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    Software How-To

    The Bike Shed

    On The Bike Shed, hosts Joël Quenneville, Sally Hall, and Aji Slater discuss development experiences and challenges at thoughtbot with Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and whatever else is drawing their attention, admiration, or ire this week.

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    Latest Episodes:
    309: Naming the Change Sep 21, 2021
    Show notes

    Steph talks about a new GitHub feature and Twitter account (@RubyCards) she's really excited about and Chris talks about his new job as a CTO of a startup and shifting away from writing code regularly. GitHub RubyCards Resilient Management The Manager's Path Transcript: CHRIS: Oh God, my computer is so stupid slow. I need a new computer. STEPH: Come on, little computer, you can do it. You know you could just buy a new one. You don't have to wait for the fancy-schmancy M1. CHRIS: I want to wait for the fancy. I want it so bad. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: Do you know how long I've had this computer? And if I can hold out one more month, I want the fancy stuff. I've waited this long. Why would I give in now when I'm right on the cusp of victory? STEPH: One more month. I'm going to send you...as a kid, did you ever make those construction… CHRIS: Oh yeah. STEPH: They look like chain links bow construction paper. So we would make those for a countdown to special days. I'm going to send you one that's all crumpled and folded in the mail. It would be delightful. And you'll be able to snip off a little chain each day as your countdown to your new fancy-schmancy. [laughs] CHRIS: I love it. Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, what's new in your world? STEPH: Hey. Well, I just got back from vacation. So getting back to work is what's new in my world. And vacation is nice. I miss it already. But it's also nice to be back, and see everybody, and see what they've been up to. CHRIS: I've heard wonderful things about vacation. STEPH: Yeah. Have you had one recently? I know you've been quite busy. CHRIS: I have. I think it's hard to tell, especially because everything just kind of blends together these days. But I think I took off a few days recently. I haven't had an extended vacation since much earlier on in the summer, I think. And so I think I'm due for one of those sometime in the not too distant future. But it's one of those things where you got to plan it. And you got to think ahead, and I haven't been doing that of late really with anything. So kind of living for the moment, but that's not how you take a vacation. So I got to rethink some strategies here. [chuckles] STEPH: Yeah, I've been trying to schedule more vacation time just further out. Because then if I don't want to take it, like if I decide that I don't want the staycation or I don't need the day off, then I can just change my mind, and that's pretty easy to do. But I'm like you; if I don't plan it, then I don't feel like I have the energy to plan a vacation, and then it just doesn't happen. So I know that's one thing that I've been doing. I've also been mentoring or coaching others, just checking in with them to say, "Hey, when's your next vacation? Have you scheduled any days off? Do you want to schedule a day off next month?" And saying that to other people has also been a very helpful reminder to me to do so. CHRIS: Oh, I like that a lot as a recurring one-on-one question of, so what can you tell me about vacation? What do you got in the works there? Because that's the most important thing, [chuckles] which it kind of is. It's the way that we keep doing the work that we do. STEPH: And I think so many people just haven't been taking a vacation. I mean, in 2020, we were all locked in and going through a pandemic, so then a lot of people weren't taking those breaks. And so part of it is just reminding people that even if you can't go somewhere, still please take some downtime and just know that you can step away from work and should step away from work. But for us, we did go somewhere. So we went out to Seattle, which I've never...I've been out to the West Coast, but it's more like I've been out to L.A., Santa Monica. But this time, we went to the Northwest region. We went to Seattle, and we explored and did a lot of hiking and camping around the Northern Cascades and then Mount Rainier. And both of those are amazing. And I've never flown with camping gear, but that went really well. It worked out nice. We had an Airbnb every so often just for showers and having a roof over your head. That's really nice. But for most of the trip, we did a lot of camping and hiking. CHRIS: That sounds like an awesome trip. STEPH: Yeah, it was really cool. I'd love to go back to the Olympic National Park because there are just so many national parks that are around Seattle and in Washington that we couldn't begin to do it all. But Olympic National Park is still on my list. And I'm really grateful to have also seen the Northern Cascades and Mount Rainier. But switching gears a bit, I have something that I'm really excited to share with you because I don't think you've seen it yet. I'm excited to find out if you have. But it's a new GitHub feature that came out, I think about a month ago, but there doesn't seem to have been much fanfare from GitHub about announcing this new feature. And I happened to find out through Twitter because someone else found it, and then they were really excited. And so now I think it's really gaining some more traction. But it still seems like one of those sneaky feature releases, but it's really cool. So GitHub has added the ability to open up a web-based editor that allows you to view the source code for a repo, view it in syntax, highlighting, make a code change, and commit the change. And it's free for everybody. And there's a couple of ways to get there, but I'll pause there. Have you seen this yet? Have you interacted with it? CHRIS: I think I've seen it and poked around ever so gently with it. I want to say this is GitHub Codespaces. Is that the name of this feature? STEPH: Yep. That's it? CHRIS: Yes. I poked around with it just a tiny bit, and I'm very excited about it. But it's very much in the like, huh, okay, cool; I’ll look at that someday down the road and figure out what I want to do with it. But have you actually dug into it particularly deeply? STEPH: I used it to make a change for a personal project, just because I wanted to see the whole flow. So I went to a personal project, and there are two ways that you can open it up for anyone that hasn't seen this yet. So you can either press the period button that's on your keyboard, and that will open it up, or you can just alter the URL. So instead of github.com, replace that .com with .dev, and then that will also open up the browser. And so I made a change to a personal project, and it worked really well, and it commits the change to main. And it was nice. It was easy. In my case, I was just making a change to make a change. I think I actually went to an older project where I was still using the underscore target to force users that when they clicked on a link that it opened a new tab, and I was like, perfect. This is a good thing to just change. And I could do it from my iPad. I didn't have to be at my computer. And it was really nifty. I was very impressed with it. And they also mentioned that it's very easy to integrate your own VS Code settings and environment. I'm not a heavy VS Code user, so I haven't tried that. But I've heard really positive things about how easy it is to sync your settings between your local VS Code and then GitHub's editor. But overall, it was really easy to use. CHRIS: That's super cool. My very limited understanding of it is like GitHub has had the ability to edit files and things like that for a while. But it was very much like a simple web editor where it's a big text box that happens to contain the code. And they've added some stuff for like browsing with syntax highlighting and even some context-aware show usage and things like that. But as far as I understand it, this is like a whole VS Code instance in the cloud that is running it. And then I think what you're saying about you can have your VS Code settings in there, but even your project settings and the ability to run the tests, I'm not sure where the edges of it are. But my understanding with Codespaces it's like this is how your team can develop. Everyone gets one of these Codespaces. You're developing in the cloud. But it does VS Code remote sync type stuff. I'm very intrigued to see where it goes and that idea of...obviously, I like Vim. That's the thing that's probably known and true about me. So I will probably be one of the later adopters of this. But the idea of being able to bottle up the development environment for your projects and have those settings, and the ability to run the test and all of that packaged up as part of the repository, and then allow people to run with that, especially in the cloud, and be able to carry that with them as they move around, that's really intriguing. And the idea of having this very easy on-ramp, especially for open-source projects and things like that. If you want people to be able to contribute easily but with the linting, and the configuration, and the settings, and all the stuff, well, now you can have that packaged up. And that is very interesting to me. So I'm super intrigued to see where it goes. Again, I will probably be one of the later adopters of this platform for reasons. But I am super interested, and I continue to like...the work with VS Code is so interesting in the way it keeps expanding out and the language server stuff and now the Codespaces stuff. And it's super interesting developments across the board. STEPH: Yeah, I'm with you. I don't actually see this replacing my current development that I do day-to-day, but it's more generally nice to have access. So if I needed to make a change and I don't have my laptop or if it's just something small and I don't want to have to go through…I guess essentially, if I don't have my laptop, but I wanted to make a change, then I could do this realistically from something that doesn't have my full local dev setup. I don't know if you have the ability to run tests. I didn't explore that far as to whether you can actually have access to run those types of commands or processes. I did see some additional notes while reading through GitHub's documentation about this new editor. And they included some notes that talk about how the editor runs entirely in your browser's sandbox. So it doesn't actually clone the repo, but instead, it loads your code by invoking the services API directly from the browser. So then your work is saved in the browser's local storage until you commit it, and then you can persist your changes by then committing it back to the repo. And because there's no associated compute, you won't be able to build and run your code or use the integrated terminal. Ah, I think that actually answers the question about running tests. So only a subset of extensions can run in the web will appear in the extensions panel and can be installed. So this does impose certain limitations for particular programming languages and full functionality, things that we may need like running tests. CHRIS: Interesting. That now puts it back more on the uncanny valley for me where it's like, oh, it's just VS Code, except it can't do a bunch of the stuff. So yeah, I'll probably be hanging out in Vim for a while. But again, I'm super interested to see where they can push this and what the browser platform allows, and then how they're able to leverage that and so on and so forth. STEPH: There is one flow that I was testing out because I was reading someone else mentioned that not only can you use this for looking at source code and then changing that source code but also for a pull request. And so I went to a pull request and changed the URL to dev. And I do have the ability to make changes, but I'm not quite sure if I could commit my changes and if that would go to the branch or how that would work. It wasn't obvious to me how I could save my changes. But it was obvious to me that I could make changes. [laughs] So that part feels weird to me, and I will have to test that out. But I'm going to wait until I have my own PR before I start fooling around [laughs] so I don't ruin somebody else's PR. CHRIS: Ideally, the worst case is you just push commit to a branch, and commits are reversible. You can throw them away. You can reset, and you can do all sorts of stuff. But I agree with you that maybe I'll do this on my home turf first before I start messing around with somebody's PR. STEPH: That way, someone doesn't reach out to me and say, "Steph, what is this commit that I have on my PR?" And I'm like, "Oh, I'm just testing." [laughs] But that's something that I was excited to talk about and share with you. What's new in your world? CHRIS: Well, what's new in my world? I think we've talked about this a little bit, but to give a little bit of context on what's new in my world, I joined a startup. I am now engineer number one. I'm also CTO, a very fancy title, but again, I'm the team of one, so count it as you will. But we do have some consultants working with us. So there is a small team that I am managing, and very quickly, I found myself shifting away from the code or having to balance that trade-off of maker versus manager time. Like, how much of the time am I actually coding and shipping features versus managing and communicating, and trying to figure out the work to be done and triaging the backlog? And all of those sorts of things. I've also just been coding less, and I think that's a trend that will almost certainly continue, and I'm intrigued by that. And that's a thing that I want to poke at just a little bit. And then I've also noticed that my work has become much more reactive than it used to be, where there are lots of things in Slack. And there's stuff that I'm kind of the only person that can do certain things because I have certain access levels and yadda yadda. And I want to make sure other folks aren't blocked. So I'm trying to be as responsive as possible in those moments. But I'm also struggling with that that trade-off between reactive versus proactive. My ideal version I think of the work is gather all of the information, all of the different permutations, and what are all the features we want? And then I think about them holistically, and then I respond once solidly as opposed to little one-off interactions and things like that. So there are just a lot of subtle differences. And I think there are trends that will continue. And so I'm trying to just take a step back, observe them from a distance and say, "How do I feel about these?" But probably most interesting to me is the moving away from code. Have you noticed that at all in your work? Or is that something you've thought about, something you'd be interested in, opposed to? How do you feel about that space in the coding world? STEPH: That is a wonderful question. It's one that I have wrestled with for a while because I really love my current position. I love being a team lead because I feel like there's this wonderful balance between where I get to code a lot of the time, but then I also get to learn how to be a manager, and help those around me, and provide some…

    Full show notes at the publisher
    308: That’s Picante Sep 14, 2021
    Show notes

    You know what really grinds Chris' gears? (Spoiler Alert: It's Single-Page Applications.) Steph needs some consulting help. So much to do, so little time. Sarah Drasner tweet about shared element transitions Article about Page Transitions API Svelte Crossfade layout demo Svelte Crossfade tutorial page (Note - click "Show Me" on the bottom left) Transcript: CHRIS: I have restarted my recording, and we are now recording. And we are off on the golden roads. Isn't software fun? STEPH: Podcast battle. Here we go! Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. Hey, Chris, happy Friday. How's your week been? CHRIS: Happy Friday to you as well. My week's been good with the exception of right before we started this recording, I had one of those experiences. You know the thing where software is bad and software is just terrible overall? I had one of those. And very briefly to describe it, I started recording, but I could hear some feedback in my headphones. So I was like, oh no, is that feedback going to show up on the final recording? Which I really hope it doesn't. Spoiler alert - listener, if I sound off, sorry about that. But so I stopped recording and then I went to go listen to the file, and I have our audio software configured to record directly to the desktop. And it does that normally quite well. But for some reason, the file wasn't there. But I remember this recently because I ran into it another time. For some reason, this is Finder failing me. So the thing that shows me the files in a graphical format, at least on my operating system. Although I think it also messes up in the terminal maybe. That feels like it shouldn't be true, but maybe it is. Anyway, I had to kill all Finder from the terminal to aggressively restart that process. And then suddenly, Finder was like, oh yeah, there's totally files there, absolutely. They were there the whole time. Why do you even ask? And I know that state management is a hard problem, I am aware. I have felt this pain. I have been the person who has introduced some bugs related to it, but that's not where I want to experience it. Finder is one of those applications that I want to just implicitly trust, never question whether or not it's just sneakily telling me that there are files that are not there or vice versa. So anyway, software. STEPH: I'm worried for your OS. I feel like there's a theme lately [chuckles] in the struggles of your computer. CHRIS: On a related note, I had to turn off transparency in my terminal because it was making my computer get very hot. [chuckles] STEPH: Oh no, you're not a hacker any more. CHRIS: I'm not. [chuckles] I just have a weird screen that's just dark. And jellybeans is my color scheme, so there's that going on. That's in Vim specifically. Pure is my prompt. That's a lovely little prompt. But lots of Day-Glo colors on just a black background, not the cool hacker transparency. I have lost some street cred. STEPH: What is your prompt? What did you say it is? CHRIS: Pure. STEPH: Pure, I don't know that one. CHRIS: It is by Sindre Sorhus; I think is his name. That's his Twitter handle, GitHub name. He is a prolific open-source creator in the Node world, particularly. But he created this...I think it's a Bash and a Zsh prompt. It might be for others as well. It's got a bunch of features. It's pretty fast. It's minimal. It got me to stop messing around with my prompt, which was mostly what I was going for. And it has a nice benefit that occasionally now I'll be pairing with someone, and I'll be like, "Your prompt looks like my prompt. Everything is familiar. This is great." STEPH: Well, if you get back in the waters of messing around with your prompts again, I'm using Starship. And I hadn't heard of Pure before, but I really like Starship. That's been my new favorite. CHRIS: Wow. STEPH: Wow. CHRIS: I mean, on the one hand… STEPH: You're welcome. [laughs] CHRIS: On the one hand, thank you. On the other hand, again, let me lead in with the goal was to stop messing around with my prompt. So you're like, oh, cool. Here's another prompt for you, though. [chuckles] STEPH: [laughs] But my goal is to nerd snipe you into trying more things because it's fun. CHRIS: I don't know if you know this, but I am impervious to nerd sniping. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: So try as you might, I shall remain steady in my course of action. STEPH: Are we playing two truths and a lie? Is that what we're doing today? [laughs] CHRIS: Nah, just one lie. It's easier. Everybody wins one lie. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: But anyway, in other news, we're going to do a segment called this really grinds my gears. That's today's segment, which is much like when I do a good idea, terrible idea. But this is one that I'm sure I've talked about before. But there's been some stuff that I saw moving around on the internet as one does, and it got these ideas back into my head. And it's around the phrase single-page application. I am not a fan of that phrase or SPA as the initialism. Thank you, Edward Loveall, for teaching me the difference between an initialism and an acronym. I really hope I'm getting it right, by the way, [laughs] SPA as people call them these days. I feel weird because of how much I care about this thing, how much I care about this idea, and how much whenever I hear this acronym, I get a little bit unhappy. And so there's a part of it that's I really do think our words shape our thinking. And I think single-page application has some deeply problematic ideas. Most notably, I think one of the most important things about building web applications is the URL. And those are different pages, at least in my head. I don't know of a different way to think about this. But if you are not emphasizing the URL and the fact that the URL is a way to address different pages or resources within your application, then you are throwing away one of the greatest advancements that humankind has made, in my mind. I care a lot about URLs; it turns out. And it's not inherent to an SPA that you will not be thinking about URLs. But again, in that idea that our words shape our thinking, by calling it an SPA, by leaning into that idea, I think you are starting down a path that leads to bad outcomes. I'm going to pause there because I'm getting kind of ranty. I got more to say on the topic. But what do you think? STEPH: Yeah, these are hot takes. I'm into it. I'm pretty sure that I know why URLs are so important to you and more of your feelings around why they're important. But would you dive in a bit deeper as to why you really cherish URLs, and why they're so important, and why they're one of the greatest advancements of humanity? CHRIS: [laughs] It sounds lofty when you say it back to me, but yeah. It's interesting that as you put into a question, it is a little bit hard to name. So there are certain aspects that are somewhat obvious. I love the idea that I can bookmark or share a given resource or representation of a resource very simply. Like the URL, it's this known thing. We can put hyperlinks in a document. It's this shared way to communicate, frankly, very complex things. And when I think of a URL, it's not just the domain and the path, but it's also any query parameters. So if you imagine faceted search on a website, you can be like, oh, filter down to these and only ones that are more than $10, and only ones that have a future start date and all those kinds of nuance. If you serialize that into the URL as part of the query param, then that even more nuanced view of this resource is shareable is bookmarkable is revisitable. I end up making Alfred Workflows that take advantage of the fact that, like, oh, I can look at this URL scheme, and I can see where different parts are interpolated. And so I can navigate directly to any given thing so fast. And that's deeply valuable, and it just falls naturally out of the idea that we have URLs. And so to not deeply embrace that, to not really wrap your arms around it and give that idea a big hug feels weird to me. STEPH: Yeah, I agree. I remember we've had this conversation in the past, and it really frustrates me when I can't share specific resources with folks because I don't know how to link to it. So then I can send you a link to the application itself to the top URL. But then I have to tell you how to find the information that I thought was really helpful. And that feels like a step backward. CHRIS: Yeah. That ability to say, "Follow this link, and then it will be obvious," versus "Go to this page, click on this thing, click on the dropdown, click on this other thing." Like, that's just a fundamentally different experience. So one of the things that I saw that got me thinking about this was I saw folks referring to single-page applications but then contrasting them with MPAs, which are multiple-page applications. STEPH: So the normal application? [laughs] CHRIS: And I was like, whoa, whoa, everybody. You mean like a website or a web app? As much as I was angry at the first initialism, this second one's really getting me going. But it really does speak to what are we doing? What are we trying to build? And as with anything, you could treat this as a binary as just like there are two options. There are either websites which, yeah, those have got a bunch of URLs, and that's all the stuff. And then there are web apps, and they're different. And it's a bundle of JavaScript that comes down, boots up on the client, and then it's an app thing. And who cares about URLs? I think very few people would actually fall in that camp. So I don't really believe that there is a dichotomy here. I think, as always, it's a continuum; it’s a spectrum. But leaning into the nomenclature of single-page application, I think pushes you more towards that latter end of the spectrum. I think there are other things that fall out of it. Like, I believe deeply in having the server know more, have more of the logic, own more of the logic, own more authorization and routing, and all of those things because really great stuff falls out of that. And that one has more of a trade-off, I'd say. But I won't name any names, but there is a multiple billion-dollar company whose website I had to interact with recently. And you land on their page on their marketing site. And then, if you click log in, it navigates you to the application, so a separate domain or a separate subdomain, the application subdomain, and the login page there. And the login page renders, and then I go to fill in my username and password. Like, my mouse makes it all the way to click on the little box or whatever I'm doing if I'm using keyboard things. But I have enough time to actually start to interact with this page. And then suddenly, it rips away, and it actually just renders the authenticated application because it turns out I was already logged in. But behind the scenes, they're doing some JWT dance around that they're checking; oh no, no, you're already logged in, so never mind. We don't need to show you the login page, but I was already on the login page. And my feeling is this sort of brittle UI; this sort of inconsistency erodes my trust in that application, particularly when I'm on the login page. That is a page that matters. I don't believe that they're doing anything fundamentally insecure. But I do have the question in my head now. I'm like, wait, what's going on there, everybody? Is it fine? Was that okay? Or if you see something that you shouldn't see and then suddenly it's ripped away from you, if you see half of a layout that's rendered on a page and then suddenly you see, no, no, no, you actually don't have access to that page, that experience erodes my trust. And so, I would rather wait for the server to fully resolve, determine what's going to happen, and then we get a response that is holistically consistent. You either have access, or you don't, that sort of thing. Give me a loading indicator; give me those sorts of things. I'm fine with that. But don't render half of a layout and then redirect me back away. STEPH: I feel like that's one of the problems with knowing too much because most people are not going to pick up on a lot of the things that you're noticing and caring deeply about where they would just see like, oh, I was logged in and be like, huh, okay, that was a little weird, but I'm in and just continue on. Versus other folks who work very closely to this who may recognize and say, "That was weird." And the fact that you asked me to log in, but then I was already logged in, did you actually log me in correctly? What's happening? And then it makes you nervous. CHRIS: Maybe. Probably. But I wonder…the way you just said that sounds like another dichotomy. And I would say it's probably more of a continuum of an average not terribly tech-savvy user would still have a feeling of huh, that was weird. And that's enough. That's a little tickle in the back of your brain. It's like, huh, that was weird. And if that happens enough times or if you've seen someone who uses an application and uses it consistently, if that application is reasonably fast and somewhat intuitive and consistent, then they can move through it very quickly and very confidently. But if you have an app that half loads and then swaps you to another page and other things like that, it's very hard to move confidently through an application like that. I do think you're right in saying that I am over-indexed on this, and I probably care more than the average person, but I do care a lot. I do think one of the reasons that I think this happens is mobile applications came along, and they showed us a different experience that can happen and also desktop apps for some amount of time this was true. But I think iOS apps, in particular really great ones, have super high fidelity interactions. And so you're like, you're looking at a list view, and then you click on the cell for that list view. And there's this animated transition where the title floats up to the top and grows just a little bit. And the icon that was in the corner moves up to the corner, and it gets a little bigger. And it's this animated transition to the detailed view for that item. And then if you go back, it sort of deanimates back down. And that very consistent experience is kind of lovely when you get it right, but it's really, really hard. And people, I think, have tried to bring that to the web, but it's been such a struggle. And it necessitates client-side routing and some other things, or it's probably easiest to do if you have those sorts of technologies at play, but it's been a struggle. I can't think of an application that I think really pulls that off. And I think the trade-offs have been very costly. On the one positive note, there was a tweet that I saw by Sarah Drasner that was talking about smooth and simple page transitions with the shared element transition API. So this is a new API that I think is hoping to bring some of this functionality to the web platform natively so that web applications can provide that higher fidelity experience. Exactly how it'll work whether or not it requires embrac…

    Full show notes at the publisher
    307: Walking Contradictions Sep 07, 2021
    Show notes

    On this episode, Chris talks about testing external services and dissects a tweet on refinements for Result. Steph talks about thoughbot's recent improvement to their feature flag system. Links: refinements For Result Faking External Services in Tests with Adapters by German Velasco Testing Interaction with 3rd-party APIs Transcript: CHRIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, what's new with you? STEPH: Hey, Chris. Well, today is Summit Day at thoughtbot, and it's the day where all the bots gather, and we hang out, and we chat, and we play games. And it's a lot of fun. We're actually taking more of a respite this year just because life has been taxing. And so we decided to give people more of the day off. So we still had some fun events, but most of it is everybody gets a chill day. Do something that brings you joy is the theme of the day. But we had Lightning Talks, which is my favorite thing that we do on Summit Day because I realize that I just work with the coolest people, and they have such interesting things to talk about. And we had such a variety of topics. So one of them, Alex Chen taught us acronyms in K-pop. And Sam Kapila, our resident foodie, taught us about a variety of spices. And one of my favorite talks was by Akshith Yellapragada, and it's the top 10 best limo entrances by The Bachelor, and it was phenomenal. And I really want to share some stuff that I learned with you. CHRIS: The Bachelor like the TV show? STEPH: Yeah, like the TV show. Are you familiar with it? Have you seen it before? CHRIS: I am familiar with it. I know it exists. I know that there's a spinoff, The Bachelorette. And I believe we have now exhausted my information on the matter. STEPH: [laughs] That's fair. For anyone that hasn't seen the show, the show revolves around a single person. For the bachelor, it's a single bachelor who dates a number of people over several weeks, and then they narrow down the people. There are elimination rounds, and the whole goal is for them to find their true love. So each week, someone is eliminated, and I think the show ends with a marriage proposal. So it's a wild show. It's something. [chuckles] And in Akshith's talk, I learned some really fun terminology. The first one is the Crown, and this is actually an important building block because we're going to get to the rest of the terminology that uses this word, so we got to start here. So the first one is the Crown, and this is the person that everyone's competing for. So they're the star of the show. They're the one that everybody is hoping to fall in love with or will fall in love with them so they get a marriage proposal. So then the other stuff that I've learned is all about the entrance because again, we're talking about the top 10 best entrances. And one of them is the sidecar entrance. So this is where the player, because yes, this is totally a game, has someone assist them in meeting the crown. So it could be like a family member, maybe it's like your grandma. And then there's TOT, T-O-T, which is short for Trick Or Treat. And this person exits the limo wearing a costume. So it's someone wearing a shark costume. There was someone wearing a sloth costume where they really dedicated to the role, and they climbed a tree and hung from a branch. I don't know for how long but for long enough to really vibe with the role. And then there's the Kringle, and this person brings a prop or a present to the Crown. And there's the Grandy, and this player arrives in something other than a limo. So the example that Akshith provided is someone arrived in a motorized cupcake. CHRIS: Was the cupcake edible? STEPH: I don't think so, fair question. [laughs] CHRIS: So really just like a go-kart that looked like a cupcake, not really a motorized cupcake, if I'm going to meet pedantic about the thing, [chuckles] which I think is my job. STEPH: Yes, it is a motorized non-edible cupcake, but that seems like something a next player should do. They should really up the game, and they should bring an edible motorized cupcake. CHRIS: Yeah, because you get the visual novelty, but then you layer on top of it that it's actually something that you can now eat, and it's a double win. STEPH: Ooh, and then you're a Grandy, and you're a Kringle because you arrived in something other than a limo, and it's a present. CHRIS: I love how you have so deeply internalized this now that you're like, ooh, okay. I can remix here. I'm going to bring together the pieces. Yeah, all right. Yeah, this all makes sense. STEPH: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Those are most of my notes for today. I have some tech stuff too, but this felt like the most important thing to start the show with. CHRIS: We use the phrase tech talk and nonsense to describe the show often, but I think nonsense and tech talk is the correct orientation. STEPH: [chuckles] CHRIS: Correct in terms of importance and chronological order, and whatnot. But yeah. STEPH: I love that we start with a bit of nonsense. So I do have some tech stuff. But first, before I share any of that, what's going on in your world? CHRIS: I'm sure there's plenty of nonsense in my world, but at the top of my list is some tech stuff. So someone on Twitter, Adam Lassek, reached out and he suggested related to the conversation and the back and forth that I've been having with myself around some of the data structures within the app that I'm building…So I've talked about the dry-monads result object, and there's this success and failure. And I wanted to introduce this new method called bimap, but I wanted to do it in a reasonable way. So I wrapped, and then I wrapped, and I wrapped things. As an aside, former colleague and friend of the show, Joel Oliveira, sent a wonderful tweet which was a reference to the SNL video where they make a taco and put it inside of a pizza and put it inside of a bag. And that was his joke about it, which I really liked. That was an excellent reference. But in this case, Adam Lassek reached out and suggested if I'm that squeamish about monkey patching, which I am, have I considered refinements? And so he sent an image of a code sample, which is so kind of him to send that much detail over, but it was interesting because I know of refinements in Ruby. I know of that as an alternative to monkey patching, a more refined way, but a safer way, a more controlled way to alter code, but I've not actually used them. STEPH: I'm not familiar with refinements. What is that? CHRIS: Refinements are a way...so similar to monkey patching, where you say like, I'm going to reopen this class or this module and define a new method or redefine a method or do something like that, a refinement is a way to do that in a scoped manner. So I'll be honest, I'm not super familiar with them. I think I came into Ruby at a time where the community was moving away from monkey patching. And the dogmatic swing of the pendulum was like, that's a bad thing to do. And so even the refinements were introduced, as far as I understand it, to be a more controlled way to do it. So it's not just like, hey, cool. This module is redefined now in your app in a magical way that's really hard to figure out and hard for folks to debug refinements. You have to explicitly opt into within a certain lexical scope. I'll be honest; I know that at the headline level. I don't actually know the ramifications or where and when you can use them and how you can. But I know that that was the idea is refinements are a way to do monkey patching but in a more controlled, more understandable manner, and so the code sample that Adam shared does that. And it's very interesting. As I'm looking at it, I'm like, okay, that's cool because I think it'll be a little bit safer. But at the end of the day, my concern wasn't safety in this case because I was introducing a method that would be new, that would be additive to the API of this module that I'm working with, and so that I think of as a relatively safe operation. My hesitation was more around how does someone figure it out if they're working with this? And particularly, the name of the method that I was introducing was bimap so, B-I-M-A-P. And if someone sees that in our codebase and is like, "Bimap, where is this coming from?" Well, this is one of those dry-monad result objects. And they go to the code, and they try and look it up in the docs, and they're just not going to find anything. And I can imagine losing a lot of time to try and chase that down. There are ways to figure it out. There's the method in Ruby, which is a wonderful trick for chasing things down. Or if you grep the codebase, you'd find it. But I think I'm possibly over-indexed on worrying about that lost time, that moment. But I've lost that time so many times in my life where I'm like, I can't grep for this. I can't Google for this. And so I have so strongly moved in the direction of being like, everything should be grepable, everything should be googleable. Those are the two of the things that I believe about software. I think I believe a bunch of stuff. STEPH: I think we have a full episode that talks about what we believe in software. CHRIS: I believe we do. STEPH: Cool. Thanks. Yeah, I have not heard of refinements. That sounds really interesting. I really like that bit about everything should be grepable, and everything should be googleable, googling everything. I kind of agree with that one. We live in a world where we're always doing bespoke things so that one feels a little bit harder that we're always going to be able to Google it. But then that encourages people to constantly publish the bespoke work that they're doing so then others can benefit from that work. But the grepable, I absolutely agree with that one. It's so frustrating where I see a method, but I cannot find its definition. And then having the ways to figure out where that method is defined to then find its definition is crucial. CHRIS: Yeah, it's interesting. I definitely feel that way very strongly. And it's in such stark contrast to Rails. Rails is like, hey, don't worry. There's going to be a lot of methods. You don't need to worry about where they come from, or why they exist, or what they are, or what they do. Well, probably what they do. But all of the magic inflections on database tables,, and suddenly you have methods named after every column. That's both very magical and hard to grep for or impossible to grep for, but it also leaks the entire structure of your database into your application in a way that I've always felt a little bit complicated about. And so explicitness, grepability, those are things that I care about. There's another one, delegates in Rails, that I sometimes pause around using especially when it's like delegates 19 methods to user prefix user. And so you end up with methods that are like username. And that's a delegation to the user object to get the name method off of it, but it creates the method user_name. And you're never going to be able to grep for that. And it saves like a little bit of code, definitely, but it saves this very obvious, very knowable code. So this one I actually shy away from using delegates in most cases, and I'll just write out the methods manually because sometimes I like to hear the clackety of my keyboard. There's a reason I have a clackety keyboard. STEPH: You want to get your money's worth. You want to clackety as much as possible. Yeah, I'm also not a fan of delegates. This may be a lie, but I don't know that I've actually ever used it. I've worked with it, but I can't think of a time that I've implemented delegates. Maybe that's a lie, but I'm going to say it anyways because that feels true, at least in the last couple of years. CHRIS: I feel like that could be true for the last couple of years. I would be surprised if you have never even added to a delegates line. Because that's the thing, you can just keep shoveling stuff into them as well. So I would put money on you having used it at some point and then just forgotten about it. But who knows, maybe not. STEPH: This is where we play two truths and a lie and that one's my lie. [laughs] Yeah, that's also fair about adding to it because if that's already defined and it's easier to add to it, I don't know. Who knows what past Stephanie has done, probably some wild stuff. CHRIS: It's unknowable at this point. It's lost to the sands of time. But looping back to the core thing of this refinement and the module, I think I'm leaning in the direction of doing that and unwinding my wrapping and wrapping layer thing. Because obviously, as I talked about...I think it was the previous episode or maybe two episodes ago. There was conceptual complexity to the additional wrapping layer. Even as I was fully in the context of working on that, I was still getting myself confused in either triple wrapping or then unwrapping too much or whatever. And these are the concerns with this type of code. So moving away from that feels better, having just a single layer of context wrapping around a given value. And then the other thing it's actually just a lot less code, and it's less prone to error, I think. That's my hope. I have to look into exactly how refinements get used, but I noticed in a couple of places that sometimes we were wrapping with this local value object that gave us the bimap method, and sometimes we were forgetting to. And so, I could see that being a very subtle, easy way to introduce failures into the app that would be hard to catch just by looking at it. So I think having a more global refinement...although I think that's sort of a contradiction, a global refinement because I think refinements are meant to be local. But anyway, I'm going to look into it because it's a much more concise code sample than what I have. Yeah, I'm going to poke at that a little bit. But it was an interesting exploration of some different things. And then it forced me to consider why am I so resistant to monkey patching at this point, especially in this particular case where I think it's okay-ish? STEPH: That's a good question. Do you have any insights? I am also resistant to monkey patching. I feel that pain and also that timidness of diving into that space. But I'm curious, have you figured out any other reasons that you really prefer to avoid it? CHRIS: I think this one falls into that sort of...what's the word? Like tribal knowledge of we've been burned by it in the past and therefore we build almost a...religious is too strong of a word but that sort of cultural belief. This is a thing that we do not do because of the bad things that we've experienced in the past. And there are a lot of things that fall into that experiential negative space. So with monkey patching, things that I know we can run into is if I introduced this bimap method, but I introduce it subtly differently than the library will eventually, then they could eventually introduce it themselves. And suddenly, I have this fork of my code expects it to work this way, but you've now implemented it that way. I no longer can upgrade. This is a critical piece of infrastructure in my app. I'…

    Full show notes at the publisher
    306: If You Want To Go Far, Go Together Aug 31, 2021
    Show notes

    In this episode, Steph and Chris talk about things they've changed their minds about over the course of their careers as software developers. Steph talks about as it turns out, arm chair rests are good, feature flags and comments are also good, she's changed her mind about how teams structure the work that each person is doing at once, and believes strongly in representation in the field. Chris is not a fan up upgrading his operating system and when he first started out, he gravitated towards learning dynamic languages, and since then, much prefers functional languages, static typing or more broadly, static analysis. He also no longer believes in the 10x engineer, and also very much believes that URLs matter on the internet. So basically, don't call them single-page applications; call them client-side applications instead! Arq Karabiner-Elements Kent C. Dodd’s Epic React Course The Art of Code Comments by Sarah Drasner Gary Bernhardt: Functional Core, Imperative Shell Steph's Standing Desk - curved top - 55x28 Transcript: CHRIS: I still have dreams that I missed an entire semester of math class, and now it's time for the final. I don't know that I'm ever going to grow out of that. STEPH: That's wild. CHRIS: You don't experience that? It's a mixture of I'm in elementary school, but it's a college final. Like, the physical school that I'm in is my elementary school, but it's a calculus college course that I missed. And now it's time for the final, and I won't graduate college as a result. But it's also high school at the same time. Just every part of education sort of melded together into this nightmare scenario. Do you not experience that? I thought this was normal. STEPH: [chuckles] Not in a very long time, not since I was in college. But I'm imagining this very cute, young Chris showing up with a backpack to the calculus final like, "Oh no." [laughs] CHRIS: Yeah, pretty much, yeah. I really thought I would grow out of it at some point. But it shows...I think it manifests when I have anxiety about something else in the world, and then I have a math terror dream. STEPH: That's your stress sign. That's your terror dream. CHRIS: Apparently. STEPH: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. Hey, Chris, how's your week going? CHRIS: Oh, it's going fine. Yeah, I'll go with fine. I had to upgrade my operating system. Enough things had stopped working or seemed to be pestering me about it regularly, which normally I'm going to ignore that for as long as I can. That's sort of where I'm at in the world these days. Like, I don't want to upgrade because I don't know what's going to break and whatnot, but then things had broken already. Text messages were no longer showing up on my computer. And it turns out that the primary way that I interact with text messages is by replying to them through my computer. I don't want to type on my phone, that's not a thing. I'm already grumpy enough about text messages, to begin with, that I will regularly respond switching to email, and then I'll go off from there. But yeah, they stopped working, it stopped connecting. And then I got this really weird message from Apple when I tried to sign in. And I was like, I feel like I should at least try to upgrade to the new operating system, which I think has been out for a long time, and I've just been ignoring it. But then I had the added problem of I didn't have enough space on my computer to install it, which I tried once before. So I downloaded the installer, but the installer downloader doesn't check whether or not you have enough space to do the install. So it's just like, hey, so you know how you didn't have enough space? Well, we took up the remainder of it, and now you can't do anything about it. And the installer is hidden somewhere in the computer. So at one point, it just went away, and then suddenly had a lot of space on my computer. But finally, I decided to bite the bullet. I found a bunch of caches on my computer. So there was a cache for my backup utility, which is called Arq, A-R-Q, which was a lot of space. It was like 20 gigs or something like that. So it was like, sorry, you have no more cache. I'm pretty sure my computer's going to light on fire the next time it tries to do a backup because it has no cache to rely on, and it's got to try a lot harder, pull a lot more data down. I don't know what it does, but whatever. It's going to do that. And then, I found the more general application caches on the computer. Spotify had like six gigs of cache. Well, what are you doing? Aren't you streaming from the internet? Stop it. That's not okay. That is not acceptable. Yarn had three gigs. I was like, what is everybody doing? And I busted all of these. I threw away everything, and my computer seems to be doing fine after the fact. So, were the caches even doing anything? I ask. Anyway, so I upgraded, and then some stuff didn't work. And so then I had to find the versions to make stuff work. The particular one that stood out was Karabiner-Elements, which I used to make my mechanical keyboard do the right things for the function keys. That stopped working. And I tried to upgrade it to the newer version because I figured okay; they probably hopefully released a new version, but it failed in the upgrade process. And it turns out the secret was I had to upgrade to an intermediate version. I was on 12.3, and I needed to go to 13.4. But in between, I had to go to 12.10. And if I went to 12.10, then the upgrade to 13...everything about it was everything that I hate about upgrading software. It's like, I just know it's working right now, and I feel like if I even just look at it wrong, this whole tower of software is going to fall over. The worst thing, the thing that I have not been able to fix, is now I use iTerm as my terminal, my terminal emulator as it were. And I typically run with transparency mode on which some people look at and say, "Wow, that's a choice." And I say, "I kind of like it. I don't know; it makes me feel like a hacker or something." I don't know, whatever. [chuckles] Let me live my life. But for some reason, switching to Big Sur, the version of OS X that I'm on now, iTerm doesn't have transparency anymore. And I just haven't been bothered to fix it yet. But, man, I got rambly. I clearly have some feelings about upgrading software. STEPH: You have so many feelings. The fact that you kept going...People can't see me, but I'm just dying because of that whole story. [laughs] CHRIS: I kind of felt like I had to get through it. I had to exorcise the demons, tell my tale, and then be done with it, which I think I'm at now. STEPH: When I start laughing that hard, [laughs] I try to hide from the camera view because I want you to keep going for people to listen. CHRIS: But what's fun is you bob and weave. You'll hide for a minute, and then you'll come back and be like, okay, I'm composed, never mind. And then you'll just fade off to the side again. So yeah, but I powered through. [laughs] STEPH: Oh, all right, there is so much there. [laughs] Upgrading is the worst. I agree with that. That was actually something I ran into earlier this week. Well, it was a mix of where upgrading presented a problem and then upgrading something else resolved that problem. And so that was an adventure where I shared a tweet. I can link to it in the show notes as well. But Ruby was just taking up 100%, a full core, just all the time, and I couldn't figure out why. I wasn't doing anything with Ruby. We weren't talking at the moment, but it was just turning up one of those 100% CPU or higher. And so then I did some searching. And I did find the resolution, which was to upgrade the Listen gem because there was something in the Listen gem that didn't fully support Big Sur. Is that the name of the thing that I am on? CHRIS: That's the new one, yeah. I know because I've just upgraded to it. I have thoughts on the matter. [chuckles] STEPH: Cool. [chuckles] Yeah, when I upgraded to Big Sur. But then someone had kindly marched in to fix it, then upgrading resolved that problem. And Ruby is back to a peaceful level as to the amount of process, the amount of CPU that it should be taking up. Transparency mode, I'm thumbs up on it. I like how you called that out, how that's a choice. And I'm with you on that choice, although I didn't realize that's broken. I guess I just hadn't...I guess I don't care deeply enough that I've tried to restore my transparency, but you're telling me to hold on. CHRIS: We're going to get realer now in this moment. So I have a very old version of iTerm because it has a different way of going fullscreen than the default operating system level fullscreen. I really hate that it animates to fullscreen, and it doesn't quite fill the full screen. Like, it still had a border around it or something. So I have a very old version of iTerm that I've been running with forever, and I refuse to upgrade in any way as a result of I want to cling to this old version of things working. But as a result, I think I finally hit the end of the road on that. This is like years running now too. I remember I kept it in a Dropbox folder so that each time I upgrade or get a new computer, I'm like, okay, good. I still have my old special version [chuckles] of iTerm. But I think that time is over and I got to find...I feel like there are new terminal emulators out there. It's like Alacritty and other stuff that people talk about. So maybe it's time for me to try and find something new as long as I can get that transparency because I want to feel like an uber lead hacksaw. STEPH: You have such a brand of new-new that I'm now discovering that you are also a software hoarder, so you have both in your personality. [chuckles] CHRIS: There was a period early on in my software career that was like, oh, I got to find all this stuff. I got to figure things out and configure it. And then I was like, wow, that's taking up a lot of my time, I should stop it. And I think since then, I haven't upgraded anything. If you go look at my .files, I don't know the last time I pushed to them, but it's been a while. I'm still doing things, of course, but not as much. I know the cost of it, and I know the cost of maintenance. And really, this is an allegory for software overall. This isn't just about our local development environments, but entropy exists in software. Software does not exist at rest, and it will decay over time. And so the idea of we've worked with so many clients where they're like, yeah, we're on Ruby 1.8, and it's Rails 0.9. So okay, all right, well, we're going to have to deal with that, it turns out. We can't just keep ignoring that. So really, it's the same story played out but in my local hoarder cavern. STEPH: There was a part of the saga, the story that you shared with the installer and that you don't have enough space, and it took up the rest of the space, and you can't do anything. I'm very nervous; what happened to your stuff, your space? How did that resolve? [chuckles] CHRIS: I finally bit the bullet. And so I have a bunch of...I've tried a bunch of the different pieces of software that will visually analyze your disk space. So they crawl the whole directory starting from the very root of your computer, and it will be like, all right, applications has this much, and the library directory in your home directory has this much. Here are all of the different places that stuff might be hiding on your computer. And then you can visualize and be like, okay, that's where the most of it is. Node modules, as an aside, we did not choose an efficient way to approach how to put code on my computer because Node modules take up a lot of space on my computer, but they're so spread out. Multiple times I've seen people share a version of rm -rf, and then it's some subshell that does find every Node modules directory underneath a code folder. So you can find every single Node module and just blow them away. That will regain you some space. But that was not the solution this time. I've tried lots of piecemeal solutions over time. But eventually, the thing that got me there was just busting all of those caches. So I cleared the backup utility, Arq's cache. I cleared a bunch of them, Spotify Yarn, et cetera. And that cleared enough space for the installer to actually run. And then, once that was done, the installer program itself was no longer around, so I reclaimed that space. But it was this weird chicken and egg thing where I had to have enough space to complete the installation such that the installer could go away. And now...actually, let me see what my hard drive looks like now. So somehow, according to the Macintosh hard drive info, I have 50 gigabytes of available space, which is really frustrating because there were a number of weeks where we went into a Bike Shed recording, and I was like, I have one gigabyte. I'm not safe right now because this audio is going to be more than that. And so I don't know how now I'm sitting at 50. I guess all those caches that I cleared and the installer being gone probably puts me in a good spot. But anyway, I'm living in an upgraded, wonderful world. As an aside, Big Sur is ridiculously rounded and colorful and almost cartoonish. They're really leaning into the iOS vibes. And I'm not sure it's my personal aesthetic, but that's fine. I spend most of my time in the terminal anyway. But I think that's enough of me ranting about upgrading my operating system, which apparently I had a lot to say about. But what else is up in your world, Steph? STEPH: I do appreciate the ranting, though. You're not often grumpy, and when you are, it's quite humorous. [laughs] I really enjoy the grumpiness. And it's often a painful process. So I appreciate all of that story. Something that I really need to share with you and get off my chest is a couple; I don't know, x number of episodes back, you and I were talking about computer chairs. And I bragged about the fact that I have a computer chair that has no armrest, and I love it. I love my chairs like this, and it's wonderful. And I just think it's the best way to live. And it turns out that that's bad because I happened to go see a massage therapist who's also very well-skilled in physical therapy and other areas. And they were talking to me about my desk setup. And I mentioned the fact that I get these typical headaches, and I have my chair, but there's no armrest. And they're like, "Oh, that would do it." I was like, "Why? I like my setup. What's wrong with it?" And they're like, "Well, if you don't have armrests, then your back is having to compensate and to hold up your arms and your shoulders all day. So while you're typing, you're using more muscles to then hold that. And then they eventually tighten and contract, and then that can cause headaches." So in case, I have led anyone astray into having no armrest, they are apparently very important to not having headaches or having your back overworked to the point that you have headaches,…

    Full show notes at the publisher
    305: Burnout & Bugs Aug 17, 2021
    Show notes

    This week Chris talks about Bifunctor optics and introduces an app he's been liking recently called CleanShot X, which is a replacement for the built-in screenshot utilities on OSX. Steph talks about her experience using New Relic Browser Stats to troubleshoot a slow page and burnout. Who's feeling it? (Raise your hand.) How do we identify it? What do we do about it? Svelte Is Beloved! - Stack Overflow Survey Bifunctors CleanShot X Next.js Image Transcript: CHRIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. And we're off the rails already, everybody. It's going to be a good one. Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, how's your week going? STEPH: Hey, Chris, it's going really well. We talked recently that I have a new laptop. So I have been migrating the things that I'm accustomed to over to my new laptop, but I also love that clean, fresh start. So as part of that fresh start, I was like, what if I use Safari? What if I just switch? I'm a Chrome user, for the record. I'm pretty sure you know that, but just to share that. I was like, well, what if I just switched and I try out Safari for a while? So that was the thing. CHRIS: So I heard the words try and the phrase that was the thing, but I'm going to probe a little deeper. How'd that go? Was it good, great, not so great? STEPH: Honestly, it was fine. I did enjoy being in a new environment to see how Safari handles bookmarks and then also the inspector. So it was novel to be in a different browser where I really don't spend much time in a different browser other than when I need to test this specific UI bug or things like that. But the reason that I ended up migrating back to Chrome was frankly for Chrome profiles because I really like that I can have this clear separation now between my work life and my personal life, and then it also keeps me signed in. So my personal email versus my thoughtbot one versus before the Chrome profiles, which I'm not sure how recent of an addition that is where Chrome introduced that feature. But before, I just always had to be signed into both, and it was just all together in one spot. But now I really like that I can separate. And it's more intentional where I'm like, oh, I'm going into work mode, so I just want that profile versus I do need to hop over to my personal side for a while. So that was the thing that brought me back. CHRIS: Interesting. I don't take advantage of that at all. I know of the feature, but it's never really called to me. And if anything, I do the opposite. So specifically, this doesn't work in the browser, but on my phone, I use the iOS Gmail client, and I use the unified inbox. So I just have everything come together. And I subscribe to the idea of, I don't know, it's all work and stuff. And hopefully, people aren't sending me a lot on the weekends, and I will defer and snooze and all of that. But that holistic view pulls me in. And so it's interesting that you're just on the other side of that. It totally makes sense. I actually think I'm wrong here. I think I'm doing the wrong, bad thing. But it's interesting just the way we're on the two sides of that. STEPH: I can see the merits for your approach where it all goes to one place. So you have one place to go and triage, and I think that makes total sense. I haven't triaged my personal life well enough that I want it to come into my work life. And that's the one that needs the more immediate response typically. So I want to prioritize all of my work emails and focus on that and then have my personal ones more like, okay, I've got some time, and I want to check on this. But I don't want to blend those together. Because frankly, I need to do some more triage on the personal side if I'm just going to bring it all into one space. CHRIS: Interesting. Yeah, I would almost view it from the other point of view of I want to protect my personal space, and this is obviously not what I do based on what I just said but protect my personal time so that when it's evenings or weekends or whatever, that I'm not seeing work emails in there. I do my best to snooze them and get them out of the way. But if they are coming in, maybe there's something I need to respond to or, I don't know, maybe it's FOMO in a certain way, FOMO but professional FOMO. I don't really know. It's interesting that that's the feature that brought you back. But overall, how was your experience using Safari? I have heard loosely that now most of the browsers are evergreen; even Edge has really caught up and is now implementing features in a similar way. And so Chrome, Firefox, and Edge are very similar. And my understanding is Safari is the one that actually lags behind or even holds back web standards and implementations and things like that. So, did you find any rough edges of that sort, or was it otherwise just fine, and it was mostly the profile stuff that made you switch? STEPH: It was honestly just fine. I also may have not used it long enough to run into any of those rough edges. But overall, it was just fine. It worked. I just got to that point where I've run into this situation before where I'm signed into my personal email, and then I'm signed into my work email. And then I'm going to Google Hangouts, and Google Hangouts gets confused, and it's like, which person are you? And then I have that moment of where I have to sign out of one, or sometimes it just gets complicated. And what I found with profiles is that that's just never an issue. I don't have to worry about it anymore. So yeah, overall, Safari was fine. I wouldn't mind going back to using it. I just really like the profile feature. This was one of those moments where it helped me notice how much I really liked that feature because I had just opted into it a while back. But this was that moment where I was like, oh yeah, I really miss that. So I'm going to go back to it. CHRIS: The thing you said a minute ago about which person am I? [chuckles] There's a deep philosophical underpinning there, but I've definitely struggled with that and trying to trick the browser into it. So Trello is the one that I'm struggling with that right now. I am one human in the world, I assure you. But GitHub gets this; GitHub plays the game correctly where I'm one human, but I have multiple internet identities. I am the work person. I am the open-source person. And I'm able to route notifications and things to the different inboxes based on the organization that they're part of, et cetera. And I really liked that, that GitHub seems to understand that I am a human that is multifaceted, whereas Trello does not. And so I use Trello in a professional context a lot, but it's my personal...like, I would have to create a distinct account on Trello. And I'm like, Trello, that's not true; I'm still one person. Just understand this Trello organization is a separate facet of my existence. Got on my soapbox on that part. The other thing I want to say is I do feel bad about the fact that I'm just on Chrome. Because increasingly, Chrome has got so much of the market share, and it's becoming the new deeply dominant thing. And so I want to be the agent of change or like, no, we should use different browsers, and we should support them and make sure that we're testing against them and all of that. And then I'm just on Chrome all the time, and I feel bad about it. But it's one of those like; I have so much muscle memory and built-up knowledge around how to use Chrome. And I've just used it for so long now that the switching cost would be pretty high, I assume. I actually haven't even really tried, but I feel bad about it. I'm now saying two things which are I feel bad about it, and I've never even really tried. So I don't feel great in this moment, but these are my truths. STEPH: [laughs] Well, I can plus-one your truths. Those resonate with me. Well, there's always stuff that I am trying that's new all the time. So I feel like I need some constant in my life until I'm ready for other things to be the constant in my life. And then I can muck around with which browser I'm using and change other things. And you have to be in that moment. You have to be ready for it. So going back to a thing that you said a minute ago about separating your work life and your personal life, I very much like that framing, and that's a nice segue, frankly. And it's something that I've been thinking about where you and I often start with technical topics. But I have a very people-centric topic that I'd love to chat with you about today, and it is emphasis on burnout. And who's feeling it? How do we identify it? What do we do about it? And that's been very much on my mind because I have noticed a lot of people around me, including myself; I just feel like we are more inclined to experience burnout right now or are going through it actively. And it feels even more important to have those conversations with each other and with ourselves to talk about what does it look like when we're burned out? How do we recognize when we're there? Because often, when we are burned out, it's not something that happens gradually, or at least it's not something that we notice happening gradually. It's like, okay, I'm fine. And then suddenly, okay, I'm burned out. And I'm at a place where then I can't really focus. I feel overwhelmed. I'm drained. For anyone that is less familiar with burnout, one, hooray, and then two, burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion that can be caused by excessive and prolonged stress. So then that's what leads to us feeling very overwhelmed, emotionally drained, unable to meet constant demands, or those are the things that are causing our burnout. So I have been doing what I typically do when I'm thinking about a particular topic, and then I'm looking to gather knowledge and information is I try to go pretty wide where I start looking for podcasts, books, just people that are having similar conversations and trying to synthesize a lot of the information that they're sharing. And I have found some really good stuff. The question is now, what does one do once one has that content, and then how do you bring it back and help apply that content to yourself and then people that are around you? So I have some thoughts there, but before I go further, I'm curious, what's your experience with burnout? CHRIS: I think for me, I've been somewhat lucky in that I don't think I've ever really got into an acute period of burnout, but I've definitely had periods where I just felt weighed down. And there are ebbs and flows of life, and of work, all of those things. There is something that I've been thinking about recently, which is the inherent nature of the work that we do where consistently we're working on something where we don't quite know how to do it, and we're struggling, and we're struggling. And finally, we figure out how to do the thing, how to trick the computer into doing what we want. And then the minute we do that, in trying to encode, ideally, we're automating that away. And we take that solved problem, and we just ship it off. And then, we pick up the next unsolved problem from the list. This isn't entirely true, but it feels like sometimes unspecificity in sort of I'm just working on things that are underdefined, underspecified, and I'm trying to solve little puzzles constantly. And, I don't know, I was feeling that recently of the nature of the work was burning me out. And I think earlier on in my career; I definitely experienced this in a certain way. And then, in the middle of my career, there was this perfect inflection point of my skills and the level of tasks that I was going for. But then, the further I got into my career, the more I tend to take the weird underspecified stuff and anything that's relatively clear I'm giving to other folks on the team. I'm like, "Oh, here's this well-defined piece of work here. Can you go implement this admin page?" Whereas I am doing the investigate integrating with third-party platform XYZ that uses a SOAP API that isn't documented. I'm like, okay, cool. Let me roll up my sleeves and figure out what that means. And I noticed in my work that that was starting to weigh on me, and I was able to shake that off and shift around some of the tasks that I was doing. But that was a particular form where the work itself was weighing on me. And I took a step back, and I was like, why do we do the things that we do as developers? Because there's something just fundamental like, you have to enjoy that nature of challenge and constantly escalating challenge to a certain degree, I think, to really like this work, but it can be a lot sometimes. So I feel like maybe that's a slight digression from the topic, but it was a thing that I was feeling in this space. And that's a little bit of my story. STEPH: Well, the beautiful thing about that is it highlights everybody experiences burnout differently. So that could really be how someone is experiencing burnout where they're taking on all these very complicated, different tasks, and they're feeling just worn down by that and that they're not able to meet demand. And they get to that point where maybe they lose their interest in tech and coding because they have pressed too hard in one direction. And so then they need to take a step back. As for me, I've been thinking back over the last couple of months because there was once or twice where you and I had, I think a conversation here on The Bike Shed where I shared that things were okay, but I didn't feel like my normal self. I was losing some of my interest and energy for technology and coding. And I'm very fortunate; I love what I do. So the fact that I wasn't feeling that interest was a really big sign to me that something's different; something feels off. And it does vary depending on the client that I'm working with. And I think feeling that burnout then was a mix of some of those client pressures that I was feeling and that I was working perhaps too many hours as I was very interested in that client's success. And then the other stuff was more personal because we only have, to borrow from the spoon theory, we only have so many spoons to give. And so if you have a lot going on in your personal life as well, that's going to detract from the energy that you also have to give to work. Are you familiar with the spoon theory? CHRIS: I am not. STEPH: I recently heard about it, and I can't stop using it now because I really like it. But it essentially...and there's a really great article that we can link to so others can read about it because I'm not going to remember exactly who came up with this theory. But the idea is that each spoon represents a unit of energy. And let's say if you start each day with only ten units of energy and you use spoons to represent that, as someone needs energy from you, maybe it's work, maybe it's a personal commitment, maybe you're dealing with a chronic illness, then yo…

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    304: MEGA Crossover Episode (The Bike Shed x Rails with Jason x Remote Ruby x Ruby on Rails Podcast) Aug 11, 2021
    Show notes

    This is the sweeps week episode, the epic crossover episode, the mega episode! We have a very special episode as Chris, and Steph teamed up with the hosts of three other podcasts to bring you one giant, mega Ruby episode! In this episode, you'll hear from the hosts of Remote Ruby, Rails with Jason, and Brittany Martin, the host of the Ruby on Rails podcast. They cover the origins of their shows, their experiences as hosts, and why podcasting is so important in keeping the Ruby community thriving. Remote Ruby Rails with Jason Ruby on Rails podcast *Transcript: * STEPH: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. This week we have a very special episode as Chris, and I teamed up with the hosts of three other podcasts to bring you one giant, mega Ruby episode! In this episode, you'll hear from the hosts of Remote Ruby, Rails with Jason, and Brittany Martin, the host of the Ruby on Rails podcast. This episode was so much fun to record, and we have Brittany Martin to thank as she organized and moderated this special event. So without further ado, here is the mega Ruby episode. BRITTANY: Welcome, everyone. We have a whopping seven podcast hosts recording today. So, listeners, you are in for a treat. This is the sweeps week episode, the epic crossover episode, the mega episode. We're going to need our editor to insert some epic sound effects right here. Announcer: The mega episode. BRITTANY: So let's go ahead and introduce the crew today. I am Brittany Martin from the Ruby on Rails Podcast. CHRIS OLIVER: I'm Chris Oliver from Remote Ruby. JASON CHARNES: I am Jason Charnes, also from Remote Ruby. ANDREW: I am Andrew Mason, also from Remote Ruby. STEPH: And I'm Stephanie Viccari from The Bike Shed. CHRIS TOOMEY: I'm Chris Toomey from The Bike Shed. JASON SWETT: And I'm Jason Swett from Rails with Jason BRITTANY: Today, we're going to cover the origins of our shows, our experiences as hosts, and why podcasting is so important in keeping the Ruby community thriving. Now I know personally, I really enjoy the origin story behind Remote Ruby. So, Chris Oliver, could you kick us off with that? CHRIS OLIVER: Yeah, we can go back maybe to the first time that Jason and I met, which was Jason emailed me out of the blue and was like, "Hey, are you going to be at RailsConf?" And I wasn't planning on it, but it was over in Kansas City, like four hours away from me. I was like, "No, I'm not going, but I'll meet you." So we went and drove over there and met and have been friends ever since. And Jason had the idea of doing an online meetup. And I'll let him explain where that started and turned into the Remote Ruby Podcast. JASON CHARNES: I thought it would be a good idea. There weren't any online meetups. This was pre even the idea of shutting down the world for a pandemic. And maybe I was just too soon because I got Chris to speak at the first one, and we had 40, 50 people. I spoke at the next one, and there were 20. And by the third one, there were five of us. So it wasn't really a super sustainable thing for me to do. So Chris and I got together and said, "What if we tried podcasting?" Chris, you hadn't really done your own podcast at that point, had you? CHRIS OLIVER: No, I don't think so. And you and I were just having calls every week or whatever just to hang out and chat. And we were like, why don't we just record that and publish that as a podcast? And here we are. JASON CHARNES: Yeah. So we've been doing that. I think we started in 2018, so yeah, three years in June, and somehow people still keep listening to us talk but probably because we brought along our friend, Andrew. ANDREW: Wow. Okay. No, that's not true. But yes, I was a guest on Remote Ruby before I joined as a host. And not to get into the details, but I was on another podcast, and something went down, and I no longer was on that podcast anymore. And Chris and Jason were like, "Do you want to come hang out with us?" And I was like, [chuckles] "Absolutely." So I started doing that, and at the same time, I also started The Ruby Blend with Nate Hopkins and Ron Cooke. And so we were doing that for a while until that had to tragically shut down. But I'm still here with Jason and Chris. I guess I should also mention that Jason Swett gave me my start in podcasting a month or two after I started full-time as a Rails developer on a now archived show called The Ruby Testing Podcast. BRITTANY: Which is the perfect segue because Jason Swett was also my first opportunity to guest on a podcast. So I was already hosting, but I hadn't guested, which is kind of the opposite order. So, Jason, do you want to tell the origin of where Rails with Jason came from? JASON SWETT: Sure. I'd been involved with podcasting since around 2016. I somehow ended up on the Ruby Rogues Podcast and was on there for maybe a year or so. And then, somehow, I got the idea that I could start my own podcast. And as an experiment, I started a podcast that I called The Ruby Testing Podcast, which I figured was sufficiently narrow that I could get some traction. And to my surprise, guests actually said yes to coming on the show. And also, to my surprise, people actually listened to the podcast. That gave me some confidence. So maybe a year later, I broadened, and I changed from The Ruby Testing Podcast to just Rails with Jason. And I have been doing that for something like two years. BRITTANY: That's fantastic. I want to move to probably our most experienced podcast veteran, and that would be Chris Toomey. When I was learning how to code, I was listening to Giant Robots and then was excited for the transition that The Bike Shed took. Chris, I would love to hear the story of what it was like taking over a really popular podcast and really maintaining the drive behind it. CHRIS TOOMEY: So, as you mentioned, I had done a little bit of podcasting. It was about a six-month run where I was a co-host on Giant Robots, which was the original podcast of thoughtbot. And that was more in the business and sort of how do we build a software company? So at that point, I was running Upcase, which was the subscription learning platform that thoughtbot had. So I was talking about the inner details of the business, and the marketing tests, and A/B tests and things like that that I was doing. And every week, I was sharing my MRR rather transparently in that thoughtbot way that we do. I did that for, like I said, about six months and then took a while off. And in the background, thoughtbot had started up a new podcast called The Bike Shed, and that started October 31st of 2014. So The Bike Shed has been going for a long time now, and that was hosted by Derek Pryor and Sage Griffin. And they ran that for a number of years. I think it was about four years that the two of them worked collectively on that. But at some point, they both moved on from thoughtbot, and there was an opportunity for new hosts to step in. So I took over in August of 2018. So I've been doing this now for about three years. And so, for that first year, I took the opportunity to do a tour around thoughtbot and talk with many different individuals from the company and a handful of people external to thoughtbot. But I knew that there were so many great voices and ideas and points of view within thoughtbot that I really wanted to spend some time getting to know more of them personally and then sharing that as much as I could with the existing audience that The Bike Shed had. But secretly, all along, I was looking for a person to hang out with all the more so, and Steph was the person that was a perfect choice for that. And so, for the past two years, Steph and I have been chatting. And I will send it over to Steph to share a little bit of her point of view on that transition. But from my point of view, it's been fantastic. STEPH: I still remember exactly when we had the conversation. You were running The Bike Shed and doing an incredible job of just having weekly guests. And then you'd reached out to me and said, "Hey, would you be interested in doing an episode?" And I thought, "No, absolutely not. I can't podcast. I can't begin to do this." So you continued to convince me. And finally, you said something that resonated where you were like, "Well, we can just show up and record, and we don't have to publish. We can just see how it goes." I was like, that's a perfect safety net. I'm into that. So I showed up, and I think the first episode that you and I recorded ended up being titled What I Believe About Software. And it was a lot of fun. I realized I have a lot of things to say. And after that, I think it was another month or so. You continued interviewing more guests, but then you reached out to me and asked me if I wanted to be a co-host. And at that point, I was super jazzed about it, and it's been wonderful. It's been a roller coaster. I have learned a ton. BRITTANY: I'm kind of seeing a pattern here where over the last three years, it seems like Remote Ruby came into place, Bike Shed transitioned. That's when I took over as host of the 5by5 Ruby on Rails Podcast. We're going to call it the golden era of the Ruby Podcasts. But for me, I probably have the longest-running podcast. It was started back in 2009 on the 5by5 Network, but it's gone through many different hosts. And so, I took over roughly about three and a half years ago as the main host from Kyle Daigle. And then, just a couple of weeks ago, as I announced on my podcast, we took the podcast independent. We are now just The Ruby on Rails Podcast. And I'm starting to change the model where I'm bringing in more co-hosts. So that way, I can get those regular updates that I really appreciate on all these podcasts we have featured on the show today. I am curious. I want to talk about how we put together the episodes and plan out how everything's going to go down. I know for me, I'm currently a mix of interviews and co-host episodes. So I'd love to hear from Andrew. How do you plan out what Remote Ruby is going to be week to week? ANDREW: This is an easy question because we don't at all. We don't plan. We do have some guests that come on, and sometimes, they may get their Zoom link the day of; who’s to say? But we really don't have a plan. We don't talk about what we're going to talk about beforehand. We all just kind of show up, and I think we have that kind of relationship and flow where it always just works. JASON CHARNES: And I think part of that came from actually how Chris and I started the show because we were trying to make it as low stress as possible because we knew if we put a lot of pressure on it, we would stop doing it. Our first episodes were YouTube live links that we just shared out. And then in our next episodes, we were like, oh, we should start using some software to do this. And then eventually, we got an editor, but that same core of let's just keep it fun for better or for worse, I think, also affects our planning. BRITTANY: I've been lucky in the sense that I have guests sit on all three of the episodes. And I do want to give a compliment to The Bike Shed because it is very well run and very well planned. So I want to kick it over to Steph as to how putting together a Bike Shed episode looks. STEPH: Oh, thank you. That's wonderful to hear, by the way. That's wonderful feedback. So we predominantly use Trello to organize our thoughts. So we will have...and as we're capturing community questions that are coming in, so we will capture those on the board. And then, we will have a ticket that represents a particular episode. Usually, on the day of, we'll share some thoughts about, hey, these are the broad topics I'm interested in. And there's usually some hot takes in there, which is fun because the other person doesn't know exactly what's coming, and we can have real honest conversations on the mic. And then, every so often, we'll grab a beer, and we'll go through that list. And we'll chat through what sparks joy. What do we want to talk about? What would we like to respond to? And that's pretty much how we organize everything that we discuss. Chris, is there anything I've left out that you want to add? CHRIS TOOMEY: I think that mostly covers it. We do occasionally have interviews just as a way to keep some variety and different things going on, but primarily it's the sort of what's new in your world? And I find that those episodes are the ones that I think are the most fun to record for Steph and I when it really feels like a sincere conversation. I've recently taken to a segment I call good idea, terrible idea where I'm like, "I'm actually considering this, Steph. What do you think?" And live on-air, I'm getting Steph's feedback, and generally, we're very aligned. But every once in a while, she's like, "That's a terrible idea. Don't do that." And I love those, and I love being able to share that because I think it's really easy to talk about, you know, here's a list of things that are true about software, but really, everything depends. And it's all the nuance. And so, being able to share some of our more pointed experiences and then share the conversation that we have over those is hopefully very valuable to the audience but definitely the thing that I enjoy the most. BRITTANY: So kicking it over to Jason Swett, I really enjoy the interviews that you do. I'm curious, how do you select guests? JASON SWETT: Well, thanks. Selecting guests is tough. I had Peter Cooper on the other day, and I was telling him that I feel like every guest that I get on the show is the last guest I'm ever going to be able to get on the show. But somehow, I keep finding more and more guests. Early on, it was relatively easy because I would just find book authors, or if somebody else does podcasting, then it's fairly obvious okay, you're the kind of person who does podcasts, so I'll invite you. But it's a little bit tough because I don't want to invite people who aren't into podcasting and would be really thrown, although sometimes that happens. But let's see, sometimes I send an email out to my email list, and I'm like, "Hey, I'm looking for guests for my show." Sometimes I just tweet that I'm looking for guests. And sometimes I get some really interesting guests from surprising places. But at least in the start, it was looking for those authors and podcasters and the people who are known in the Ruby community. BRITTANY: I know for me, I strive to have at least 50% of my interviews be with people who've never been on a podcast before. And so that usually involves the top of the episode they're dry heaving into a paper bag. And I'm explaining to them, don't worry, about halfway through the episode, you're not going to remember that you're recording anymore. It'll be fine. And you know what? It's always fine. And so, I do love hearing from a wide variety from the Ruby community just because it really proves just how big it is. So I'm curious, could you host the podcast that you are currently hosting now if you weren't actively working in Ruby? ANDREW: I could because Chris is the one that has all the clout. I could sit back and make dumb jokes and memes during it. And as long as Chris is there, I think we'll be good. JASON SWETT: Yeah, I think I could because a good majority of what we talk about on Rai…

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    303: Dear Mr. Grumpy Goose Aug 03, 2021
    Show notes

    Chris gives a DB sessions update and talks bifunctors & command objects. Steph shares the coolness of a gem she's been using called after_party, and excitedly gushes about her new laptop. (Chris is hoping to hold off on replacing his until the end of the year and then they can compare!) The two then answer a listener question on retrospectives and how they've seen productive ones run, while giving some of their own helpful opinions on dos and don'ts. They're talking to you, Grumpy Goose! dry-monads gem attr_extras gem after_party gem What Went Well? - Bike Shed 123 What I Believe About Software - Bike Shed 172 Is Agile Over? - Bike Shed 299 Running a Retrospective - Upcase Transcript: STEPH: Cool. [laughter] CHRIS: Good. No, I like what you did there. STEPH: Yeah, I feel like we can get rambling on that one. CHRIS: It's been great. This is what the Bike Shed is at its best. It's the two of us just rambling and being like, well, what about this? And if it's this, then that, then these, and it depends. And it's complicated and it's nuanced. And what about the humans? That's the story of The Bike Shed right there. [laughs] STEPH: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And I'm CHRIS Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. Hey, Chris, how's your week? CHRIS: My week has been good. I have some updates actually on some topics from previous episodes. One of the things that I can update on is the discussion around the cookie versus the database store. So I had posed this as a thing that I was going to be doing in the app for a handful of reasons. Most notably, I wanted the ability to invalidate sessions from the server-side, wanted to have a little more control over that. And so that's a dream that the database-backed session store can do. Eventually, I have to make that actually work in the way that I want. But I was asking the question in that episode, which we can include a link to the specific episode, but I was asking the question of why don't we just do this all the time? The database-backed sessions seem better in all these ways. It's a lower overhead per request because you're just sending the session ID and the cookie instead of the whole payload of the session. You actually can have more data stored in it, a bunch of things that seemed really great. And then right after I introduced it, I figured out the thing. I figured out the secret. It's not a big issue, and we're going to stick with database session stores. But we have to be purposeful because it turns out they are essentially plain text in the database. And so if there's anything that you are putting into the session like say a social security number or an authentication token or other things which naturally I might have done if it was in a cookie that lives on the user's browser and never actually lives on the server, persists on the server, that seems fine to me. But now these things are getting stored in the database and that really changes the calculus, especially because if I'm not purposeful, they'll just stick around for forever. So social security is probably the most pointed example of this. If you happen to have a form in the app that accepts a social security number and you want that to persist through some number of other steps, not actually going to store the social security number in the database because that's a thing that I have actively chosen not to do. I need to send it off to some other system, but I do need to hold onto it for a few minutes. The session is a perfect place to put that unless the session gets stored in my database. STEPH: That's such a great point. I'm so glad you discovered that. And in our recent conversation, we were trying to think of the reasons why this isn't the default case. You may be headed in this direction, but this may also be timely, the fact that you're discovering this issue but also the fact that Rail 6.0 now has encrypted columns. Is that where you're headed with the fact that you can still keep session data in a database? CHRIS: That is a great question, and it is an intriguing option. But it's not the one that I'm going with here. I think broadly, my hope is to completely avoid ever persisting this data in the database, this truly sensitive user-specific PII or PCI or social security numbers or any of these other fancy acronyms that get collected together under the umbrella of I probably don't want that on my server. For those, I'm just opting to push them back into a cookie. So I'm using particularly a...In rails, it's fun because they have a fluent interface where you can just chain together things, so it's cookies.signed.encrypted.whatever, and then you go from there. But I'm using signed, encrypted cookie, which is essentially what the session store views; the cookie session store uses itself. So I'm basically reverting to the old session store behavior for specific values. So anything that is truly sensitive like that, I'm just saying, cool, that's actually just going to live in a cookie, and that will be it, but not leaning on the ability to encrypt the database sessions. There's just enough subtlety around that. There's so much volume of data if I do allow that sensitive data into the system that any failure, any exploit that happens, would be somewhat catastrophic. So, in my mind, this lowers the surface area and says, yeah, this data really never lives on the server. It comes with a request, and then it's gone after the fact. And that's the world I want to live in. STEPH: Yeah, that's super interesting. You're also raising questions for me that I hadn't considered when we originally had this conversation where there's necessity or that you're looking to store form data or sensitive data in that session as well. So that makes a lot of sense to me that for that type of behavior, we're going to separate that from the idea of authentication and the user session and still use encrypted cookies for those details. So it only stays with the user's browser, but then the actual authentication of a user that part could still live in the database. CHRIS: It is ending up being a weird Venn diagram of; this is data that I want to stick around but only sometimes and particular to the machine that the user is interacting with because the session is still associated with a cookie at the end of the day. So a user may have multiple sessions in the database-backed session version. It is somewhat interesting, and I'm going to see how it develops over time. But yeah, at a minimum, I have now found this edge case of like, ooh, okay, sensitive data, that's a thing, which is one of the reasons that I would reach for the session inherently. So it turns out, as always, it depends. Things are complicated. STEPH: It's a nice update. I like when we have closure to a question like that, especially so quickly. CHRIS: Love to provide that continuity. It's what I'm all about. But yeah, what's up in your world? STEPH: What's up in my world? I am excited that I have a new laptop. So I have been using a MacBook Pro for about the last...it's lasted me for a while. I think I've had it for a good four, four, and a half years, but that's on the fritz. The keyboard, in particular, the keys are popping off, and that's something that I could go get fixed. But I'm at the point that I need a new laptop. So I have a brand new shiny laptop. And I had the option to either go with a 16-inch MacBook Pro or to go with one of the new, fancy laptops that has the M1 chip. And I was torn for a little while because having the M1 chip sounds really cool and novel, and there's a lot of speed improvements that come with that. But I ended up going with just the 16-inch MacBook Pro; specifically, one, it's still very fast. It's very reliable. I can use this as my work machine and just know everything's going to work. That part feels really important to me. And then also the screen size is important. So any Mac laptop that is using the new M1 chip, I think they only go up to a 13-inch, right now, screen size. And I really want the 16-inch in case I am traveling, so I have that larger desktop. But I did do some research into the M1 just because I know about it. I know it's out there. I know it's hot. People are interested in it, but I didn't know a whole lot about it. So for anyone else that's like me and is curious about what the heck this M1 chip is, it's essentially Apple's foray into making their own processors. So traditionally, their machines have used Intel CPUs and third-party graphic processors, and other parts. And this introduction of the M1 chip really represents Apple's switch to having their own internal architecture rather than relying on those third-party parts. And it also means that all those features that were sourced from other parties like the CPU and its security are now being combined into a single chip, which has also led to some performance improvements. And while I was reading about the M1, there's a lot to go through, but the thing that stood out to me was this idea of Apple's Neural Engine. And I thought, well, that sounds super fancy. What is that? Are you familiar with Apple's Neural Engine? Have you read about that? CHRIS: I don't think I am. What all is that? STEPH: Yeah, good question. That was a question I was asking myself just recently. So essentially, their neural engine it's a microprocessor that specializes in the acceleration of machine learning algorithms. So it's really similar to how a GPU will focus on accelerating graphics rendering. And their neural engine or neural engines in general then focus on accelerating neural network operations. And the inclusion of a neural engine isn't something that's new because Apple introduced this into iPhones and iPads back in 2017 to support their features like Face ID and emoji, searching for photos with dog pictures. Siri speech recognition is also one that's using this engine and other machine learning tasks. But the sparkly stat that Apple is sharing with this new design is it's a 16-core design that can perform 11 trillion operations per second, which sounds very fancy, very fast. But it really got me thinking about how companies are working to improve, not just laptops but also our mobile devices to run machine learning software more efficiently, and then how that's just going to evolve and change all the different features that we use, and then how developers can integrate with this engine. I think currently, Apple hasn't shared much information about how this engine works, but I think they've exposed a few developer tools so people can still build features that will then use the power of this faster, improved neural engine. CHRIS: Oh, that's super interesting. I have still not really delved into machine learning or artificial intelligence, or any of that stuff in any real way. But it's one of those things like the number of mentions is ticking up. And at some point, I'm like; I probably have to pay attention to this, don't I? I'm still in the not paying attention to it camp. So if I'm understanding, though, you just described this wonderful feature, but you opted for the machine that does not have all the fancy stuff. You did not... STEPH: Exactly. [laughs] CHRIS: Okay, yeah. STEPH: Yes, it would have been nice. That would have been neat, but yeah, I needed a machine with a larger screen, all those good things. And that's still really fast, for the record. CHRIS: Oh yeah. I'm desperately hoping to make it to the end of this year. This is going to be a bit of a rumor mill here, but my understanding is the expectation is that Apple is going to release a 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 and the return of MagSafe, and the removal of the touch bar. And that sounds like my dream machine right there. I want that piece of hardware. I also seem to care a little bit less about the size of the laptop screen. I'm so often working at my desk with a large-format monitor that I'm connected to. And so, when I'm on the road, I want to optimize for portability when I'm traveling because I do it so rarely, and then I'm hopefully focusing on travel at that point. But we'll see if that remains true as the shape of my work changes and I start to not only work from home. And maybe I'll actually change my tune on that. But for now, that's my hope is to make it to that machine and then get one, and that it exists because right now, those are all rumors. STEPH: Well, I totally support this goal of yours. So that way, you can have that new-new, and then you can report back on what it's like, and then we can compare. Because I'll have the other version, the Intel CPU, and then you'll have the M1 chip, and we can see how our lives are different. CHRIS: You'll have the new, and I'll have the new-new, and that's how we'll categorize them. STEPH: [laughs] But yeah, I'm very much looking forward. Having a new laptop is always just such a fun feeling. It's just a clean space that I get to rebuild. It's like going through and prioritizing; what are the things that still spark joy? And then I get to only port over the stuff that I still really use all the time and want to keep. So I'm looking forward to getting it set up. CHRIS: I need to do that sometime soon. I'm like five years deep, at least on this machine. So I've been dragging along. Also, the hard drive is just completely full, and I regularly have to go through and delete things before we start recording because it turns out these audio recordings start as very large files. [chuckle] So it's almost a weekly thing where I'm just like, got to throw something out today. I don't know what. It's fine. I'm going to be fine. [laughter] I'm going to make it to the end of the year, and it's going to be great. STEPH: What else is going on in your world? CHRIS: Well, I wrote some fancy code, and I use fancy not necessarily as a good word. [chuckle] So I'm intrigued that the code could be described perhaps as clever or other words like that, which I think are very complicated words in the coding space. I tend to try and avoid this type of coding where I'm trying to introduce abstractions and clean things up, and remove duplication because I've been burned by that so many times in the past. But this time, I think maybe this time it'll work. So, in particular, there are two different areas of the application. There were two sets of refactorings, but they really went together. One is we have the idea of command objects within the application that we're working on. So there are a lot of cases where we need to save something to the database and then communicate something to an external API. And then presuming the results of that is a successful response from them, then unpack some data, make sure it's in the right shape, and then save something else to the database. And ideally, wrap that all in a transaction and keep everything together and then return some data at the end of it. So that whole sequential operation, I've been using dry-monads to model that. I've talked about this on a few previous episodes. I'm really enjoying it. The more I lean into it, the more I find that it is just a really great way t…

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    302: Observability with Charity Majors Jul 27, 2021
    Show notes

    Tune in as Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, an observability platform, Charity Majors joins Chris to drop some knowlege bombs such as: Thinking of observability as being about the unknown unknowns: Allowing for high cardinality, high dimensionality, ad hoc queries at any point in time. Comparing instrumentation to a muscle: It's a habit that needs to be developed and fostered. Sincere continuous deployment: 15 minutes or bust. And bunches more, since y'all know you hear her name come up at least once during every other episode! Honeycomb.io o11ycast Charity's blog (charity.wtf) Charity on twitter Charity's post on cost of not doing continuous deployment Charity's post - The Engineer Manager Pendulum Transcript: CHRIS: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. And this week Steph is taking a quick break, but while she's away, I was joined by a special guest, Charity Majors. Now, folks who've been listening to the show lately will know I've been mentioning one idea or another from Charity almost every episode these days. Charity's work spans from the deeply technical through to the deeply human. And across all of it, she brings such a wealth of experience in pragmatism while consistently providing grounded, actionable advice about how we can improve all aspects of our work. And to give a bit more context for those who aren't as familiar with Charity's work, she is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, which is an observability platform that we talk about more in the episode. Charity is also a prolific blogger, tweeter and speaker, and general leaver of digital breadcrumbs for the rest of us to hopefully follow. And Charity is also one of the hosts of the o11ycast podcast. That's observability, o11y podcast. And in fact, in the intro to the first o11ycast episode, Charity provides a beautiful summary of her approach to the varied work that we do. Quote, "I'm someone who's always been drawn to where the beautiful theory of computing meets the awkward, messy reality of actually trying to do things." And that quote rang so deeply true to me when I heard it and really encompassed what I see across the variety of work that Charity has shared with us. And frankly, I've been so impressed with the quality and quantity of wonderful content that Charity has shared over the years. I was really just thrilled to get the chance to sit down and talk with her directly. So without further ado, here's our conversation with Charity Majors. Thanks so much for joining us today, Charity. CHARITY: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. CHRIS: As I've mentioned on many an episode, I've been following your work for a while now. And at this point, I would say that just about every Bike Shed episode has a reference to you and some piece of work that you have put out into the world, whether it be a tweet or a blog post, or a conference talk or something. So I'm so grateful for all the work that you put out into the world and for taking the time to chat with us today. CHARITY: That's so exciting. Yay. I feel right at home here then. [chuckles] CHRIS: Fantastic. Well, I want to dive in. I think it's sort of the core of some of the conversation that we'll be having, which is around instrumentation and observability, and observability as a newer, noveler form of how we think about this space. But to give a bit of context, I was hoping you might be able to give just the quick summary for anyone who might not be as familiar with observability as a concept and what that means now, and Honeycomb as a product and how it offers affordances around observability and pushes that envelope forward. CHARITY: Yeah, I think of the observability as being about the unknown unknowns. For a long time, all of the complexity was really bound up in the app. You had the load balancer, you had the app, and the database. And all the complexity you could just attach to a debugger and step through it if you had to. But then we kind of blew up the app, the monolith, and now it's in services scattered to the winds, and you can't just trace it. And so observability is a way of passing that context along hop by hop so that you can actually slice and dice in real-time. And the hardest problem is not usually debugging the code. It's finding out wherein the system is the code that you need to debug. And observability, if you accept my definition, which is it's about unknown unknowns, that you should be able to ask any question of your systems, understand any internal state just by observing it from the outside, well, then a lot of things proceed from that, in my opinion. Like, you need to be able to handle high cardinality, high dimensionality. You need to be able to string together a lot of these high cardinality dimensions. You need to... any kind of schema or indexing scheme in advance is verboten because you don't know what questions you're going to need to ask. And so there's a lot that flows from that definition; arbitrarily-wide structured data blobs is the source of truth, et cetera. But at its heart, it's just about the concepts, that our problems are getting harder and harder. We don't get paged to go, "Oh, that again? Oh, that again?" CHRIS: [chuckles] CHARITY: Ideally, we fix those things. But we still get paged. What the hell is this? It's about allowing engineers, empowering them in a reasonable amount of time to be in constant conversation with that code that's out there in the world because most problems honestly we never get paged about. They're too subtle until they snowball, and they pick up other problems. It's like a hairball under your couch until it gets so big and so impacting that it actually does alert someone. And then you just start picking up the rock and be like, oh God, what's that? Well, we've never understood this. And that's why ops has such a reputation for masochism. [chuckles] CHRIS: Absolutely. There are so many little pieces in what you just said that really deeply resonate with me, although there is one facet of some of the way that you talk about observability that I find interesting. I'm someone who likes to cling to the perhaps unrealistic these days ideal of a monolith of what if we were to just keep everything in the same place and all the data lived together in one database, and I could have foreign keys, and consistencies, and asset compliance? CHARITY: Which you should do for as long as you possibly can. You should never impose more complexity on yourself than you absolutely need to. And I would say that it's never not better to have observability than the older paradigms of monitoring and so forth. Some of Honeycomb's biggest and best customers still use monoliths. But they still find it really valuable to be able to apply the principles. I think that it's the microservices revolution, if you will, that forced this set of changes. It was inevitable. The steps that I started talking about, like, somebody would have because the older way just became untenable when you started adopting containerization and a lot of these things that made everything suddenly a high cardinality including the number of applications you have. But it's never not better to have high cardinality tools and to be able to instrument your code for spans and tracing. Tracing is still valuable even in the monolith. CHRIS: Yeah. As I've observed and started to play around with Honeycomb, that's definitely what I've seen is I'm almost exclusively working in the context of monoliths and, like I said, clinging to them for as long as I possibly can, which isn't going to be forever. CHARITY: It's true. [chuckles] CHRIS: I recognize that truth, but already I see the value. And so Honeycomb is a platform that you've built that allows for this high cardinality, high dimensionality ad hoc queries at any point in time. And so the idea that I can come into the tool and say, "Huh, I've got a new novel problem today." I don't need to re-instrument my code. I can just ask a new question, and the system will responsively be able to answer that question, ideally. And that feels like it holds true in a monolith all the more so, like you said, in an SOA architecture. But even in my safe little playground of everything is in the same space, I still don't know how everything's working all the time if we're being honest. So being able to answer those questions feels meaningful. CHARITY: Totally. I think that one way of thinking about the SOA or microservices is that it pushes a lot of what was in the operations realm into a realm of development, and suddenly you're responsible for a lot more of the operating of your services, things like retries and backoffs, and load distribution, and thundering herds, and all these things that ops traditionally took care of. Well, now you have to think about them. So you need some ops tools, too. What I like about...of course I like everything about Honeycomb because we designed it for this problem. But it speaks in the language of variables, and endpoints, and functions, and not in the low-level language of proc IPv6 timeouts and stuff where I feel like ops has also traditionally been the translation layer between software engineers and their actual code in production. And it's time to start giving software engineers those tools in their own language. CHRIS: Yeah. I love that. And I'm very happy to have Honeycomb as part of an instrumentation stack, which actually shifts me to the next question, which as I look at Honeycomb, very quickly the first time I saw it, I was like, oh okay, this makes sense. I want this in the world. CHARITY: Oh, I like you. [laughs] Not all people are like you. CHRIS: It might have been my second or third look, but it was definitely...once I got it, I was like, oh yes, I absolutely want that. But now, the question that I have is I typically will have a collection of tools that exist in this space. And there's a weird Venn diagram overlap of well, there's logging, and there's error tracking, and there are APM performance tools, and there's metrics, dashboards. And my sense is that Honeycomb perhaps can or an observability tool more generally can subsume a bunch of those, but it's not clear to me exactly. I think I probably still want logging. I think I still want error tracking as a discreet service tool that I'm using but maybe not APM and maybe not metrics as a distinct thing. Maybe I can infer those from a tool like Honeycomb. But I'm wondering what's the current thought on that? CHARITY: Well, part of what you're seeing is just observability tooling is very new, and we haven't had time to grow up. And here I'm like, officially, we play very nicely with all other vendors, and none of us would ever try to compete or take away from each other's faces. But I do think that ultimately, logging pretty much the only real use case for it is security stuff, the security archiving, just keep every log light. It's gotten cheap enough, but it's not actually useful for debugging or understanding your system, not really. It's useful for compliance. It's useful for proving that you did something in the past. Most logs are just a pile of trash, but they can be useful trash. And I understand people's emotional want to hold onto them for a while, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with keeping some trash around for a while, while you make it...[laughs] Sorry, not to totally slam on logs, but they are trash. CHRIS: I love the analogies that we're going for. [laughs] CHARITY: But the thing about observability is I do think the kind of center of the world is these arbitrarily-wide structured data blobs from what you can infer logs, from which you can infer metrics, from which you can roll-up. So I do think that well metrics are the right first tool for understanding infrastructure. Like if you're Amazon and you're responsible for all this hardware and stuff, you should be asking yourself, is my service healthy? But if you're someone who's writing and shipping code on top of that service you care about, can my request complete? What is my user's experience? And that's observability's territory. So I think that ultimately, I do think metrics, logs, and traces all get subsumed under the observability umbrella and performance management, too, if the tools get built correctly. There will still be use cases. They will just get smaller, for logs, for standalone metrics tools. Honeycomb just launched our metrics product. Metrics is like a 30-year-old piece of technology. Prometheus and Datadog are going to be the last best metrics tools ever built. We have wrung the water out of this laundry. [chuckles ] But we aren't trying to compete with that. What we are trying to do is give people an on-ramp into Honeycomb. They've got decades’ worth of stuff. They've been corralling metrics, structuring them. You rely on them. You don't want to give them up. So yeah, let's feed them in. Let's give them an overlay. And number two, the more interesting use case for me is when you're a software engineer who's writing and shipping code, you do care about did the memory usage just triple, or is the CPU completely buzzing after I shipped my last change? But there's really only like three or four of those metrics that you really care about as system metrics. The rest are mostly legacy. CHRIS: I like the idea that aspirationally, Honeycomb is moving towards a place where given sufficient input data, given this arbitrarily-wide data blob with high cardinality, et cetera, that we can infer basically all of those others from it. But also speaking to also observability is somewhat new, and so we got to build a lot of product to get there and that idea that there is perhaps a space right now where you might be bringing together a few of these tools. But if there is a future world in which I can have one of these tools that just handles everything and tells me about my code and directs me to the line of code that I incorrectly instrumented, that would be wonderful. Happy to do the work in the interim to cobble it together from the pieces. CHARITY: The place in the meantime that we're at where all of these big vendors are acquiring other vendors and trying to put together...they're like, we have three pillars. Coincidentally, we have three products to sell you. It's like, it's not good for the users because when you're...like, you're sitting in the middle here. You've got your metrics dashboard. It's telling you that there's a problem. Okay, if you can't slice and dice and figure out what it is, you have to jump over into logs and visually correlate based on the times and hope no timestamps are wrong and try and find the thing. And then, oh, okay, so you want to trace it. So you've got to copy over and try and find that in your tracing product and hope that that would get sampled in. It's not good. You can't follow the question from the beginning. I have a problem to the end. I have a solution and back. And it's not linear. You're going to be following a trail; then you're going to need to back up, then you're going to find another trail. And then you're going to want us to zoom out and see who else is impacted. And you really can't back your way into that with different products. You have to start with the arbitrarily-…

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    301: Ants in the Cookie Store Jul 20, 2021
    Show notes

    What do you get when you mix a worm and a hammerhead shark? Also ants. Steph made some cool new discoveries in bug-land. She also talks about deploys versus releases and how her and her team has changed their deploy structure. Two words: feature flags. Chris talks about cookies: cookie sessions, cookie payloads, cookie footprints, cookie storing. Mmm cookies! The convo wraps up with lamenting over truthiness in code. Truthy or falsy? What's your call? Flipper Bike Shed - Ask a Question Form Transcript: STEPH: At the top of my notes for today, I have marauder ants and hammerhead worms. [laughs] CHRIS: I'm sorry, what? I lost you there for...not lost you, but I stopped following. I...what? Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, how's your week going? STEPH: Hey, Chris, it's been a good week. It's been busy, lots has been happening. I learned about a new creature that's in our backyard. They're called hammerhead worms. Have you ever heard of those? CHRIS: I've heard of hammerhead and worms, but not together. The combination is new and novel for me. STEPH: Cool. Cool. So take a hammerhead shark and a worm and combine the two and then you have a hammerhead worm. And it rained really heavily here recently because there's a tropical storm that's making its way up the East Coast. And when I was outside on the porch, I noticed that there were these new worms or worms that I'd never seen before on the back porch. And so I had to Google them to understand because they had the interesting hammer-shaped head. And I found out that they're called hammerhead worms. They're toxic worms that prey on earthworms. And they're basically immortal because if you cut them into multiple pieces, each section can regenerate into a fully developed organism within a few weeks, which is bananas. And a lot of people online highly recommend that you should kill them because they are a toxic predator and they prey on earthworms, which you want in your garden and in your yard. But I didn't, but I learned about them. CHRIS: Wow. That's got some layers there, toxic, intense worms that you can cut in half. And so does their central nervous system just spread throughout their whole body? Where's their brain? How does it...I don't have any real thoughts here. That's just a bunch of stuff, and it's awesome. Thank you for sharing. STEPH: I will warn you. I wouldn't read about hammerhead worms right before bed. Otherwise, you might have some nightmares because the way that they do prey and consume earthworms or other creatures that they prey on is the stuff of horror movies, which I find happens so much in nature, but them especially they fall into that category. So just be aware if you're reading about hammerhead worms and how they consume their food. Now I feel like everybody's going to go read. But as long as you have that warning, I feel safe sending you in that direction. CHRIS: Yeah, first thing in the morning on a very sunny morning, that is the time to do this research. STEPH: Exactly. He got it. I also learned about marauder ants because apparently, this is the day that I'm having. I'm learning about all these creatures. But I won't go into that one, but they're really interesting. And this one's thanks to someone on Twitter who shared, specifically @Rainmaker1973 is their Twitter handle if you want to go see what they shared about marauder ants. So I'll just leave that one for those that are curious. I won't dive into that one because I don't want to take us in the direction of that we're all about worms and ants now. CHRIS: Not all about worms and ants but definitely some. STEPH: But in technical news, I've got some stuff to share, but I was so excited about worms and ants that now I have to figure out which is the thing that I want to share from the week. So there's a couple of interesting things that I'd love to chat about with you, one of them, in particular, is there's been some interesting conversations going on with my client team around deploys versus releases and how we have changed our deploy structure, and then how that has impacted the rest of the team as they are communicating to customers as to what features are available. And there have been some interesting conversations around how to migrate this process forward. So to provide a bit of context, we were previously having very strict, rigid deploys. So we would plan our deploys typically every Tuesday. It was usually once a week. And then we would make sure that everything had been through QA, things had been reviewed and tested. And then we would have one of those more like grand deploys, things are going out. And then hey, if you need to get something into the deploy, let us know; we need to talk about it. So there was just more process and structure to that. And so deploy really mapped to the idea that if we are doing a deploy, then that means all these feature bug fixes are going out, and this is now the time that we can tell customers, "Hey, this new feature is available or this bug that you reported to us has now been fixed." We have since been moving towards a more continuous deployment structure where we're not quite there where we're doing continuous deploy, but we are deploying at least once a day, so it's a lot more frequent. And so this has changed the way that we really map the idea of the work that's being done versus the work that's actually available to customers. Because as we are merging work into the main branch, and then let's say if I'm working on a feature and then I merge that into the main branch and then push it up staging, we have an overnight QA process. So then overnight QA, if they say, "Hey, there's something that's wrong with this feature. It didn't quite meet the required specs," then they can kick that ticket back to me, but that's not true for my code. We could do a revert and take my code out at that point. But at this point, it's in main, and main may have been deployed at that point. So there have been some interesting strategies around how can we safely continue to deploy while we know we often have a 24-hour wait period for QA and to get sign-off on this work? But we want to keep moving forward and then also communicate that just because the code has been deployed doesn't necessarily mean that it's available to customers. There's a lot there. So I'm going to pause and see if you have questions. CHRIS: Well, first, I'm just super excited to talk about this. This is something that's been very much top of mind for me, and it's a direction that I want to be going more and more, so yeah, excited that you're pushing the boundaries on this. I am intrigued. I'm guessing feature flags is the answer about how you're decoupling that and how you're making it so that you've got that separation of deployment and actual availability of the feature. So, yeah, can you talk more about that? STEPH: Definitely. And yes, you're right. We're using feature flags, so we'll use the same scenario. I'm working on a feature, and I want to be able to release it safely, so I'm going to wrap it in a feature flag. And I'll probably wrap it, and maybe it's like a beta feature flag, something to indicate that this is a feature that's going to be available to all, but we don't actually want to turn it on until we know that it's truly ready to be turned on. So then that way, it's hidden, but then we can still merge it into the main branch. We can still have a deploy even if my code hasn't gone through QA at that point, but we know it's still safe to deploy. And then, QA can go to a staging environment; they can test it. And if they say, "No," it's fine because nothing was churned in production. But then, if it gets approved, then we can turn it on, and then we'll have a follow-up to then remove that feature flag. CHRIS: So some follow-on questions. I'm wondering about the architecture of the application. Is this like traditional Rails app rendering HTML on the server, or do you have any more advanced client-side stuff? And then I'm also wondering what you're using for the actual feature flagging, and those will probably inform each other. But what's the story on both of those fronts? STEPH: It's a traditional Rails application. So we're not using any other client-side application. It is Rails and rendering HTML. As for feature flags, so we're not using something traditional. And by traditional, I mean I typically have reached for Flipper in the past for managing feature flags. We're using more of a hand-rolled approach because there's a lot of context there that I don't know is necessarily helpful. But to answer your question, we essentially do have feature flags as columns in the database, and we can just check if they are enabled or disabled. And then that also allows us to easily turn it on, turn it off as well since it's just a database update. CHRIS: Okay, that makes sense. I think the nature of being a Rails application rendering HTML on the server like what you're doing totally makes sense in that context. I think it becomes a lot harder the more complex the architecture of your application is. So if you've got microservices, then suddenly you've probably got to synchronize across some of them, and that sounds like a whole thing. Or even if you have a client-side application, then suddenly you've got to serialize the feature flag stuff across the boundary or somehow expose that, which really does push the issue of we could just render stuff on the server and send it to the client and let that be good enough, then man, is stuff simpler. But unfortunately, that's not the case in a lot of situations. I'm expecting to be introducing feature flags on the app that I'm working on pretty soon. And again, we've got...so it's a Rails server-side thing. So there's going to be plenty of feature flag logic on that side. And then I'll need to do something to serialize it across the boundary and get it onto the client-side without ballooning every payload and adding complexity, and lookups, and whatnot. I think it's doable. Inertia, again, being the core architecture of the application, I think will make this a little bit easier, but I am interested to see what I'm able to pull off and how happy I am with where I get to. Another question that I have for you then are you testing the various flows? So given a Boolean feature flag, you now have two different possible paths for your code to go through. And then there may be even more than Boolean, or you may have feature flags that sort of interact with each other. And how much complexity are you trying to manage and represent in the test suite? STEPH: Yeah, good question, and we are. So we're testing both flows, especially if it's a new feature, then we are testing when the flag is enabled or disabled. One that's been tricky for me is what about a bug fix? Is that something that should be feature flagged? And I think at the surface level, if you're presuming that it needs to go through QA before this is live on production, then the answer is yes, that then you have to feature flag a bug fix, which feels weird. But then the other consideration would be, well, it is a bug fix. And could we find another way to QA this faster or some other approach so that way we don't have to wrap it in a feature flag? And I don't have a great answer for that one because I can see arguments in favor of either approach. Although wrapping everything in a feature flag does feel tedious, it's something that I'm not accustomed to doing. And it's something that then becomes a process for the team to remind each other that, hey, is this wrapped in a feature flag? Or just being mindful of that as part of our process. And it prompted me to think back on the other projects that I've worked on and how did we manage that flow? How did we go from development to staging to QA and then out to production? And one additional consideration with this flow is that we do have an overnight QA team. So in the past, when I've worked with teams, often product managers or even other developers, we would QA each other's work. So then it was a pretty fast turnaround that then you could get something up on staging. Someone could check it out and say, "Yes" or "No." But then I'm also pretty confident most of the teams that I've worked with we have had a distinct staging branch. So we would often merge work into a staging branch, and then deploy that work, and then get it tested. And then, if it passed everything, then we would essentially cherry-pick that work and move it over into production. And I can see there's a lot of arguments against that, but then I have also experienced that and had a really positive experience where we could test everything and not have to worry about going out to production. We didn't have to wrap everything in feature flags, and it just felt really nice to know that everything in the main or production branch, whatever you call your production branch, that everything in there was deployable versus having to go the feature flag route, or the hey, did this go through QA? I don't know. Let me check. Can I include this? Should I cherry-pick some commits into our actual deployment to avoid stuff that hasn't gone through QA? I've been through that dance before too, and that one's not great. CHRIS: I like the way you're framing the different sort of trade-offs that we have there in velocity or deployment speed and ease of iteration versus confidence as things are going out. I have worked with a staging branch before, and I personally did not find it to be valuable. It ended up adding this indirection. Folks had to know how to use Git in a pretty deep way to be comfortable with that just as a starting point. So it already introduced this hurdle of knowledge, and then beyond that, that idea that you have commits going in in a certain order on the staging branch. But then say we verify the functionality of the third commit in that list, and we want to cherry-pick it across to the main branch. Commits don't actually...you can't just take the thing that you had there. That commit existed in the context of all the others. There are subtleties of how history exists in Git. And I would worry about those edge cases where you're taking a piece of work out of the context of the rest of the commits that were around it or before it is, more importantly…that preceded it in the history on the staging branch, and you're now bringing it across to the main branch. Have you now lost something that was meaningful? Ideally, you would get a conflict if it was really bad, but that's more of like a syntactic diff level thing. It's not a functionality-level thing. So personally, I may be overly cautious around this, but I really like as much as possible to have the very boring linear history in Git and do everything I can such that work happens on feature branches and then gets merged in as a fast forward into the main branch or rather the main branch is fast-forward marched into my feature branch such that I'm never working with code that…

    Full show notes at the publisher
    300: Mozzarella Sticks & Knowledge Silos Jul 13, 2021
    Show notes

    The big "Three Oh Oh!" What a milestone for this podcast! Aside from celebrating that the show has made it this far, Chris gives some followup on some Inertia.js issues he had been having, and talks about open source licenses and legality and testing against external APIs. Steph has thoughts on mozzarella sticks and what makes good ones; particularly the cheese to bread ratio... They then, together, answer a listener question re: knowledge silos: Jan asked, "Our team (3 pairs) is currently working on two different projects due to that fact we are creating information silos. Now we are looking into ways how we can minimize those information silos. Do you have any ideas how we could achieve this?" With switching pairs they are unsure about it as it can be difficult for new pairs to get up to speed. inertia-rails thread safety Rails Cache-Control no-store fix Transcript: STEPH: I have no shame. CHRIS: That's important in this industry. STEPH: [laughs] Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we learned along the way. Hey, Chris. So today's an exciting day. It's a rather momentous day, at least in my world, because today is our 300th episode. CHRIS: 300? That is incredible. STEPH: That's an incredible amount of episodes. And it made me pause and reflect on how many episodes I have been a part of. And I've realized it's over 100. I think it's around 104 or something like that, and I can't believe it. Time flies when you're behind the mic. CHRIS: Time does fly, yeah. So yeah, fully a third of these you've been involved in. I don't know what the number is. And I'm just so grateful to Derek Prior and Sage Griffin, who started this whole process. And then to Thom Obarski, who was the producer for so long, and Mandy Moore, who recently joined us and has been doing a wonderful job of carrying that forward and to you, Steph, because this has just been such a joy to work on. Yeah, it's just a joy to be on the show and to get to chat with you each week and share some things. And frankly, learn from folks writing in questions and sharing pointers with us, and it really is such a delight. And yeah, 300 is pretty momentous. STEPH: The listener questions and feedback have undoubtedly been a highlight for me. That is one of the areas that I love the most. I love the questions. I also love when people provide helpful answers to us, and then they help us out in return and also, all the incredible guests that we've had on the show. It has been phenomenal. I'm also very thankful to have been part of this journey and appreciate everyone that has got us here today. I wonder what the fourth iteration of The Bike Shed looks like. I consider this the third iteration because the first iteration was Sage Griffin and Derek Prior. The second iteration was where you took over The Bike Shed, and then you were hosting a number of incredible guests on the show. And then the third iteration is the iteration that we're living, so I wonder what the fourth will look like. CHRIS: Oh, that is an interesting question. Hopefully, you and I get to hang out for a good bit longer. But at some point, much like the Green Lantern, this will get passed on, and someone else will take up the mantle and tell some stories. But, yeah, hopefully, that's not too soon because I certainly enjoy hanging out with you. STEPH: Oh, I agree. I certainly enjoy this, and I'm in no rush to leave The Bike Shed. But I think it's just fun thinking about the next people that will carry this journey forward. CHRIS: And determine the color of The Shed. STEPH: And determine. I mean, that is their right. As host and co-host, they get to determine the color of The Shed. CHRIS: 300 episodes in, and we still haven't figured it out. So I guess we got to keep trying. STEPH: Oh, I have. I already know what color it is. CHRIS: Is it yellow? STEPH: It's yellow. CHRIS: Yeah. Okay. [laughs] STEPH: I like how we said yellow at the same time, you know. [laughs] CHRIS: I do, although I feel like it's wrong to have a color in mind, or at least I want to dig in and talk about it for a while just to be in keeping with the show, but... STEPH: One must first argue before deciding and then argue again. But to not continue bikeshedding on The Bike Shed, what's new in your world? CHRIS: My week has been good. Actually, I have two quick updates on various Inertia things that I've shared in previous weeks. So we can include a show notes link for the two different episodes where I talked about these respective things. But there was one weird issue that I ran into with Inertia where it could start clicking a button that would delete, was behaving weirdly and occasionally, intermittently; some of the responses would end up as a full HTML page response as opposed to the expected Inertia response. And there's a bunch of subtlety around this. I actually reported it as an issue to the Inertia team. And they very kindly pointed me to the HTTP semantics at place. So it's the difference between a 302 redirect and a 303 redirect. And so, in their code, they were correctly doing a 303. They were standards-compliant; everything was great. But for some reason, it was still misbehaving sort of randomly, and I could never pin it down. I ended up working around it and opting out of Inertia behavior for those endpoints. But my assumption was that something in my Rails Middleware Stack was behaving weirdly and occasionally overriding Inertia Rails' setting of the status. So Inertia Rails was saying, "303," which is a special version of redirect, and something else in the Rails Middleware Stack, was saying, "302, it will be fine." Turns out, in retrospect, the Inertia Rails team has discovered that this was, in fact, a threading bug on their side. So it's not Inertia's fault. Inertia as a core concept and as a protocol was definitely doing the right thing. And the Inertia-Rails Middleware was attempting to do the right thing. But threads and concurrency got in the way, which I'll be honest, I don't deeply understand those concepts. So I was just like, oh okay, that sounds like a thing that could go wrong occasionally, which is exactly how I experienced it. But now they've made an update to the project, so that should be resolved in a deep way. But goes to show you threading and concurrency are really tricky to chase down. STEPH: I appreciate that you're coming back to give us the conclusion to that issue because I remember talking about it, and you were still going off on a journey and finding out what's wrong, so that's super interesting. And yeah, threads and concurrency those are super easy, like cache invalidation and naming, that's right up there. CHRIS: It's actually kind of funny. One of the issue threads where I wrote about it, someone followed up and asked if I'd come to any solution. And I said, "Oh, I've gone kind of this weird way, and I'm doing these things." But I shared a code sample, and I said, "Just to be clear, this is 100% about something Rails is doing and not Inertia, which remains a stellar project." And then, very shortly after that, someone from the Inertia-Rails team was like, "Ah, actually, I think it was us. Sorry about that, but we fixed it now." And I was like, "I still love you guys. This is great. You're doing a great job. [chuckles] You continue to push the envelope in a wonderful way." But it was a funny interaction where I was like, never shall I let the name be dragged through the mud. Whoops. Okay. Never mind. STEPH: You're an excellent hype man for Inertia. CHRIS: I try, I really try. I believe in it to my core. And actually, there's another one that this one's not really related to Inertia at all, although I've seen it discussed within the context of Inertia. And again, I think the Inertia team has done a really great job of responding and pointing to here are the HTTP semantics, and adhering to the standards, and the way that things should work. But this one has to do with the back button. When you're doing sequential forms or really any sort of form type thing, the browser will just pull from its back/forward cache, which is a local cache of the HTML of the page as it just had it. And I had come to the understanding that this was not something that I could workaround. This was not something that I could control. I had tried every combination of headers, at least I thought I had, in Rails to try and control this from the server-side because ideally, the server is the one who knows about when data is changing and things of that nature. The server should be able to inform the browser, "Hey, don't cache or store this page in any way, always revalidate it." It turns out there was a bug in Rails that was improperly normalizing the Cache-Control header and always removing the no-store Cache-Control value. So there are like five different or a handful of possible values that can be set for that header for the Cache-Control header. And Rails has a bunch of internal logic that says, "Okay, if you've set this, then I'll put these two, but not that one." And they're just trying to manage it and do nice things on our behalf. But unfortunately, they were being a little overzealous in that normalization effort. And so they were dropping an important value, which is no-store. So now there's a PR opened in Rails, or I think it's actually been merged in at this point that will fix that and allow you to set that particular header value, which then should get the behavior of "Hey, browser, if I hit the back button, please go ask the server. Don't trust your local cache, “which is exactly what I want. STEPH: Interesting. Wow. So that's two very helpful resolutions to some of those strange issues you were running into before. CHRIS: Yeah, definitely. And actually, for that issue, in particular, it was a very kind Bike Shed listener; Alexei Vasiliev wrote in and shared some initial thoughts, pointed me in the direction of some things. In that case, I actually was like, "I don't think that's the case. I tried it." And he was like, "No, no, no, pretty sure." And he was definitely correct in this case and was very kind and gave me an example of code reproduction and all of those nice things. So I was able to chase this down and then eventually find the issue in Rails, which had been opened like eight days before. So I think for me, I just happened to run into a weird period of time where Rails was subtly broken around this behavior. And therefore, I determined that the world was broken when, in fact, it was just a tiny slice of Rails' history. But yes, thank you so much, Alexei, for writing in and pointing me in the right direction on that. STEPH: The dream came true. We talk about some of our troubles and our strifes, and people respond and help us out. CHRIS: That is the dream. But yeah, so those are some quick updates, not really about me, although tangentially, I got to go along for these rides, and it was fun. But what else is up in your world? STEPH: Let's see. Well, I also have a small update that I can share. It's circling back to the conversation that we had talking about extracting an untrustworthy service to a new location. And at that time, I don't remember exactly the process I laid out. But at that time, it’s the idea that it is a bit untrustworthy, but we have some security in how this process works, and it is ideal that we move it to this other location. So let's just go ahead and move it wholesale, bugs and all to the new location. And then there, we will start to refine, and we'll start to improve the service. Well, the update is that we have realized that the untrustworthy service is untrustworthy enough that I'm actually working on improving it in its current place just to a certain extent that then it feels like we can move it to another location. There have been enough issues with it that it has taken my focus to continue patching those bugs and making sure everything is working appropriately. But now I'm in the space of where I'm like, goodness, I thought I knew this thing and now I'm realizing I don't. And so, I'm looking for ways to inform myself and the team when something isn't working when we think it is. So to provide a bit of context, this service is sending a bunch of messages to other systems, and most of the time, that is working, but there are times that it's not. And when it's not working, it's silent about the fact that those messages aren't being sent, and it's very important that we send those messages. So what's been on my mind is looking for a way to then elevate myself and the team to say, "Hey, these are the number of messages that are being sent on average." And then suddenly, let's say it dropped by 50%, or maybe we typically send 98% successful messages, and we have a 2% failure rate, but suddenly we have a 50% failure rate, but looking for those metrics that I can capture and then alert the team if something is going wrong. And one of the suggestions that was bubbled up by Chad Pytel, who's a developer, he's also founder and COO of thoughtbot, and we're working on the same project together. And he had highlighted that a previous project that he worked on used AWS specifically to leverage the idea of tracking how many successful messages are being sent, or perhaps in their particular project, it was focused on how many orders were being processed. That was important to know. And in our case, we could do a similar metric where we look to see are we still sending messages? Has the number dropped significantly lately so then we can be notified, and then we can escalate that to PagerDuty? So then we notify the team that something's going on. I don't know the specific mechanics of how I'm going to implement that yet. So I will report back, but I'm excited to have something that's going to alert me for when things aren't working the way I expect versus waiting for then someone that's a customer to notice it and then get back to us. It's very in line with a number of the topics that you've brought to the show recently, talking about how we can measure more of the user's experience and be notified sooner versus waiting for a user to bump into an error and then they reach out and notify us. CHRIS: I'm super interested to hear where you get with that because that's definitely an area that I've poked at but not dug into particularly deeply. I know there are a number of projects like StatsD is one of them. I think there are others in that space, but that's where you're sending metrics just out to some service, and then you can aggregate and graph. I've also done similar things with Papertrail; I want to say, where you can do a very specific search in the logs, and then within that, you can aggregate and graph and show things over time. So you can do a very simplified version of what you're describing to sort of visualize a rate of something over time. And then I think they might have some thresholding alerts. But also, that's one of those super hard things to do because it turns out like Monday morning, a lot of emails get sent and then Friday afternoon, fewer, and then on the weekend, none. And so, there's going to be an inherent sort of…

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