recommend very often, especially when writing blog posts or call for papers is, defining the audience. Who's this for? JOËL: Yeah, knowing your audience is so important when it comes to any kind of media, even if it's a talk or an article, or I guess, a crochet pattern. SARA: Precisely. JOËL: Does the crochet world have sort of the concept of patterns aimed at beginners versus patterns aimed at a more advanced audience? SARA: I would definitely say that is the case. There are more advanced stitches and techniques that you would generally not see in a more beginner pattern. And in more advanced patterns, at least speaking from a knitting perspective...I'm pretty new to crocheting, but I've been knitting for a while. In knitting patterns, simpler techniques might not be described in such detail in a more advanced pattern. JOËL: So a couple of weeks ago, Stephanie and I were discussing the fundamentals, how much of the fundamentals of web development line up with a computer science degree. I had made this comment on that episode that my pick for most underrated CS class that I think would benefit most developers is a class called discrete math. SARA: I remember this class. It was a love-hate relationship. I am a big fan. JOËL: Would you describe yourself as a math person? SARA: I don't think so. No. JOËL: Because I know I hated math for the longest time. And I don't really find that math, in general, has been that helpful for software. There's kind of the stereotype that I'll sometimes hear from people when they find out that I write code for a living. They'll say things like, "Oh, you must be so good at math." And it's like, no, calculus was really hard for me, and I struggled and did not like it. SARA: I feel like that's a big reason why folks go into programming; the computer can do the math for you. JOËL: Right? It is a computer. It is a math machine. SARA: I mean, how many folks in computer-related fields got their start on a TI-83, programming in that thing? JOËL: A lot of people. Someday it might be fun to do an episode on the sort of common origin stories that you hear from people in the software industry, a lot of people programming a calculator, a lot of people I hear coming from Neopets. SARA: Yeah, Neopets and MySpace, editing the profile pages with CSS, HTML. JOËL: But that's an episode for another time. I think, in my experience, discrete math was not like all the other math that I did. It felt so practical, like, this is math for programmers is how I felt it was even though that's not how it's sold in university. What was your experience? SARA: My concept was very much like, this is logic. This is very hard. By hard, I mean firm way of looking at the world and defining the logic behind things when you think about proofs and set theory. JOËL: So we've been throwing around the term discrete math, and many of our listeners might not be familiar with what it is. If you had to describe discrete math to someone who is not familiar with it, what would you say? SARA: Math that's discrete. [laughter] Sorry, sorry. JOËL: What does discrete mean? SARA: When I think of discrete math, I think of logic, definitions, how data relates to each other, that sort of thing, as opposed to ones and zeros. JOËL: Yeah, discrete math; it felt like it was very much like a grab-bag class. It just involved so many different branches of math, and you kind of get a little bit of an intro of like ten different topics, all of which apply and are helpful when you're writing software. So I got a little intro to a couple of different forms of logic, propositional logic, and predicate logic. I got an intro to Boolean algebra. I got an intro to set theory, an intro to combinatorics, talked about recursive functions from a mathematical perspective, an intro to graph theory. Probably like a few more. There are like ten different things. You just got a little intro to them, spent a couple of weeks on each topic. But I felt like that was enough to give me a lot of value that I still reference on a daily basis in my work. SARA: Absolutely. One of the parts of discrete math that really stuck with me are computational models like Turing machines, pushdown automaton, finite-state machines. Learning about those, analyzing them really helped me break down algorithms and break down my code and look at, okay, for this specific input that I have for each of these variables, what are we doing? JOËL: So what does that look like in your daily work? You've got a complex card, and you see that it's a difficult feature to implement. And in your mind, you say, okay, let me try to describe this as a finite-state machine, and maybe you draw a diagram or something like that. SARA: Yeah, I will, actually. I'll draw a diagram, or I'll draw like a pseudocode out on paper. I'll think about all the different kinds of inputs that I would expect or not expect, which itself is not finite, but we try. And then what is the output that I would expect? What is the outcome that I would expect from, say, a user enters one, a user enters Sara, a user enters purple? What would the outcome be? Do I have those vectors captured in my code? And that also goes into TDD. JOËL: Do you feel like knowing about Turing machines or finite-state machines has made it easier for you to PDD? That's a connection I haven't heard before. SARA: Yeah, I think so because a Turing complete computational model is deterministic. That means that every possible path that could be got into from where you're at any path exists between the two. Sometimes it might mean rejection or an error, but the path has been defined. And thinking about that when it comes to tests, I feel like has been so helpful for me of like, I can't just think about the happy path. I can't just think about it's exactly what it needs to be. It's also what if it's not there? What if it doesn't exist? What if it's 0? What if it's empty? What if it's a different data structure? JOËL: That's really fascinating to me because I feel like I encountered some of these practical applications of it much later when I was learning about types and learning about Elm and sort of that community's approach to designing data structures. And one thing that they say a lot is that you should make impossible states impossible when you design a type, and the way that they tend to approach that is thinking of types as if they were sets. And so you think of a set of...the Boolean type is a set that has two elements because there are true and false. An enum might have, you know, if it's a three-element enum, that is, three elements. But then you start having things like records which are kind of like a hash in Ruby, which might have, let's say, two elements in them. And if it has a Boolean and an enum value, now those two multiply times each other. And so now you have two times three, six possible states. And maybe the problem you're trying to model only has five, and so you've sort of inadvertently added an extra state. They tend to talk about it a little bit more through the lens of sets and the lens of combinatorics, which are other elements of discrete math that give you mental models to deal with this. And so talking about all the different possibilities, that's combinatorics. Thinking of a type as a set and talking about its cardinality, that's set theory. So those were things that I would do when I was writing Elm programs on a daily basis, but I never made the connection back to finite-state machines. SARA: I feel like those marry so well together, those concepts. You can see combinatorics and set theory of objects and of where they can go. And that goes right into graph theory. JOËL: Oooh, I love me some graphs. SARA: [laughs] JOËL: Listeners of the show will know that I am a huge fan of dependency graphs and as a tool and as a model that can be applied to a lot of things, so thinking in terms of maybe the dependencies of your program like packages. But it can also be in terms of tasks to be done and so thinking in terms of a larger feature, breaking it down into smaller features, all of which depend on each other. And depending on how that dependency graph is structured, what order do you need to complete them in order to ship them independently? SARA: I love that. And it reminds me of graphs that represent state, like, finite-state machines sort of things where you can actually infer where you're going to end up based on where you are for certain types of graphs. And I feel like you can use that in programming. You can use that in proofs where you have the, okay, you've solved for the zero case. You've solved for the one case. Now let's solve for N+1 anytime in the future. This all feels very full circle in my mind. [chuckles] JOËL: I think that's very apt. And a really powerful thing that I've noticed is having different mental models to approach the same problem or different logical or analysis techniques to interact with the same problem. And so when you look at something through the lens of a finite-state machine, or through the lens of a graph, or through the lens of a set, or through the lens of combinatorics, you might be looking at the same problem. But by having different perspectives to look at it, you gain different insight and hopefully helps you come to a better solution. SARA: Absolutely. And I love that discrete math gives us those different tools to be better programmers. It's something that I enjoy. And I enjoyed the classes as much as they were extremely difficult. And I love the idea of being able to share those tools with other people that might not have learned about them. JOËL: You were talking about seeing things from different perspectives and how they kind of line up. There are some equivalences that I found were really fun between, let's say, sets and Boolean algebra, the operations that you can do. So things like ANDing two values is similar to doing an intersection on two sets, and ORing two values is similar to doing a union. Interestingly, we have preserved that in Ruby. Array has operators where you can combine arrays using set operations, and it has the single pipe, which we typically read as OR to union two arrays. I want to say it has a single AND that you can use. It's used to intersect two arrays. SARA: I actually used that sometime within the last year, I remember. JOËL: So, if you've ever wondered why those two particular operators to do set operations instead of a union method, now you know. SARA: I love set operations. I recently made an update to thoughtbot's internal tool hub, and I used set unions there. [laughs] MID-ROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer’s worst nightmare...but it doesn’t have to be. Airbrake is an award-winning error monitoring, performance, and deployment tracking tool created by developers for developers that can actually help cut your debugging time in half. So why do developers love Airbrake? It has all of the information that web developers need to monitor their application - including error management, performance insights, and deploy tracking! Airbrake’s debugging tool catches all of your project errors, intelligently groups them, and points you to the issue in the code so you can quickly fix the bug before customers are impacted. In addition to st…

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373: Empathy, Community and Gender Bias in Tech with Andrea Goulet Feb 28, 2023

Show notes

Stephanie is joined today by a very special guest, Andrea Goulet. Andrea founded Empathy In Tech as part of writing her book Empathy-Driven Software Development. She's also the founder of the community Legacy Code Rocks and the Chief Vision Officer of two companies: Corgibytes and Heartware (which provides financial support to keep Empathy In Tech running). Stephanie has strong opinions about the concept of "Makers and Menders" that the Corgibytes folks have written/spoken about, especially around those personas and gender stereotypes. Andrea joins Steph to evolve the conversation and add nuance to the discussion about legacy code/maintenance in our community. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake. Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Makers and Menders from Corgibytes Empathy in Tech Legacy Code Rocks Forget Technical Debt — Here's How to Build Technical Wealth Equal Partners by Kate Mangino Sustainable Web Development Episode Transcript: AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. 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, Andrea Goulet. Hi, Andrea. ANDREA: Hello, thanks for having me. STEPHANIE: So here on The Bike Shed, we like to start by sharing something new in our world. Could you tell us a bit about yourself and anything new going on for you? ANDREA: Yeah, so I have a background in strategic communications, and then kind of made a windy journey over to software. And so, for the past 13 years, I've been focused on modernizing legacy systems. And legacy is kind of a loose term; something you write today can be legacy. But essentially, we kind of help modernize any kind of software, any language, any platform, any framework. And so, over the course of doing that, in the work that I did before I came to software, I had a very technical understanding of empathy and communications and had just done a lot of that. And I just noticed how much that mattered in creating healthy and sustainable codebases. So now I'm kind of taking that experience, and I've got a book contract called "Empathy-Driven Software Development." So I've been working on just diving into a lot of the really deep research. So that's been kind of my focus for the past two years. And it's been really surprising because there were things that were positioned as truths, and then it's like, wait a second, neuroscience is completely upending everything. So it's been a fun learning journey. And I'm excited to share some of the things that I've learned over the years, especially [laughs] in the past two years with this book. So that is the new thing with me. And it's...I was telling you before it just feels like a constant new thing. Anybody who's written a book...it's the hardest thing I've ever done, so... [laughs] STEPHANIE: Yeah, that sounds tough but also kind of exciting because you're learning so many new things that then kind of shape how you view the world, it sounds like. ANDREA: Yeah. Yeah, it really does. And I think I really like diving into the details. And I think what started this was...my business partner, Scott, at the time, really embodied the stereotypical 2010 software developer down to the scruffy beard and dark-rimmed glasses. And what I found incredibly interesting was he had this belief of I'm good with machines, but I'm bad with people. And he just had this really deeply ingrained. On the flip side, I had this belief of, oh, I'm good with people, but I'm bad with machines. I'll never learn how to code. And I found that really interesting. And personally, I had to go through a journey because we went on...it was the first time either of us had ever been on a podcast. So this was about ten years ago. And at the end of the podcast, Scott was the only one on there. And he said, you know, the person asked about his origin story and about our company Corgibytes. And he was like, "Yeah, you know, Andrea is amazing. She's our non-technical founder." And by that time, I had been coding next to him for like three years. And I was like, why the heck would you call me non-technical? And I just felt this...what is it that I have to do to prove it to you? Do I have to actually go get a CS degree? I know I'm self-taught, but does that mean that I'm not good enough? What certificates do I need? Do I need to sit down next to you? Do I need to change my lifestyle? Do I need to look like you? So I was really upset [laughing] and just thinking through, how dare you? How dare you label me as non-technical? And Scott is very quiet and patient, great with people, I think. [laughs] And he listened and said, "I use the words that you use to describe yourself. When we were in a sales meeting right before that phone call, I paid attention to how you introduced yourself, and I pretty much used the same words. So when you call yourself technical, I will too." That shattered my world. It shattered my identity because then it put the responsibility of belonging on me. I couldn't blame other people for my not feeling like I didn't belong. That journey has just been so profound. This is what I see a lot of times with empathy is that we have these kinds of self-identities, but then we're afraid to open up and share. And we make these assumptions of other people, but, at the same time, there's real-world evidence. And so, how do we interpret that? In addition to this, Scott...like, part of the reason I called myself non-technical was because all of the people I saw who were like me or had my background, that's the word that was used to describe someone like me. And when I would go to a conference, you know, I have a feminine presentation. And this was ten years ago. My very first conference was 300 software developers, and there were probably about 295 men. And I was one of five women in the room. And because I looked so different and because I stood out, the first question that anybody would ask me, and this was about 30% to 40% of introductions, was, "Are you technical or non-technical?" And I had to choose between this binary. And I was like; I don't know. Am I technical? Like, is it a CEO that can code? I don't know. But then I have this background. And so I would just default to, "No, I guess I'm non-technical," because that's what felt safe because that's what they assumed. And I just didn't know, and I didn't realize that I was then building in this identity. And so then, as part of trying to create a warm and inclusive organization, we did one of the unconscious bias surveys from Harvard. And what astonished me when I did that myself was that I didn't have a whole lot of bias, like, there was some. But the most profound bias was against women in the workplace, and it stood out a big one. I was like, how is it that I can be someone who's a fierce advocate, but then that's my own bias against people like me? What the heck is going on? So really exploring all of this. And I think Scott and I have had so many different conversations over the years. We actually ended up getting married. And so we have a personal reason to figure a lot of this stuff out too. And when we start to have those conversations about who am I and what's important to me, then all of a sudden, we can start creating better code. We can start working together better as a team. We can start advocating for our needs. Other people know what we need ahead of time. And we're not operating out of defensiveness; we're operating out of collaboration and creativity. So the book and kind of everything is inspired by my background and my lived experience but then also seeing Scott and his struggles, too, because he had been told like, "You're a geek. Stay in the computers. Stay in the code. You're not allowed to talk to customers because you're bad at it," and flat out was told that. So how do we overcome these labels that people have put on us, and then we've made part of our own identity? And which ones are useful, and then which ones are not? Because sometimes labels can create a sense of community and affinity and so how do we know? And it's complicated, but the same thing, software is complicated. We can take skills like empathy and communication. We can look at them schematically and operationalize them when we look at them in kind of detail. So that's what I enjoy doing is looking under the hood and figuring out how does all this stuff work? So... [laughs] STEPHANIE: I did want to respond to a few things that I heard you say when you're talking about going to a conference and feeling very much in the minority. I went to my first RailsConf in 2022, my first RailsConf in person, and I was shocked at the gender imbalance. And I feel like every time I used the women's restroom; I was looking around and trying to make a connection with someone and have a bit of a kinship and be like, oh yes, you are here with me in this space. And then we would have a conversation and walk out together, and that felt very meaningful because the rest of the space, you know, I wasn't finding my people. And so I feel that very hard. I think this is also a good time to transition into the idea of makers and menders, especially because we have been talking about labels. So you all talked about this distinction between the different types of work in software development. So we have greenfield work, and that is writing code from scratch, making all the decisions about how to set up an application, exploring a whole new domain that hasn't been codified yet. And that is one type of work. But there's also mender-type work, which is working in existing applications, legacy code, refactoring, and dealing with the complexity of something that has stood the test of time but may or may not have gotten a lot of investment or care and bringing that codebase back to life if you will. And when I first heard about that distinction, I was like, yes, I'm a mender. This is what I like to do. But the more I thought about it, I started to also feel conflicted because I felt pain doing that work as well. ANDREA: Oh, interesting, yeah. STEPHANIE: Especially in the context of teams that I've been on when that work was not valued. And I was doing maintenance work and fixing bugs and either specifically being assigned to do that work or just doing it because I knew it needed to be done and no one else was doing it. And that had caused me a lot of frustration before because I would look around and be on a team with mostly White men and be like, why aren't they picking up any of this work as well? And so I was thinking about how I both felt very seen by the acknowledgment that this is work, and this is valid work, and it's important work, but also a little bit confused because I'm like, how did I get here? Did I pigeonhole myself into doing this work? Because the more I did it, the better I got at it, the more comfortable and, to whatever degree, enjoyed it. But at the same time, I'm not totally sure I was given the opportunity to do greenfield work earlier in my career. That could have changed where my interests lie. ANDREA: Yeah, it is. And it's funny that you mentioned this because I actually I'm a maker. But yeah, I created this community, and I'm known for this thing. And I had a very similar experience to how do I exist as someone who's different in this kind of community? And I think part of it is, you know, there's a great quote by George Box, who is a statistician, and he says, "All models are wrong; some are useful." And I think that's kind of the whole idea with the maker-mender is that it is a signal to be like, hey, if you like fixing stuff...because there is so much shame, like, that's what we were responding to. And Scott had the opposite problem of what you have experienced, where he was only allowed to work on greenfield work. They were like, "No, you're a good developer. So we want you working on features. We won't let you fix the bugs. We won't let you do the work that you like doing." And so that's why he wanted to create Corgibytes because he's like, "This work needs to be done." I am so personally passionate about this. And when we were having these conversations 13 years ago, I was talking to him about product/market fit and stuff like that. And I was like, "You like fixing software, and there's a lot of software out there to be fixed." I just was very, very confused as to why this kind of existed. And we had been told flat out, "You're never going to find anybody else like Scott. You're never going to be able to build a company around people who find a lot of joy in doing this work." And I think that this comes down to identity and kind of the way that Legacy Code Rocks was built too. A lot of the signaling that we put out there and the messaging and stuff really came from Scott's feeling of, like, I want to find more people like me. So being in the women's bathroom and like, how do I find more menders? Or how do I find people...because we were walking through a Barnes & Noble, and it was like a maker fest, maker everything. And he's like, "I don't have a community. There's nowhere for me to go to create these meaningful connections," exactly like you were saying. "I have maybe two people in my network." And then we were at a conference in 2015. We were at the large agile conference. And it was one of the first ones that I've been to that had a software craft track. And we met like 20 people who were really, like, I just saw Scott light up in a way that I hadn't seen him light up because he could geek out on this level that I hadn't seen him do before. And so when I asked, like, "How do you guys stay in touch afterwards?" And they're like, "Oh no, we don't. We don't know how to build a community." And it's like, well, okay, well, we can get that started. To your response of like, how do you operate when it is presented as a binary? And it's like, am I this, or am I this? This kind of gets down to the idea of identity-wise, is it a binary, or is it a spectrum? I tend to think of it kind of like an introvert-extrovert spectrum where it's like there is no wrong or right, and you can move in different places. And I think being able to explain the nuances of the modeling around how we came up with this messaging can get lost a lot of times. But I'm with you, like, how...and that's kind of something now where it's like, okay, maybe my role was to just start this conversation, but then everybody's having these ideas. But there are people who genuinely feel seen, you know. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's really interesting because what I'm hearing is that when there's this dominant narrative of what a developer should be, and should be good at, and what they should do, it's kind of like what you were saying earlier about how hard it was for you to claim that identity yourself. People who feel differently aren…

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372: Onboarding (Well!) Onto a Project Feb 21, 2023

Show notes

Stephanie raves about more software development-related zines by Julia Evans. Joël has been thinking about the mechanics of rolling dice. Stephanie also started on a new client project that Joël has already been working on for many months. They talk about onboarding. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake. Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Julia Evan's Wizard Zines Why's Poignant Guide To Ruby Learn You A Haskell For Great Good Mazes for Programmers thoughtbot dotfiles rcm Transcript: AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. 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 got a very exciting package in the mail the other day that I wanted to share with you. So I think I've mentioned her on the pod before, but I got a package of software development-related zines by Julia Evans, and I'm going to share a few of the titles that I got. So I picked up, "Oh shit, git!" [laughs] Can I swear on this podcast? I don't know. I guess we're going to find out. Or maybe we can just make the executive decision that it's fine. [laughs] I also got "Hell Yes! CSS!", "The Pocket Guide to Debugging," which I think I mentioned previously. I had seen the PDF version before, but now I have this cute, little, I don't know, six-inch book that I can carry around for all of my debugging needs. Who knows? Maybe I'll be out in the world and just need to pull it out [laughs] and debug something while I'm on the train; who's to say? And then I also picked up "HTTP: Learn Your Browser's Language!" So I'm really excited to have these little illustrated digest-sized resources. I think they'll look really cute on my shelf next to my more intense hardcore technical books like "Design Patterns" and "Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby" or whatever. I'm really excited about the more creative endeavors people have done with creating educational resources about software development. In fact, I think last time when we talked about creativity and creative expression, we totally missed the world of side projects. And I've really just enjoyed when people illustrate things and make stuff a lot more accessible to a wider audience than a traditional textbook or more text-based heavy resources. JOËL: I love when people go for a bit more of the playful or quirky when dealing with technical topics. And this is a great example. I love Julia Evans' work. But I'm also reminded of things like "Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby," "Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!" or even...I forget the title of it. But there's a book by...I think it's Jamis Buck on mazes. And it's told in this sort of quirky style in a narrative. But it's all about maze-solving algorithms but told through the eyes of characters who are wandering through a maze, and it's just delightful. STEPHANIE: Aww, that's so cute. I love that. I also just had the thought that these things would make great gifts for a fledgling developer or a developer in your life who, if you don't want to get them something super specialized or technical or whatever. There are so many, like you said, quirky and fun things out there that I'm sure they'll appreciate. So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: I play D&D regularly with some colleagues at thoughtbot. And recently, I got to thinking about the mechanics of rolling dice. Specifically, what dice can be rolled together? Like, can I roll multiple dice at the same time? And which one do you have to wait for the outcome of a previous roll before it makes sense to roll it? That was really interesting to me because I think that connects to a lot of other things that we do in software, where sometimes some things are independent. You can do them at the same time. And then, other times, you have to wait for the outcome of the first thing before you can even start doing the second thing. So I think, in many ways, it's a great metaphor for the difference between parallel versus series operations. STEPHANIE: I think it's very funny that you found a way to connect D&D to software development. I'm just imagining you rolling your die and then while you're doing that, having some revelation like the math lady meme or whatever, just thinking about, whoa, if this outcome happens, then [laughs] what happens? I have not joined in on our company's D&D campaign, but I do like that y'all post little updates about the story in a public space for the whole company to check out. So sometimes I've been searching for some message in our company's knowledge base, and I have stumbled upon a post about the campaign so far and what happened in last night's session, you know, how all the adventurers fought the big bird, [laughs] and it is very delightful to me. JOËL: It's a really fun way, I think to be creative. I think I enjoy the role-playing side of it a little bit more than just the mechanics of rolling dice, even though the thing I was excited to share today is rolling dice is fun. It is kind of like doing improv, where you're trying to figure out what would your character do and how do they respond to what other people say? It's fun, but it's hard. STEPHANIE: One burning question I have is, does anyone do voices for their characters? JOËL: Absolutely. Aji Slater, who was on a previous episode of this podcast, is part of this campaign, and their character has some really fun voices. STEPHANIE: That's awesome. I'm really interested in joining as a guest or something. But yeah, the improv aspect of it kind of freaks me out. I bet it's a really welcoming group. And if other people are getting into it, then I can get into it too. JOËL: Yeah, this group is very, very low-key. Most people playing, I think, are fairly new to the game. So it's very friendly, very kind of tolerant of, oh, you didn't know this rule existed, that's totally fine. We'll make it work, things like that. STEPHANIE: Nice. So another recent development in my world is that I started a new client project, actually the same client that you've been working on for many months, Joël. JOËL: Yes, the same client but different teams within the client. So we don't get to necessarily interact with each other day to day. But it is interesting that now we get to share knowledge about how this application works with each other. STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah. And I don't think we've gotten a chance to work together even in the same world like this before. So that's kind of exciting. JOËL: How has the onboarding been for you? STEPHANIE: So, one onboarding development that was surprisingly easy and felt good was setting up a new laptop. So the client company shipped a laptop to me to use for all of their work. And I had to set up just the laptop from scratch, so I could develop on it. And I was able to do that pretty painlessly with the help of the dotfiles that I had previously put together and all of the configurations that I had exported and uploaded to like a cloud drive. And so I was able to have that up and running within a day with all of my favorite keyboard shortcuts, applications, all my little preferences, and that felt really good. So I'm going to pat myself on the back [laughs] for past Stephanie's efforts in making current Stephanie's life easier. JOËL: I'm curious, do you use thoughtbot's dotfiles as the base for your development environment, or do you use something custom? STEPHANIE: I have my own personal dotfiles that I have in a GitHub repo. But I think I did, at one point, go through thoughtbot's dotfiles for inspiration. I found that it has just a lot of extra stuff that I don't really need, but I do like that it's out there. So if any folks want a place to start with having a laptop setup configuration, you should definitely check that out. And we can link that in the show notes. JOËL: I really like the tool rcm, which is also by thoughtbot that allows you to have a modular system of dotfiles that you can pull from a few different sources and combine together. STEPHANIE: Oh, that's neat. I hadn't known about that one. That's cool. JOËL: It's a suite of command-line tools that allows you to pull probably from a git repo. And it might be several, and then trying to pull them all to the right place on your machine to be executable. So, in my case, I have the thoughtbot dotfiles and then also some personal ones. And it just kind of merges them together based on some rules and creates all the dotfiles in my home directory for that. STEPHANIE: Nice. I think the one thing that I do need to keep up on is pushing updates to the dotfiles when I make changes locally because I did have to pull in a few things that I had adjusted or made tweaks to that didn't make it to the source that I was pulling from on this new machine. This is actually my fifth MacBook that I own [laughs] just from remnants of jobs and clients' past. And one day...I keep telling myself that I'll have to return one of the older ones that I'm not using anymore, but as of now, I am an owner of five computers. [laughs] JOËL: Just start mining Bitcoin on the idle ones. STEPHANIE: Oh. [laughs] That's genius. I guess that's definitely a better use than them just sitting in my drawers. JOËL: I guess you're paying for power, and that's kind of the whole point, so... STEPHANIE: That's fair. JOËL: What are some things that you like to do when you onboard onto a new project? STEPHANIE: So, aside from my laptop adventures, when I joined this new project, I had a few things in mind that I wanted to achieve during this onboarding process. One of the things I think I want to get better at is understanding the business when I'm onboarding onto a new client. I think this is an area that previously I hadn't really focused on, but I'm now understanding is actually really important to being set up for success on a team. And so, as consultants, we're dropped into a client project oftentimes when things are already moving. And they kind of clearly have some things that they were hoping we could help with. But I am hoping to also use this time to just take a bit of a step back and ask questions about, like, what is the product? And what are its core features? And who are its users? And also, what's the direction of the business? Can I get some more context on how things are right now? We're so frequently brought in and being like, okay, like, you're going to work on this project but without the context of is the business scaling right now, or what are its struggles? We aren't quite able to make as informed decisions as we could if we had been at the company for longer and had just seen things change and had more of a feel of why we're doing what we're doing. JOËL: I love that you're asking all those questions upfront. I feel like coming in onto a new project, and that can be as a consultant, or it could be just starting a new job, is the perfect time to just be asking all of those questions. And people, I think, appreciate when we ask those questions. Sometimes I think as consultants; we can sometimes be afraid that, oh, if we're asking these sorts of basic questions, people might think less of us. But I think the opposite happens where because we're asking those foundational questions about the business model, about the future of the product, about how the technical architecture works, people really appreciate that we're asking those foundational questions where other people might not. So it actually helps build credibility rather than hurting credibility. STEPHANIE: Yeah, and I think they are really important in making the right technical decision, too, because it can help inform where you spend your time refactoring or evaluating whether this shortcut is worth it to meet this deadline or if it's not because of the bigger picture and where things are headed. If anything, I've learned that being a developer really isn't just about being in the code but having as much information as possible so that there is less ambiguity and you have more clarity to make the right choices when you do have to write the code. Another key aspect that I have become a lot more observational about, I think, is understanding the team that I'm joining, especially what their process is, how they communicate. One thing that's kind of funny about seeing a lot of different companies and how they work as consultants is they might claim to use agile, but in reality, it is a little bit different than that. And you can have that perspective as an outsider. Things like pointing an estimation is kind of all over the place in the industry. So I really like to make sure I fully understand how the team does that and what points means to them. I think another thing that I want to do during my onboarding time this week and as I'm getting to know developers on the client side is learning about the pain points that they're feeling. And, yeah, just getting more of a feel about what's top of mind for them and where is a good space to invest my time and my energy. Lastly, some more basic stuff is communication. Another thing about being a contractor that's challenging is that we don't normally get the full onboarding experience that full-time hires do. And so we may or may not have an onboarding mentor or a buddy and finding out, okay, who is the right person that I should be asking questions to? Or where's the right space for that? When you join new teams, are there any other things that you like to take into consideration? JOËL: I like that you talked about understanding the team's process. One thing that I often like to do pretty early on is make some kind of small code change but then have it go through the full process of coding on my machine to deploy it in production. And so just find some small change in the code that needs to be done, and maybe it's an easy bug fix or something. But just so I can walk through all the steps and find out what the team's process is. What are some sort of weird things that this team does that other people might not that I need to know about? Where does review happen? Is there a staging environment, unexpected ways which my change might get rejected? Things like that. So walking through the entire, I guess you could say software development lifecycle, kind of speedrunning is, I think, a really valuable exercise to do really early on a new project. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a great point. Like I mentioned, I think that looks so different for every team. And I'm now learning about new tools and SaaS products that I have never seen before. And even though I have an understanding of the software development lifecycle in general, just learning those quirks is very valuable so that you can be a contributor as soon as possible. JOËL: I like to contribute on day one, if possi…

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371: The "Fundamentals" Feb 14, 2023

Show notes

Joël has been fighting autoloading in a Rails app recently, and it's been really unpleasant. Stephanie has been experimenting with how she interacts with Slack. What are "the fundamentals"? People often argue for the value of Computer Science classes for the jobbing programmer because we need "the fundamentals." But what are they? And does CS really provide that for us? This episode is brought to you by Airbrake. Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. RailsConf talk on autoloading Joël's RubyConf Mini talk Stephanie's RubyConf Mini talk Fun, Friendly Computer Science by Mercedes Bernard Achieving Fast Method Metaprogramming: Lessons from MemoWise by Jemma Issroff and Jacob Evelyn Episode on specialized vocabulary Episode on what to learn Transcript: AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. 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 have been fighting autoloading in a Rails app recently, and it's been really unpleasant. This is an older Rails 4 application, so we don't have Zeitwerk, any of the fancy modern things. But the problem I'm encountering is that people write code that references a constant somewhere. And if that constant is not named in the conventional way so that it would load from the proper file, it will raise a NameError at runtime when you try to execute the code. And then you want to reference that constant with a big asterisk there because if anybody else has happened to have loaded that constant correctly either by a manual require or some other method, then that constant will already be in scope, and so you don't get a NameError. So it causes a situation where you have a lot of non-deterministic failures in the code that are not easy to always reproduce either locally or even in the test suite. STEPHANIE: That sounds really frustrating because you must be getting errors left and right that you weren't expecting and then have to deal with. I'm curious, though, because you use the word non-deterministic. But in some ways, I'm thinking that you could perhaps grep or search the codebase for places where we're requiring constants like that and perhaps even audit that. Has that been something you've thought about, or do you think that's possible at all? JOËL: I don't think just grepping is going to be good enough because it's anytime you use a constant, and that's a class name, a module name. Things like that are probably the most common cases. If you're just referencing a constant like an array or a string, it's probably defined in the same file, so you're probably good. But if you're trying to include a module, or inherit from another class, or you want to instantiate another class somewhere, then you can run into issues if the class name or the namespacing for it doesn't line up with the file name so that when Rails tries to autoload it, it doesn't find it where it expects. STEPHANIE: Got it. Okay, that makes more sense to me now. JOËL: When I interviewed at thoughtbot, one of the questions that I was asked, and I don't know if that's still in our interview anymore, was, "Tell us about one of your favorite features in Ruby." And then, "If you could remove one or change one thing about the language, what would you change?" And I think the goal of that was to see if people had enough expertise in the language to both have something they really liked about it but also know the warts; what are the places that are hard to work with? And I definitely know that I said enumerable is my favorite part of Ruby because enumerable is amazing. I feel like, at the time, I didn't have a great answer for what I would change, but I don't remember what I said. I think today, if I had to answer that question, I might say the global namespace for all constants where just because you load another file, it might change what constants are available in a way that can really lead to some surprising behavior sometimes. STEPHANIE: It's really funny that you mentioned enumerable because I think, at this point, you've been at thoughtbot for almost a decade, and you recently gave a talk about the enumerable module. [laughs] And so it sounds like that's something that's still one of your favorite and beloved features of Ruby. So that's really fun. I also agree that autoloading is very opaque to me, especially, like you mentioned earlier; things can be totally different depending on what Rails version you're running. And it sounds like, ideally, when it works, it works. And hopefully, someone has done the legwork of making it effective for you. But when something goes wrong, then something that you had kind of taken for granted prior becomes really hairy. JOËL: I think for those who are interested in digging into really deep how autoloading works in Rails and how it's sort of changed over time, there was a keynote at RailsConf last year that dug into that. That is an excellent talk to listen to. STEPHANIE: Yes, that keynote from RailsConf 2022 about how Zeitwerk was developed by Xavier Noria, Xavier with an X. I was there too. That was a really awesome keynote. And I found it really interesting because, again, it was about this whole aspect that I just took for granted and had never really thought about. And I'm glad that someone else [laughs] figured it out for me. So that was a great reference. Speaking of conference talks, in prior episodes, we had mentioned the talks that you and I gave at RubConf Mini back in November, and the videos for those talks are out. So if you want to check out Joël's talk about enumerable or my talks about pair programming and non-violent communication, we'll link the videos of those talks in the show notes. JOËL: Excellent. So, what's new in your world, Stephanie? STEPHANIE: I've been experimenting with how I interact with Slack. So I used to be very distracted by Slack as someone who needs to mark everything as read in order for the little red badge to go away or for the bold channel name to become unbold. I was constantly clicking around in Slack whenever I had it open for the sake of completing that task of reading messages, even if I wasn't necessarily in a space to fully read or even had time to be spending distracted on Slack. But naturally, I would like, oh, click on this channel because it's bold, so I've unread messages. And then I'd get sucked in and be like, oh, I totally lost like five minutes of my time [laughs] and have forgotten what I was doing prior. So I started experimenting with using Slack as an inbox instead, so more of a pull than push in terms of receiving notifications. And I think it's been working well for me. I've also been leaning on Slack's native keyboard shortcuts instead of using a mouse to interact with the Slack client because that helps me avoid that distracted clicking or going into this channel just to see what's up, and that has also been just okay. I think their keyboard navigation is not my favorite. There are no customization options. So at one point, the shortcut to close the thread window pane was conflicting with my 1Password keyboard shortcuts, so I had to change my 1Password situation. And whenever you have to learn keyboard shortcuts for something different and in ways that might clash with your regular muscle memory for other applications, it's kind of annoying. But that's my journey with using Slack mostly on the keyboard so far. JOËL: What kind of impact have you seen on your focus since you've been using this workflow? STEPHANIE: I think it's been helpful for me to tune out things that I just can't prioritize my time and energy to at the moment. So I'm also pretty decisive when it comes to muting and leaving channels. I'm not in a ton of fun, casual channels because, again, I find them a little bit distracting. If I do want to go see cute dog content, I will go into the pets channel. But it's easier for me to have that be an intentional decision that I'm making as opposed to, oh, look, there are more messages in the dog channel. [laughs] Let me go check them out now. I think it has helped me focus my time and energy on the things that are most important to me. And the trade-off there is that I missed out on some content, but I think that I've become okay with that. And the channels that I am more subscribed to, like our dev channel that we've mentioned on the podcast before any project or team-related communications those, are top of mind for me. And when I do need a little bit of a break and do need some fun banter, I will hop into other channels for that. JOËL: So you brought up a little bit of this idea of FOMO around Slack channels. I think there's an area where our industry at large has a lot of FOMO, and this is around the computer science degree. A lot of people that are in the industry do not have one. There are a lot of different paths that can come into becoming a developer. Some people are entirely self-taught. Some people have gone through a bootcamp. Some people have kind of transferred from other similar or not at all similar industries. So there are a lot of different journeys that people have. But for many people, if you don't have that, there is some FOMO around, “Did I miss out on something?” And there's a word that people always kind of toss around when talking about computer science and specifically the things you might be missing out on if you don't have it, and that is the fundamentals. You might be missing out on the fundamentals or, oh, well, what if I don't know the fundamentals, then I'm faced with a problem? And I won't know what to do, or it might make me learn more slowly. Is that something that you've heard thrown around? STEPHANIE: I agree that the word fundamentals is extremely vague. In fact, I'm just going to say it: I have no idea what most people mean when they say the fundamentals, or at least I think they could mean a lot of different things. And so when that term is used, maybe I should just be asking for clarification [laughs] because I think that we could be talking about a lot of different things. Before we get into what fundamentals of programming or computer science or whatever means to each of us, Joël, do you want to share a little bit about where you're coming from in terms of any education prior to becoming a developer? JOËL: Sure. So I do have a CS degree. I actually learned to code before college. I read some books, did some tutorials on the internet, played around with some code on my own, had a lot of side projects, and even at some point was, freelancing a few small projects as well. But I always struggled trying to build projects larger than a certain size. I felt like they would sort of implode under the weight of their own complexity. I definitely felt like there's got to be some underlying fundamentals that I'm missing, some theory of writing code that would explain how to structure things in a way that scales. And this is not scaling to millions of users; this is scaling beyond 100, 200 lines of code, maintainability. And so, I had really high hopes for a computer science degree. And honestly, I think I was a little bit disappointed. I learned a lot of other interesting theoretical things, but not a lot that was actually answering that underlying problem. And I didn't really get the answers I was looking for until I started working more in the industry, doing various internships and then later on full-time jobs as well. And just over the years, that has sort of built up a lot of answers to those questions that I had. But I didn't necessarily find them in my computer science degree, so I have mixed feelings. STEPHANIE: I had no idea that you were doing that level of coding prior to studying in college. That's really cool. Now that I'm thinking about it, I think that's the case for a lot of people. They might get a taste of coding when they're young. It was true for me. I was a young girl on the internet in the early days writing HTML and CSS on neopets.com. And that is also how I got my first taste, and kind of wanted to explore further. So, in college, I studied journalism actually. That was where my interests were at the time. But I did take some computer science courses on the side and ended up completing it as a minor. But I'm with you that the education I got didn't quite match up with what I was expecting. In fact, I kind of struggled, I think, because there weren't a lot of more relatable applications to what I was learning, and so I was very bored and disengaged, I think. And so when I came out of college, I didn't think I wanted to do software development, or programming, or anything like that because I didn't love taking those classes. And, I don't know, I'm going to get into my whole career history today. But I basically fell into the role of development. It was kind of like, oh, you have these coding skills; we need these coding skills. I was like, okay, I guess this is my job now. [laughs] And I think you and I are actually kind of similar in the sense that once you started doing the work, you started to see a lot of the things that you had learned previously that you could then apply. Does that sound right? JOËL: Yes. And I think maybe more so over the years, there are some things where it's like, oh, with a five-year mark, it's like, oh, finally now I feel like I've got enough practical experience where I can start to appreciate some of these underlying things, or I'm getting into things beyond just the basics of writing a simple Rails app where I start to need some of those other concepts. And some of those it's five years, some of those are ten years. And so it's sometimes nice to have something to go back to. Although after ten years, there's only so much I remember, so sometimes it's just having a keyword that I can Google and dig into further. MID-ROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer’s worst nightmare...but it doesn’t have to be. Airbrake is an award-winning error monitoring, performance, and deployment tracking tool created by developers for developers that can actually help cut your debugging time in half. So why do developers love Airbrake? It has all of the information that web developers need to monitor their application - including error management, performance insights, and deploy tracking! Airbrake’s debugging tool catches all of your project errors, intelligently groups them, and points you to the issue in the code so you can quickly fix the bug before customers are impacted. In addition to stellar error monitoring, Airbrake’s lightweight APM helps developers to track the performance and availability of their application through metrics like HTTP requests, response times, error occurrences, and user satisfaction. Finally, Airbrake Deploy Tracking helps developers track trends, fix bad deploys, and improve code quality. Since 2008, Airbrake has been a staple in…

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370: Creative Expression in Software Development Feb 07, 2023

Show notes

Stephanie shares that she's been taking an intro to basket weaving class at a local art studio, and it's an interesting connection to computer science. Joël eats honeycomb live on air and shares a video that former Bike Shed host Steph Viccari found from Ian Anderson. It's a parody to the tune of "All I Want For Christmas Is You," but it's all about the Ruby 3.2 release. In this episode, Stephanie and Joël shift away from literature and lean into art. Writing code is technical work, but in many ways, it's also aesthetic work. It's a work of art. How do you feel about expressing yourself creatively through your code? This episode is brought to you by Airbrake. Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Weaving, Computing, and the Jacquard Loom Ian Anderson's Ruby Christmas song Dan McKinley's Boring Technology Club slides Simple English Wikipedia Geepaw Hill's Twitter thread about levels of thinking Julia Evans's debugging puzzles Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin Transcript: AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. 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'm really excited to share that I've been taking this intro to weaving class at a local art studio. I'm actually a few weeks in, and it's wrapping up soon. But one thing that I found really cool at the very first class was that the instructor mentioned that weaving was, in some ways, a predecessor or inspiration to modern computing. And he said that, and I got really excited because surely that meant that I would be good at this thing [laughs] and this craft, and then I promptly kind of forgot about it. But I was inspired the other night to look up this history to just learn more about weaving and its connection to computer science. And I learned that, in particular, the invention of something called the Jacquard loom really led to early computing machines because, basically, weaving involves threading horizontal and vertical fibers. And the way you do it if you thread the horizontal fiber, also called the weft, over or under the vertical fibers, called the warp, you get different patterns. And so with the Jacquard loom, this invention utilized punch cards as instructions for basically binary code, and that would tell the loom how to raise and lower those vertical threads, which would then lead to a beautiful pattern. And after that invention, this previously very laborious process became automated. And that also had a really big impact on the textile industry. And fabric became a lot more available at a much lower cost. So that was a really cool little history lesson for me. JOËL: That is really cool. So are you saying that punch cards, as we know them from early computing, were borrowed as a concept from the weaving industry? STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's at least what I've read. I can see now how complex weaving tapestries and patterns set the stage for more complex computations. And I don't know if I'm going to keep going down this weaving journey. I liked the intro class because it was very chill, and I got to use my hands. And I had a little bit of fun making, I don't know, like ten by 12-inch little tapestry. But yeah, I've definitely seen other more advanced weavers make really beautiful textiles and fiber arts. And it's really cool to see the application of that detail-oriented skill in different formats. JOËL: Are you going to try to make your own punch cards? STEPHANIE: That's an interesting evolution of this skill [laughs] for sure. I think what I really did like was the hands-on approach. And so the punch cards did make this process automated. But I personally enjoyed the switching of the threads and pulling them through and doing it with my hands instead of something that's kind of turned into automated machine work. Does that inspire you in some way? JOËL: I think sometimes it's interesting, right? As software people, we sort of have the two urges. We work in so much automation. When we see a process, we would love to try to automate it ourselves, even if it's been done before. So, oh, could I build a small, automatic mechanical loom using punch cards? That sounds like a fun automation challenge. At the same time, so much of my daily job is automation that sometimes it's nice to kind of remove automation entirely from the picture and, like you said, just work with your hands. STEPHANIE: That's a really interesting way to think about it. I do believe that people have different reactions to it, like you said, where they're like, "Wow, I can use my skills to do this really cool thing." On the other hand, you might also respond with, "Wow, I've done this automation code-writing work for eight hours. So now I really want to do something completely different." And I think that's the camp that I was in, at least when I first signed up for this class, just having space, like three hours a week, to sit and not look at a computer and deal with the physical realm. JOËL: So here's the other route that I think a lot of software people take, and that is, here's a fun mechanical process that can be automated. What if we simulated it virtually? So what if I create a program where you can sort of create your own punch card, like, decide where you want to punch the holes? And maybe these are just radio buttons or something or checkboxes in a grid on a webpage. And then, the program will output an SVG that is the thing that would have been woven if you'd used it in that pattern. And so now you can kind of play around with, like, huh, what if I punch here? What if I unpunch here? And you get all these patterns out, and you could just get to try it around. STEPHANIE: That's fascinating. I can't believe your brain went there. [laughter] But yeah, the idea that it's not actually about the pattern itself but the holes that you make, that part being the creative process and then what comes out of it then being a bit of a surprise or just something organic that's a really interesting take too. JOËL: Something that I find is really fun about software and things created from software is this sort of really short feedback loop in terms of trial and error. So if you were actually having a weaving machine and you made a physical punch card, and then you try something, and you realize it's not quite right, the machine weaved something you didn't quite like, now you've got to set it up again. You probably have to start from scratch with a new punch card because you can't really unpunch holes unless maybe you can put tape over it or something. That trial-and-error feedback loop is much shorter. Whereas with a program, you just pause the simulation, punch-unpunch some holes, restart, and then you just kind of keep trying. And there's something fun about that creative exploration when you've got that really tight feedback loop. STEPHANIE: That's fair. I think perhaps that actually might be why doing it manually, and by it, I mean weaving, gives you a little bit more room to [laughs] debug if you will, because you can see when something goes wrong. And this actually happened to me in class earlier this week where I didn't thread the fiber over instead of under. And I was like, oh, this doesn't look right. Like, that's not the look I'm going for. And then I could kind of quickly see, oh, I missed a thread over here and unravel and do it again. Whereas what you just described, if the punch card is wrong and then you create this big piece of fabric, at that point, I'm not really sure what happens then. If someone out there is a weaving expert and knows the answer; I would be very curious to know. JOËL: Now I kind of wish we'd had this conversation last month because, in early January, there was a game jam event that happened. It's a yearly or biyearly Historically Accurate Game Jam, and they select a theme, and then everybody has to submit a game, or a simulation, or something, an interactive program that fits with the theme. And this year's theme was the Industrial Revolution. And I feel like simulating an old automated loom with punch cards would be the perfect fit for something that's small enough that I could build it in a week without spending 10 hours a day working on it. It fits within the theme, and it's still kind of fun. STEPHANIE: Wow, that would have been a really great idea. If there was an award for best fitting the theme, I think that would have won because then you're also tackling the history of computing. I was talking about earlier the loom obviously being...or the automated loom also really playing a big role in the Industrial Revolution. And, I don't know, maybe this is our future club, Joël, and we're going to get into video game development. [laughs] What's new in your world, Joël? JOËL: There are two things. One is that today former Bike Shed host, Stephanie Viccari, shared a video with me from Ian Anderson. This was made last December to the tune of All I Want For Christmas Is You. But it's all about the, at that time, upcoming Ruby 3.2 release. It is amazing. The lyrics talk about the different features that are upcoming. It rhymes. It's set to meter. I am just blown away by this. And I'm just really hyped [laughs] about this video. STEPHANIE: You sent it to me and I gave it a watch before we sat down to record, and I also loved this video. It was so fun. And I think Ruby has a bit of a tradition of releasing new versions around Christmas time. So if this became a tradition, that would be very fun, and maybe instead of singing Christmas carols, we'll be singing new Ruby version carols around the holidays. JOËL: I feel like if Ian wants to do another one next Christmas, now that you have the precedent, it'd be a great space to try something to the tune of Last Christmas because now you can reference back last year's song. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I might as well just go all in and create a whole Christmas album of Ruby anticipation carols. [laughter] JOËL: Yeah, really excited about that. Kudos to Ian. And for all of our listeners, we'll link the video on the show notes of the podcast. Go and check it out; it is worth the two and a half-minutes of your life. STEPHANIE: Agreed. JOËL: The other cool thing, for the past few episodes, we've been talking a lot about hexagons and how they show up in nature, and bees, and how they build their honeycombs and whether that is sort of by design or sort of just happens by nature through sort of external forces. And so this week, I went out to the store, and I bought some real honeycomb. And I'm going to try it on air. STEPHANIE: [laughs] Oh my gosh, I didn't realize that's what was happening. [laughter] Okay, I'm ready. JOËL: All right, I'm going to take a slice. STEPHANIE: Wow. For research. JOËL: For science. STEPHANIE: Wow, that is a big bite. [laughs] JOËL: Hmmm, it's basically crunchy honey. STEPHANIE: So I've enjoyed honeycomb in that raw form on ice cream. I really like it on there and oatmeal and stuff like that. I think it's a little bit waxy. Like, once you get to chewing the bits at the end, that part is a bit of a less pleasant mouth-feel [laughs] in my opinion. What are you experiencing right now? JOËL: Yeah, so like you're saying, the honey kind of dissolves away in your mouth. You had this really fun mix of textures. But then, in the end, you do end up with a ball of [laughter] beeswax in your mouth. STEPHANIE: Oh no. JOËL: Which I understand is completely safe to eat, so... STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's true. JOËL: I'm just going to eat the whole thing. STEPHANIE: I think it's kind of like swallowing gum. [laughs] JOËL: Which apparently does not last for seven years in your digestive system; that's a myth. STEPHANIE: Wow, debunking myths, trying honeycomb. You're welcome, to all The Bike Shed listeners out there. Investigating the important things. JOËL: What is interesting is that we're talking about the structural power of hexagons. I can cut a pretty thin slice of the comb, and it doesn't fall apart. It still has a lot of strength to it, which is nice because it means that the honey doesn't just go splashing everywhere. I can cut up a fairly thin slice, pick it up, it still holds the honey, put it in my mouth, and it doesn't make a mess. STEPHANIE: The bees know what they're doing. [laughs] Cool. Would you eat raw honeycomb again? JOËL: Well, I got a whole block, and I had one tiny slice. So, yes, I will be eating the rest of this. STEPHANIE: [laughs] JOËL: I don't think this will be a regular thing in my weekly groceries. But I would bring this out again for a special occasion. Or I can see this fitting nicely, like you said, on maybe certain breakfasts, even on a charcuterie board or something. STEPHANIE: Oh yeah, that's a really good use for it. JOËL: In some ways, it's nice because it's a way to have honey without having to have it on something else or having to eat it with a spoon. It's honey that comes with its own carrying vessel. STEPHANIE: That's great. Yeah, like a bread bowl for soup. [laughs] JOËL: Exactly. Bees make their own bread bowls for honey. STEPHANIE: [laughs] MID-ROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer’s worst nightmare...but it doesn’t have to be. Airbrake is an award-winning error monitoring, performance, and deployment tracking tool created by developers for developers that can actually help cut your debugging time in half. So why do developers love Airbrake? It has all of the information that web developers need to monitor their application - including error management, performance insights, and deploy tracking! Airbrake’s debugging tool catches all of your project errors, intelligently groups them, and points you to the issue in the code so you can quickly fix the bug before customers are impacted. In addition to stellar error monitoring, Airbrake’s lightweight APM helps developers to track the performance and availability of their application through metrics like HTTP requests, response times, error occurrences, and user satisfaction. Finally, Airbrake Deploy Tracking helps developers track trends, fix bad deploys, and improve code quality. Since 2008, Airbrake has been a staple in the Ruby community and has grown to cover all major programming languages. Airbrake seamlessly integrates with your favorite apps to include modern features like single sign-on and SDK-based installation. From testing to production, Airbrake notifiers have your back. Your time is valuable, so why waste it combing through logs, waiting for user reports, or retrofitting other tools to monitor your application? You literally have nothing to lose. Head on over to airbrake.io/try/bikeshed to create your FREE developer account today! JOËL: So, for the last couple of weeks, we've been joking that this is turning into the Stephanie and Joël book club because we've been talking about a lot of article…

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