Show notes
Stephanie shares her newfound interest in naming conventions, highlighting a resource called "Classnames" that provides valuable names for programming and design. Joël, in turn, talks about using AI to generate names for D&D characters, emphasizing how AI can help provide inspiration and reasoning behind name suggestions. Then, they shift to Joël's interest in Roman history, where he discusses a blog by a Roman historian that explores distinctions between state and non-state peoples in the ancient Mediterranean. Together, the hosts delve into the importance of asking questions as consultants and developers to understand workflows, question assumptions, and build trust for better onboarding. Stephanie categorizes questions by engagement stages and their social and technical aspects, while Joël highlights how questioning reveals implicit assumptions and speeds up learning. They stress maintaining a curious mindset, using questions during PR reviews, and working with junior developers to foster collaboration. They conclude with advice on documenting answers and using questions for continuous improvement and effective decision-making in development teams. Class names inspiration How to Raise a Tribal Army in Pre-Roman Europe, Part II: Government Without States Diocletian, Constantine, Bedouin Sayings, and Network Defense The Power of Being New: A Proven Recipe for High Impact How to ask good questions Transcript: JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, if it has not been clear about just kind of the things I'm mentioning on the podcast the past few weeks, I've been obsessed with naming things lately [chuckles] and just thinking about how to name things, and, yeah, just really excited about...or even just having fun with that more than I used to be as a dev. And I found a really cool resource called "Classnames." Well, it's like just a little website that a designer and developer shared from kind of as an offshoot from his personal website. I'll link it in the show notes. But it's basically just a list of common names that are very useful for programming or even design. It's just to help you find some inspiration when you're stuck trying to find a name for something. And they're general or abstract enough that, you know, it's almost like kind of like a design pattern but a naming pattern [laughs], I suppose. JOËL: Ooh. STEPHANIE: Yeah, right? And so, there's different categories. Like, here's a bunch of words that kind of describe collections. So, if you need to find the name for a containment or a group of things, here's a bunch of kind of words in the English language that might be inspiring. And then, there's also other categories like music for describing kind of the pace or arrangement of things. Fashion, words from fashion can describe, like, the size of things. You know, we talk about T-shirt sizes when we are estimating work. And yeah, I thought it was really cool that there's both things that draw on, you know, domains that most people know in real life, and then also things that are a little more abstract. But yeah, "Classnames" by Paul Robert Lloyd — that's been a fun little resource for me lately. JOËL: Very cool. Have you ever played around at all with using AI to help you come up with the naming? STEPHANIE: I have not. But I know that you and other people in my world have been enjoying using AI for inspiration when they feel a little bit stuck on something and kind of asking like, "Oh, like, how could I name something that is, like, a group of things?" or, you know, a prompt like that. I suspect that that would also be very helpful. JOËL: I've been having fun using that to help me come up with good names for D&D characters, and sometimes they're a little bit on the nose. But if I sort of describe my character, and what's their vibe, and a little bit of, like, what they do and their background, and, like, I've built this whole, like, persona, and then, I just ask the AI, "Hey, what might be some good names for this?" And the AI will give me a bunch of names along with some reasoning for why they think that would be a good match. So, it might be like, oh, you know, the person's name is, I don't know, Starfighter because it evokes their connection to the night sky or whatever because that was a thing that I put in the background. And so, it's really interesting. And sometimes they're, like, just a little too obvious. Like, you don't want, you know, Joe Fighter because he's a fighter. STEPHANIE: And his name is Joe [laughs]. JOËL: Yeah, but some of them are pretty good. STEPHANIE: Cool. Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: I guess in this episode of how often does Joël think about the Roman Empire... STEPHANIE: Oh my gosh [laughs]. JOËL: Yes [laughs]. STEPHANIE: Spoiler: it's every day [laughs]. JOËL: Whaaat? There's a blog that I enjoy reading from a Roman historian. It's called "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry", acoup.blog. He's recently been doing an article series on not the Romans, but rather some of these different societies that are around them, and talking a little bit about a distinction that he calls sort of non-state peoples versus states in the ancient Mediterranean. And what exactly is that distinction? Why does it matter? And those are terms I've heard thrown around, but I've never really, like, understood them. And so, he's, like, digging into a thing that I've had a question about for a while that I've been really appreciating. STEPHANIE: Can you give, like, the reader's digest for me? JOËL: For him, it's about who has the ability to wield violence legitimately. In a state, sort of the state has a monopoly on violence. Whereas in non-state organizations, oftentimes, it's much more personal, so you might have very different sort of nobles or big men who are able to raise, let's say, private armies and wage private war on each other, and that's not seen as, like, some, like, big breakdown of society. It's a legitimate use of force. It's just accepted that that's how society runs. As opposed to in a state, if a, you know, wealthy person decided to raise a private army, that would be seen as a big problem, and the state would either try to put you down or, like, more generally, society would, like, see you as having sort of crossed a line you shouldn't have crossed. STEPHANIE: Hmm, cool. I've been reading a lot of medieval fantasy lately, so this is kind of tickling my brain in that way when I think about, like, what drives different characters to do things, and kind of what the consequences of those things are. JOËL: Right. I think it would be really fascinating to sort of project this framework forwards and look at the European medieval period through that lens. It seems to me that, at least from a basic understanding, that the sort of feudal system seems to be very much in that sort of non-state category. So, I'd be really interested to see sort of a deeper analysis of that. And, you know, maybe he'll do an addendum to this series. Right now, he's mostly looking at the Gauls, the Celtiberians, and the Germanic tribes during the period of the Roman Republic. STEPHANIE: Cool. Okay. Well, I also await the day when you somehow figure how this relates to software [laughter] and inevitably make some mind-blowing connection and do a talk about it [laughs]. JOËL: I mean, theming is always fun. There's a talk that I saw years ago at Strange Loop that was looking at the defense policy of the Roman Emperor Diocletian and the Roman Emperor Constantine, and the ways that they sort of defended the borders of the empire and how they're very different, and then related it to how you might handle network security. STEPHANIE: Whaat? JOËL: And sort of like a, hey, are we using more of a Diocletian approach here, or are we using more of a Constantine approach here? And all of a sudden, just, like, having those labels to put on there and those stories that went with it made, like, what could be a really, like, dry security talk into something that I still remember 10 years later. STEPHANIE: Yeah. Yeah. We love stories. They're memorable. JOËL: So, I'll make sure to link that in the show notes. STEPHANIE: Very cool. JOËL: We've been talking a lot recently about my personal note system, where I keep a bunch of, like, small atomic notes that are all usually based around a single thesis statement. And I was going through that recently, and I found one that was kind of a little bit juicy. So, the thesis is that consultants are professional question-askers. And I'm curious, as a consultant yourself, how do you feel about that idea? STEPHANIE: Well, my first thought would be, how do I get paid to only ask in questions [laughs] or how to communicate in questions and not do anything else [laughs]? It's almost like I'm sure that there is some, like, fantasy character, you know, where it's like, there's some villain or just obstacle where you have this monster character who only talks in questions. And it's like a riddle that you have to solve [laughs] in order to get past. JOËL: I think it's called a three-year-old. STEPHANIE: Wow. Okay. Maybe a three-year-old can do my job then [laughter]. But I do think it's a juicy one, and it's very...I can't wait to hear how you got there, but I think my reaction is yes, like, I do be asking questions [laughs] when I join a project on a client team. And I was trying to separate, like, what kinds of questions I ask. And I kind of came away with a few different categories depending on, like, the stage of the engagement I'm in. But, you know, when I first join a team and when I'm first starting out consulting for a team, I feel like I just ask a lot of basic questions. Like, "Where's the Jira board [laughs]?" Like, "How do you do deployments here?" Like, "What kind of Git process do you use?" So, I don't know if those are necessarily the interesting ones. But I think one thing that has been nice is being a consultant has kind of stripped the fear of asking those questions because, I don't know, these are just things I need to know to do my work. And, like, I'm not as worried about, like, looking dumb or anything like that [laughs]. JOËL: Yeah. I think there's often a fear that asking questions might make you look incompetent or maybe will sort of undermine your appearance of knowing what you're talking about, and I think I've found that to be sort of the opposite. Asking a lot of questions can build more trust, both because it forces people to think about things that maybe they didn't think about, bring to light sort of implicit assumptions that everyone has, and also because it helps you to ramp up much more quickly and to be productive in a way that people really appreciate. STEPHANIE: Yeah. And I also think that putting those things in, like, a public and, like, documented space helps people in the future too, right? At least I am a power Slack searcher [laughs]. And whenever I am onboarding somewhere, one of the first places I go is just to search in Slack and see if someone has asked this question before. I think the next kind of category of question that I discerned was just, like, questions to understand how the team understands things. So, it's purely just to, like, absorb kind of like perspective or, like, a worldview this team has about their codebase, or their work, or whatever. So, I think those questions manifest as just like, "Oh, like, you know, I am curious, like, what do you think about how healthy your codebase is? Or what kinds of bugs is your team, like, dealing with?" Just trying to get a better understanding of like, what are the challenges that this team is facing in their own words, especially before I even start to form my own opinions. Well, okay, to be honest, I probably am forming my own opinions, like, on the side [laughs], but I really try hard to not let that be the driver of how I'm showing up and especially in the first month I'm starting on a new team. JOËL: Would you say these sorts of questions are more around sort of social organization or, like, how a team approaches work, that sort of thing? Or do you classify more technical questions in this category? So, like, "Hey, tell me a little bit about your philosophy around testing." Or we talked in a recent episode "What value do you feel you get out of testing?" as a question to ask before even, like, digging into the implementation. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think these questions, for me, sit at, like, the intersection of both social organization and technical questions because, you know, asking something like, "What's the value of testing for your team?" That will probably give me information about how their test suite is like, right? Like, what kinds of tests they are writing and kind of the quality of them maybe. And it also tells me about, yeah, like, maybe the reasons why, like, they only have just unit tests or maybe, like, just [inaudible 12:31] test, or whatever. And I think all of that is helpful information. And then, that's actually a really...I like the distinction you made because I feel like then the last category of questions that I'll mention, for now, feels like more geared towards technical, especially the questions I ask to debunk assumptions that might be held by the team. And I feel like that's like kind of the last...the evolution of my question-asking. Because I have, hopefully, like, really absorbed, like, why, you know, people think the way they do about some of these, you know, about their code and start to poke a little bit on being like, "Why do you think, you know, like, this problem space has to be modeled this way?" And that has served me well as a consultant because, you know, once you've been at an organization for a while, like, you start to take a lot of things for granted about just having to always be this way, you know, it's like, things just are the way they are. And part of the power of, you know, being this kind of, like, external observer is starting to kind of just like, yeah, be able to question that. And, you know, at the end of day, like, we choose not to change something, but I think it's very powerful to be able to at least, like, open up that conversation. JOËL: Right. And sometimes you open up that conversation, and what you get is a link to a big PR discussion or a Wiki or something where that discussion has already been had. And then, that's good for you and probably good for anybody else who has that question as well. STEPHANIE: I'm curious, for you, though, like, this thesis statement, atomic note, did you have notes around it, or was it just, like, you dropped it in there [laughs]? JOËL: So, I have a few things, one is that when you come in as a consultant, and, you know, we're talking here about consultants because that's what we do. I think this is probably true for most people onboarding, especially for non-junior roles where you're coming in, and there's an assumption of expertise, but you need to onboard onto a project. This is just particularly relevant for us as consultants because we do this every six months instead…
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