Podcasts about rails

In the final hour of the show, Chris Goforth talked UGA running back Keith Marshall about his new collective, hit a What's Trending, and wrapped by going "Off the Rails"

1. SCOTUS Tosses 3 Rulings Against Abortion Laws 2. DeSantis Vows to Appeal FL Abortion Ban Block 3. Dem Senators: Don't Expect Filibuster Change 4. Wyo. GOP Primary Debate: Trump and January 6 5. Suspect in Smuggling Deaths on Meth: Lawmaker 6. FL Court Approves Probe of Human Trafficking 7. GOP Questions State Department on Grant Money 8. Former USA Today Editor: Journalism Is ‘Going Off the Rails' 9. Newspapers Dying at Rate of 2 Each Week 10. 4th of July Will Be a Bit Pricier This Year 11. Fireworks Shortage Improved, but Prices High 12. Justice Dept. to Probe Nypd Sex Crimes Unit 13. Delta Pilots Protest Lengthy Negotiations 14. CDC Investigating Listeria Outbreak 15. Disney Reportedly Selling $5k Star Wars Drink 16. EU Denies Kosovo Special Visa-free Status 17. Russian Mall Quiet Amid Sanctions 18. UK PM: ‘We're Not Giving Up on Hong Kong' 19. Xi Visits Hong Kong for Handover Anniversary 20. Xi Jinping: China to Stick to Zero-COVID-19 Policy 21. Taiwanese Join Defense, Medical Training 22. Peruvian Town Engulfed by Landslide 23. Italy's Farmers Face Sea Water Threat 24. Georgian Shoti Loaf Delights Townsfolk 25. Japan Cautiously Welcomes Tourists Back 26. Coney Island Gets New Rides, Plazas 27. Child Interrupts Live Report on Brazilian TV 28. Bananas: Healthy Snack or Glorified Candy? 29. Baby Giraffe Delights Zoo Visitors in Chile

All Local Morning for 07/01/22

This week we make Will squirm, friend or food, frog army, AI is about to attack, best audience ever, Jimmy Johns, wrong order, most Will story possible, military orgy, T-1s, dead Alexa, super gonorrhea, messy Molly, are you side? And after this episode you might want to shut down sex robots all together!!! #podcast #new #comedy #stand #up #funny #advice #how #cast #hilarious #lol #haha #wtf #tiktok #show #host #comedic #comedy #offtherails #offtherailstm #rails #germancomedy #funnypodcast #hiddengem #milwaukee #mke

Off the Rails with Blummel - 6/30/22See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Overwatch 2 will completely replace Overwatch when it releases later this year. What We're Playing Cliff: The Pathless, Solitaire Conspiracy, Dorfromantic Colby: Dragon Age Inquisition Hans: Dorfromantic, Cycle: Frontier, V: Rising, always pinball News Overwatch 2 is Killing Overwatch Valorant is Listening AMD is Brining FSR to the Xbox The Xbox is Outselling the PS5 in Japan Does Anyone Play Diablo Like This? xCloud is Getting Mouse & Keyboard Support and Lower Latency Can an AI Play Minecraft? Give Your PC a Checkup for DirectStorage Questions Joe Coleslaw: Thinking back on Devolvers Showcase this year. They expanded a thought of "what if video games fell under 'singularity' protocol?" One company to rule them all. . . Among the product placements included, Tom Clancy's Amimal Crossing which had Tom Nook and Isabell in splinter-cell like outfits. I know we have always asked you to combine 2 unlike games or characters into one... but what is the MOST OUTRAGEOUS cross promotion video game you can think of? (Keep in mind, this is from the minds of Devolver) Misshappychildhood: What did you think of Ugly Sonic in the new Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers movie? Rdeacon: Besides Christmas, what is your favorite holiday... and which one do you dislike? What do you think is more likely to happen.. all games are free but have in game monetization, or all games will end up subscription based? ShadoughX (Josh): DO you think gaming research is important? What types of research should we be looking into? Princess_Megan: What is your favorite pasta shape and why? Mine is rigatoni because of it's ability to hold more sauce and cheese Tr1pletrouble88: Feelings on ketchup? Turndwn4wut (Travis): What do you miss most about video games before they went online? *monotone screaming*: How do you think virtual reality games could improve? Cheap/Free Games Epic Games Geneforge 1: Mutagen Iratus: Lord of the Dead The Cycle: Frontier Fall Guys Xbox Game Pass FIFA 22 (Console & PC) - Out Today Naraka: Bladepoint (Cloud, Console & PC) - Out Today Far Cry 5 - July 1 – Console, PC Last Call BBS July 5 – PC Only Matchpoint: Tennis Championships - July 7 – Console, (Day One Release) Escape Academy - July 14 – Console, PC (Day One Release) As Dusk Falls - July 19 – Console, Cloud, PC (Day One Release) Immortality - July 26 – Console, PC Xbox Gold Beasts of Maravilla Island ($9.99 ERP): Available July 1 to 31 Relicta ($19.99 ERP): Available July 16 to August 15 Thrillville: Off the Rails ($9.99 ERP): Available July 1 to 15 Torchlight ($14.99 ERP): Available July 16 to 31 Playstation Plus Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time (PS4/PS5) The Man of Medan (PS4) Arcadegeddon (PS4/PS5) Patreon John Tippins Sean Palmer Austin Palmer Alan Schulte Joe Cole Jr. Anonymous Rich Deacon Extra Life https://bytemepodcast.com/extralife/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/byte-me-podcast/message

Enchanté. Aurelie Verrot is a developer originally from France who now lives in California. She is Software Engineer at Zendesk, working in the i18n team. She answers all of Brittany's questions about working at Zendesk, translating the beloved Women On Rails newsletter and VirtualCoffee.io. Show Notes & Links: General Assembly (https://generalassemb.ly) Zendesk (https://www.zendesk.com/) Women On Rails Newsletter (https://womenonrails.substack.com/) VirtualCoffee.io (https://virtualcoffee.io/) Hacktoberfest (https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/) Aurelie Verrot (@LiliVerrot) / Twitter (https://twitter.com/liliverrot) Sponsored By: Honeybadger (https://www.honeybadger.io/) Honeybadger makes you a DevOps hero by combining error monitoring, uptime monitoring and check-in monitoring into a single, easy to use platform. Go to Honeybadger.io (https://www.honeybadger.io/) and discover how Starr, Josh, and Ben created a 100% bootstrapped monitoring solution. Scout APM (http://scoutapm.com/rubyonrails) Try their error monitoring and APM free for 14-days, no credit card needed! And as an added bonus for Ruby on Rails listeners: Scout will donate $5 to the open-source project of your choice when you deploy. Learn more at http://scoutapm.com/rubyonrails (http://scoutapm.com/rubyonrails).

Steph has an update and a question wrapped into one about the work that is being done to migrate the Test::Unit test over to RSpec. Chris got to do something exciting this week using dry-monads. Success or failure? This episode is brought to you by BuildPulse (https://buildpulse.io/bikeshed). Start your 14-day free trial of BuildPulse today. Bartender (https://www.macbartender.com/) dry-rb - dry-monads v1.0 - Pattern matching (https://dry-rb.org/gems/dry-monads/1.0/pattern-matching/) alfred-workflows (https://github.com/tupleapp/alfred-workflows/blob/master/scripts/online_users.rb) Raycast (https://www.raycast.com/) ruby-science (https://github.com/thoughtbot/ruby-science) Inertia.js (https://inertiajs.com/) Remix (https://remix.run/) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: AD: Flaky tests take the joy out of programming. You push up some code, wait for the tests to run, and the build fails because of a test that has nothing to do with your change. So you click rebuild, and you wait. Again. And you hope you're lucky enough to get a passing build this time. Flaky tests slow everyone down, break your flow, and make things downright miserable. In a perfect world, tests would only break if there's a legitimate problem that would impact production. They'd fail immediately and consistently, not intermittently. But the world's not perfect, and flaky tests will happen, and you don't have time to fix all of them today. So how do you know where to start? BuildPulse automatically detects and tracks your team's flaky tests. Better still, it pinpoints the ones that are disrupting your team the most. With this list of top offenders, you'll know exactly where to focus your effort for maximum impact on making your builds more stable. In fact, the team at Codecademy was able to identify their flakiest tests with BuildPulse in just a few days. By focusing on those tests first, they reduced their flaky builds by more than 68% in less than a month! And you can do the same because BuildPulse integrates with the tools you're already using. It supports all of the major CI systems, including CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and others. And it analyzes test results for all popular test frameworks and programming languages, like RSpec, Jest, Go, pytest, PHPUnit, and more. So stop letting flaky tests slow you down. Start your 14-day free trial of BuildPulse today. To learn more, visit buildpulse.io/bikeshed. That's buildpulse.io/bikeshed. STEPH: What type of bird is the strongest bird? CHRIS: I don't know. STEPH: A crane. [laughter] STEPH: You're welcome. And on that note, shall we wrap up? CHRIS: Let's wrap up. [laughter] 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, Chris, I saw a good movie I'd like to tell you about. It was just over the weekend. It's called The Duke, and it's based on a real story. I should ask, have you seen it? Have you heard of this movie called The Duke? CHRIS: I don't think so. STEPH: Okay, cool. It's a true story, and it's based on an individual named Kempton Bunton who then stole a particular portrait, a Goya portrait; if you know your artist, I do not. But he stole a Goya portrait and then essentially held at ransom because he was a big advocate that the BBC News channel should be free for people that are living on a pension or that are war veterans because then they're not able to afford that fee. But then, if you take the BBC channel away from them, it disconnects them from society. And it's a very good movie. I highly recommend it. So I really enjoyed watching that over the weekend. CHRIS: All right. Excellent recommendation. We will, of course, add that to the show notes mostly so that I can find it again later. STEPH: On a more technical note, I have a small update, or it's more of a question. It's an update and a question wrapped into one about the work that is being done to migrate the Test::Unit test over to RSpec. This has been quite a journey that Joël and I have been on for a while now. And we're making progress, but we're realizing that we're spending like 95% of our time in the test setup and porting that over, specifically because we're mapping fixture data over to FactoryBot, and we're just realizing that's really painful. It's taking up a lot of time to do that. And initially, when I realized we were just doing that, we hadn't even really talked about it, but we were moving it over to FactoryBot. I was like, oh, cool. We'll get to delete all these fixtures because there are around 208 files of them. And so that felt like a really good additional accomplishment to migrating the test over. But now that we realize how much time we're spending migrating the data over for that test setup, we've reevaluated, and I shared with Joël in the Slack channel. I was like, crap. I was like, I have a bad idea, and I can't not say it now because it's crossed my mind. And my bad idea was what if we stopped porting over fixtures to FactoryBot and then we just added the fixtures to a directory that RSpec would look so then we can rely on those fixtures? And then that way, we're literally then ideally just copying over from Test::Unit over to RSpec. But it does mean a couple of things. Well, one, it means that we're now running those fixtures at the beginning of RSpec test. We're introducing another pattern of where these tests are already using FactoryBot, but now they have fixtures at the top, and then we won't get to delete the fixtures. So we had a conversation around how to manage and mitigate some of those concerns. And we're still in that exploratory. We're going to test it out and see if this really speeds us up referencing the fixtures. The question that's wrapped up in this is there's something different between how fixtures generate data and how factories generate data. So I've run into this a couple of times now where I moved data over to just call a factory. But then I was hitting these callbacks or after-save-hooks or weird things that were then preventing me from creating the record, even though fixtures was creating them just fine. And then Joël pointed out today that he was running into something similar where there were private methods that were getting called. And there were all sorts of additional code that was getting run with factories versus fixtures. And I don't have an answer. Like, I haven't looked into this. And it's frankly intentional because I was trying hard to not dive into understanding the mechanics. We really want to get through this. But now I'm starting to ponder a little more as to what is different with fixtures and factories? And I liked that factories is running these callbacks; that feels correct. But I'm surprised that fixtures doesn't, or at least that's the experience that I'm having. So there's some funkiness there that I'd like to explore. I'll be honest; I don't know if I'm going to. But if anybody happens to know what that funkiness is or why fixtures and factories are different in that regard, I would be very intrigued because, at some point, I might look into it just because I would like to know. CHRIS: Oh, that is interesting. I have not really worked with fixtures much at all. I've lived a factory life myself, and thus that's where almost all of my experience is. I'm not super surprised if this ends up being the case, like, the idea that fixtures are just some data that gets shoveled into the database directly as opposed to FactoryBot going through the model layer. And so it's sort of like that difference. But I don't know that for certain. That sounds like what this is and makes sense conceptually. But I think this is what you were saying like, that also kind of pushes me more in the direction of factories because it's like, oh, they're now representative. They're using our model layer, where we're defining certain truths. And I don't love callbacks as a mechanism. But if your app has them, then getting data that is representative is useful in tests. Like one of the things I add whenever I'm working with FactoryBot is the FactoryBot lint rake task RSpec thing that basically just says, "Are your factories valid?" which I think is a great baseline to have. Because you may add a migration that adds a default constraint or something like that to the database that suddenly all your factories are invalid, and it's breaking tests, but you don't know it. Like subtly, you change it, and it doesn't actually break a test, but then it's harder later. So that idea of just having more correctness baked in is always nice, especially when it can be automated like that, so definitely a fan of that. But yeah, interested if you do figure out the distinction. I do like your take, though, of like, but also, maybe I just won't figure this out. Maybe this isn't worth figuring it out. Although you were in the interesting spot of, you could just port the fixtures over and then be done and call the larger body of work done. But it's done in sort of a half-complete way, so it's an interesting trade-off space. I'm also interested to hear where you end up on that. STEPH: Yeah, it's a tough trade-off. It's one that we don't feel great about. But then it's also recognizing what's the true value of what we're trying to deliver? And it also comes down to the idea of churn versus complexity. And I feel like we are porting over existing complexity and even adding a smidge, not actual complexity but adding a smidge of indirection in terms that when someone sees this file, they're going to see a mixed-use of fixtures and factories, and that doesn't feel good. And so we've already talked about adding a giant comment above fixtures that just is very honest and says, "Hey, these were ported over. Please don't mimic this. But this is some legacy tests that we have brought over. And we haven't migrated the fixtures over to use factories." And then, in regards to the churn versus complexity, this code isn't likely to get touched like these tests. We really just need them to keep running and keep validating scenarios. But it's not likely that someone's going to come in here and really need to manage these anytime soon. At least, this is what I'm telling myself to make me feel better about it. So there's also that idea of yes, we are porting this over. This is also how they already exist. So if someone did need to manage these tests, then going to Test::Unit, they would have the same experience that they're going to have in RSpec. So that's really the crux of it is that we're not improving that experience. We're just moving it over and then trying to communicate that; yes, we have muddied the waters a little bit by introducing this other pattern. So we're going to find a way to communicate why we've introduced this other pattern, but that way, we can stay focused on actually porting things over to RSpec. As for the factories versus fixtures, I feel like you're onto something in terms of it's just skipping that model layer. And that's why a lot of that functionality isn't getting run. And I do appreciate the accuracy of factories. I'd much rather know is my data representative of real data that can get created in the world? And right now, it feels like some of the fixtures aren't. Like, how they're getting created seemed to bypass really important checks and validations, and that is wrong. That's not what we want to have in our test is, where we're creating data that then the rest of the application can't truly create. But that's another problem for another day. So that's an update on a trade-off that we have made in regards to the testing journey that we are on. What's going on in your world? CHRIS: Well, we got to do something exciting this week. I was working on some code. This is using dry-monads, the dry-rb space. So we have these result objects that we use pretty pervasively throughout the app, and often, we're in a controller. We run one of these command objects. So it's create user, and create user actually encompasses a ton of logic in our app, and that object returns a result. So it's either a success or a failure. And if it's a success, it'll be a success with that new user wrapped up inside of it, or if it's a failure, it's a specific error message. Actually, different structured error messages in different ways, some that would be pushed to the form, some that would be a flash message. There are actually fun, different things that we do there. But in the controller, when we interact with those result objects, typically what we'll do is we'll say result equals create user dot run, (result=createuser.run) and then pass it whatever data it needs. And then on the next line, we'll say results dot either, (results.either), which is a method on these result objects. It's on both the success and failure so you can treat them the same. And then you pass what ends up being a lambda or a stabby proc, or I forget what they are. But one of those sort of inline function type things in Ruby that always feel kind of weird. But you pass one of those, and you actually pass two of them, one for the success case and one for the failure case. And so in the success case, we redirect back with a notice of congratulations, your user was created. Or, in the failure case, we potentially do a flash message of an alert, or we send the errors down, or whatever it ends up being. But it allows us to handle both of those cases. But it's always been syntactically terrible, is how I would describe it. It's, yeah, I'm just going to leave it at that. We are now living in a wonderful, new world. This has been something that I've wanted to try for a while. But I finally realized we're actually on Ruby 2.7, and so thus, we have access to pattern matching in Ruby. So I get to take it for a spin for the first time, realizing that we were already on the correct version. And in particular, dry-monads has a page in their docs specific to how we can take advantage of pattern matching with the result objects that they provide us. There's nothing specific in the library as far as I understand it. This is just them showing a bunch of examples of how one might want to do it if they're working with these result objects. But it's really great because it gives the ability to interact with, you know, success is typically going to be a singular case. There's one success branch to this whole logic, but there are like seven different ways it can fail. And that's the whole idea as to why we use these command objects and the whole Railway Oriented Programming and that whole thing which I have...what is this word? [laughs] I feel like I should know it. It's a positive rant. I have raved; that is how our users kindly pointed that out to us. I have raved about the Railway Oriented Programming that allows us to do. But it's that idea that they're actually, you know, there's one happy path, and there are seven distinct failure modes, seven unhappy paths. And now, using pattern matching, we actually get a really expressive, readable, useful way to destructure each of those distinct failures to work with the particular bits of data that we need. So it was a very happy day, and I got to explore it. This is, again, a feature of Ruby, not a feature of dry-monads. But dry-monads just happens to embrace it and work really well with it. So that was awesome. STEPH: That is awesome. I've seen one or two; I don't know, I've seen a couple of tweets where people are like, yeah, Ruby pattern matching. I haven't found a way to use it. So I'm excited that you just shared a way that you found to use it. I'm also worried what it says about our developer culture that we know the word rant so well, but rave, we always have to reach back into our memory to be like, what's that positive word or something that we like? [laughs] CHRIS: And especially here on The Bike Shed, where we try to gravitate towards the positive. But yeah, it's an interesting point that you make. STEPH: We're a bunch of ranters. It's what we do, pranting ranters. I don't know why we're pranting. [laughs] CHRIS: Because it's that exciting. That's what it is. Actually, there was an interesting thing as we were playing around with the pattern matching code, just poking around in the console session with it, and it prints out a deprecation warning. It's like, warning: this is an experimental feature. Do not use it, be careful. But in the back of my head, I was like, I actually know how this whole thing plays out, Ruby 2.7, and I assure you, it's going to be fine. I have been to the future, at least I'm pretty sure. I think the version that is in Ruby 2.7 did end up getting adopted basically as it stands. And so, I think there is also a setting to turn off that deprecation warning. I haven't done it yet, but I mostly just enjoyed the conversation that I had with this deprecation message of like, listen, I've been to the future, and it's great. Well, it's complicated, but specific to this pattern matching [laughs] in Ruby 3+ versions, it went awesome. And I'm really excited about that future that we now live in. STEPH: I wish we had that for so many more things in our life [laughs] of like, here's a warning, and it's like, no, no, I've seen the future. It's all right. Or you're totally right; I should avoid and back out of this now. CHRIS: If only we could know how the things would play out, you know. But yeah, so pattern matching, very cool. I'll include a link in the show notes to the particular page in the dry-monads docs. But there are also other cool things on the internet. In an unrelated but also cool thing that I found this week, we use Tuple a lot within our organization for pair programming. For anyone who's not familiar with it, it's a really wonderful piece of technology that allows you to pair program pretty seamlessly, better video quality, all of those nice things that we want. But I found there was just the tiniest bit of friction in starting a Tuple call. I know I want to pair with this person. And I have to go up and click on the little menu bar, and then I have to find their name, then I have to click a button. That's just too much. That's not how...I want to live my life at the keyboard. I have a thing called Bartender, which is a little menu bar manager utility app that will collapse down and hide the icons. But it's also got a nice, little hotkey accessible pop-up window that allows me to filter down and open one of the menu bar pop-out menus. But unfortunately, when that happens, the Tuple window isn't interactive at that point. I can't use the arrow keys to go up and down. And so I was like, oh, man, I wonder if there's like an Alfred workflow for this. And it turns out indeed there is actually managed by the kind folks at Tuple themselves. So I was able to find that, install it; it's great. I have it now. I can use that. So that was a nice little upgrade to my workflow. I can just type like TC space and then start typing out the person's name, and then hit enter, and it will start a call immediately. And it doesn't actually make me more productive, but it makes me happier. And some days, that's what matters. STEPH: That's always so impressive to me when that happens where you're like, oh, I need a thing. And then you went through the saga that you just went through. And then the people who manage the application have already gotten there ahead of you, and they're like, don't worry, we've created this for you. That's one of those just beautiful moments of like, wow, y'all have really thought this through on a bunch of different levels and got there before me. CHRIS: It's somewhat unsurprising in this case because it's a very developer-centric organization, and Ben's background being a thoughtbot developer and Alfred user, I'm almost certain. Although I've seen folks talking about Raycast, which is the new hotness on the quick launcher world. I started eons ago in Quicksilver, and then I moved to Alfred, I don't know, ten years ago. I don't know what time it is anymore. But I've been in Alfred land for a while, but Raycast seems very cool. Just as an aside, I have not allowed myself... [laughs] this is another one of those like; I do not have permission to go explore this new tool yet because I don't think it will actually make me more productive, although it could make me happier. So... STEPH: I haven't heard of that one, Raycast. I'm literally adding it to the show notes right now as a way so you can find The Duke later, and I can find Raycast later [chuckles] and take a look at it and check it out. Although I really haven't embraced the whole Alfred workflow. I've seen people really enjoy it and just rave about it and how wonderful it is. But I haven't really leaned into that part of the world; I don't know why. I haven't set any hard and fast rules for myself where I can't play around with these technologies, but I haven't taken the time to do it either. CHRIS: You've also not found yourself writing thousands of lines of Vimscript because you thought that was a good idea. So you don't need as many guardrails it would seem. That's my guess. STEPH: This is true. CHRIS: Whereas I need to be intentional [laughs] with how I structure my interaction with my dev tools. STEPH: Instead, I'm just porting over fixtures from one place to another. [laughs] That's the weird space that I'm living in instead. [laughs] CHRIS: But you're getting paid for that. No one paid me for the Vimscript I wrote. [laughter] STEPH: That's fair. Speaking around process-y things, there's something that's been on my mind that Valeria, another thoughtboter, suggested around how we structure our meetings and the default timing that we have for meetings. So Thursdays are my team-focused day. And it's the day where I have a lot of one on ones. And I realized that I've scheduled them back to back, which is problematic because then I have zero break in between them, which I'm less concerned about that because then I can go for an hour or something and not have a break. And I'm not worried about that part. But it does mean that if one of those discussions happens to go over just even for like two or three minutes, then it means that someone else is waiting for me in those two to three minutes. And that feels unacceptable to me. So Valeria brought up a really good idea where I think it's only with the Google Meet paid version. I could be wrong there. But I think with the paid version of it that then you can set the new default for how long a meeting is going to last. So instead of having it default to 30 minutes, have it default to 25 minutes. So then, that way, you do have that five-minute buffer. So if you do go over just like two or three minutes with someone, you've still got like two minutes to then hop to the next call, and nobody's waiting for you. Or if you want those five minutes to then grab some water or something like that. So we haven't implemented it just yet because then there's discussion around is this a new practice that we want everybody to move to? Because I mean, if just one person does it, it doesn't work. You really need everybody to buy into the concept of we're now defaulting to 25 versus 30-minute meetings. So I'll have to let you know how that goes. But I'm intrigued to try it out because I think that would be very helpful for me. Although there's a part of me that then feels bad because it's like, well, if I have 30 minutes to chat with somebody, but now I'm reducing it to 25 minutes each time, I didn't love that I'm taking time away from our discussion. But that still feels like a better outcome than making somebody wait for three to five minutes if something else goes over. So have you ever run into something like that? How do you manage back-to-back meetings? Do you intentionally schedule a break in between or? CHRIS: I do try to give myself some buffer time. I stack meetings but not so much so that they're just back to back. So I'll stack them like Wednesdays are a meeting-heavy day for me. That's intentional just to be like, all right, I know that my day is going to get chopped up. So let's just really lean into that, chop the heck out of Wednesday afternoons, and then the rest of the week can hopefully have slightly longer deep work-type sessions. And, yeah, in general, I try and have like a little gap in between them. But often what I'll do for that is I'll stagger the start of the next meeting to be rather than on the hour or the half-hour, I start it on the 15th minute. And so then it's sort of I now have these little 15-minute gaps in my workflow, which is enough time to do one or two small things or to go get a drink or whatever it is or if things do run over. Like, again, I feel what you're saying of like, I don't necessarily want to constrain a meeting. Or I also don't necessarily want to go into the habit of often over-running. I think it's good to be intentional. Start meetings on time, end meetings on time. If there's a great conversation that's happening, maybe there's another follow-up meeting that should happen or something like that. But for as nonsensical of a human as I believe myself to be, I am rather rigid about meetings. I try very hard to be on time. I try very hard to wrap them up on time to make sure I go to the next one. And so with that, the 15-minute staggering is what I've found works for me. STEPH: Yeah, that makes sense. One-on-ones feels special to me because I wholeheartedly agree with being very diligent about like, hey, this is our meeting time. Let's do a time check. Someone says that at the end, and then that way, everybody can move on. But one on ones are, there's more open discussion space, and I hate cutting people off, especially because it might not be until the last 15 minutes that you really got into the meat of the conversation. Or you really got somewhere that's a little bit more personal or things that you want to talk about. So if someone's like, "Yeah, let me tell you about my life goals," and you're like, "Oh, no, wait, sorry. We're out of time." That feels terrible and tragic to do. So I struggle with that part of it. CHRIS: I will say actually, on that note, I'm now thinking through, but I believe this to be true. Everyone that reports to me I have a 45-minute one-on-one with, and then my CEO I set up the one-on-one. So I also made that one a 45-minute one-on-one. And that has worked out really well. Typically, I try and structure it and reiterate this from time to time of, like, hey, this is your space, not mine. So let's have whatever conversation fits in here. And it's fine if we don't need to use the whole time, but I want to make sure that we have it and that we protect it. Because I often find much like retro, I don't know; I think everything's fine. And then suddenly the conversation starts, and you're like, you know what? Actually, I'm really concerned now that you mentioned it. And you need that sort of empty space that then the reality sort of pop up into. And so with one on one, I try and make sure that there is that space, but I'm fine with being like, we can cut this short. We can move on from one-on-one topics to more of status updates; let's talk about the work. But I want to make sure that we lead with is there anything deeper, any concerns, anything you want to talk through? And sort of having the space and time for that. STEPH: I like that. And I also think it speaks more directly to the problem I'm having because I'm saying that we keep running over a couple of minutes, and so someone else is waiting. So rather than shorten it, which is where I'm already feeling some pain...although I still think that's a good idea to have a default of 25-minute meetings so then that way, there is a break versus the full 30. So if people want to have back-to-back meetings, they still have a little bit of time in between. But for one on ones specifically, upping it to 45 minutes feels nice because then you've got that 15-minute buffer likely. I mean, maybe you schedule a meeting, but, I don't know, that's funky. But likely, you've got a 15-minute buffer until your next one. And then that's also an area that I feel comfortable in sharing with folks and saying, "Hey, I've booked this whole 45 minutes. But if we don't need the whole time, that's fine." I'm comfortable saying, "Hey, we can end early, and you can get more of your time back to focus on some other areas." It's more the cutting someone off when they're talking because I have to hop to the next thing. I absolutely hate that feeling. So thanks, I think I'll give that a go. I think I'll try actually bumping it up to 45 minutes, presuming that other people like that strategy too, since they're opting in [laughs] to the 45 minutes structure. But that sounds like a nice solution. CHRIS: Well yeah, happy to share it. Actually, one interesting thing that I'm realizing, having been a manager at thoughtbot and then now being a manager within Sagewell, the nature of the interactions are very different. With thoughtbot, I was often on other projects. I was not working with my team day to day in any real capacity. So it was once every two weeks, I would have this moment to reconnect with them. And there was some amount of just catching up. Ideally, not like status update, low-level sort of thing, but sort of just like hey, what have you been working on? What have you been struggling with? What have you been enjoying? There was more like I needed bigger space, I would say for that, or it's not surprising to me that you're bumping into 30 minutes not being quite long enough. Whereas regularly, in the one on ones that I have now, we end up cutting them short or shifting out of true one-on-one mode into more general conversation and chatting about Raycast or other tools or whatever it is because we are working together daily. And we're pairing very regularly, and we're all on the same project and all sorts of in sync and know what's going on. And we're having retro together. We have plenty of places to have the conversation. So the one-on-one again, still, I keep the same cadence and the same time structure just because I want to make sure we have the space for any day that we really need that. But in general, we don't. Whereas when I was at thoughtbot, it was all the more necessary. And I think for folks listening; I could imagine if you're in a team lead position and if you're working very closely with folks, then you may be on the one side of things versus if you're a little bit more at a distance from the work that they're doing day to day. That's probably an interesting question to ask, and think about how you want to structure it. STEPH: Yeah, I think that's an excellent point. Because you're right; I don't see these individuals. We may not have really gotten to interact, except for our daily syncs outside of that. So then yeah, there's always like a good first 10 minutes of where we're just chatting about life and catching up on how things are going before then we dive into some other things. So I think that's a really good point. Cool, solving management problems on the mic. I dig it. In slightly different news, I've joined a book club, which I'm excited about. This book club is about Ruby. It's specifically reading the book Ruby Science, which is a book that was written and published by thoughtbot. And it requires zero homework, which is my favorite type of book club. Because I have found I always want to be part of book clubs. I'm always interested in them, but then I'm not great at budgeting the time to make sure I read everything I'm supposed to read. And so then it comes time for folks to get together. And I'm like, well, I didn't do my homework, so I can't join it. But for this one, it's being led by Joël, and the goal is that you don't have to do the homework. And they're just really short sections. So whoever's in charge of leading that particular session of the book club they're going to provide an overview of what's covered in whatever the reading material that we're supposed to read, whatever topic we're covering that day. They're going to provide an overview of it, an example of it, so then we can all talk about it together. So if you read it, that's wonderful. You're a bit ahead and could even join the meeting like five minutes late. Or, if you haven't read it, then you could join and then get that update. So I'm very excited about it. And this was one of those books that I'd forgotten that thoughtbot had written, and it's one that I've never read. And it's public for anybody that's interested in it. So to cover a little bit of details about it, so it talks about code smells, ways to refactor code, and then also common patterns that you can use to solve some issues. So there's a lot of really just great content that's in it. And I'll be sure to include a link in the show notes for anyone else that's interested. CHRIS: And again, to reiterate, this book is free at this point. Previously, in the past, it was available for purchase. But at one point a number of years ago, thoughtbot set all of the books free. And so now that along with a handful of other books like...what's Edward's DNS book? Domain Name Sanity, I believe, is Edward's book name that Edward Loveall wrote when he was not a thoughtboter, [laughs] and then later joined as a thoughtboter, and then we made the book free. But on the specific topic of Ruby Science, that is a book that I will never forget. And the reason I will never forget it is that book was written by the one and only CTO Joe Ferris, who is an incredibly talented developer. And when I was interviewing with thoughtbot, I got down to the final day, which is a pairing session. You do a morning pairing session with one thoughtbot developer, and you do an afternoon pairing session with another thoughtbot developer. So in the morning, I was working with someone on actually a patch to Rails which was pretty cool. I'd never really done that, so that was exciting. And that went fine with the exception that I kept turning on Caps Lock on their keyboard because I was used to Caps Lock being CTRL, and then Vim was going real weird for me. But otherwise, that went really well. But then, in the afternoon, I was paired with the one and only CTO Joe Ferris, who was writing the book Ruby Science at that time. And the nature of the book is like, here's a code sample, and then here's that code sample improved, just a lot of sort of side-by-side comparisons of code. And I forget the exact way that this went, but I just remember being terrified because Joe would put some code up on the screen and be like, "What do you think?" And I was like, oh, is this the good code or the bad code? I feel like I should know. I do not know. I'm not sure. It worked out fine, I guess. I made it through. But I just remember being so terrified at that point. I was just like, oh no, this is how it ends for me. It's been a good run. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: I made it this far. I would have loved to work for this nice thoughtbot company, but here we are. But yeah, I made it through. [laughs] STEPH: There are so many layers to that too where it's like, well if I say it's terrible, are you going to be offended? Like, how's this going to go for me if I speak my truths? Or what am I going to miss? Yeah, that seems very interesting (I kind of like it.) but also a terrifying pairing session. CHRIS: I think it went well because I think the code...I'd been following thoughtbot's work, and I knew who Joe was and had heard him on podcasts and things. And I kind of knew roughly where things were, and I was like, that code looks messy. And so I think I mostly got it right, but just the openness of the question of like, what do you think? I was like, oh God. [laughs] So yeah, that book will always be in my memories, is how I would describe it. STEPH: Well, I'm glad it worked out so we could be here today recording a podcast together. [laughs] CHRIS: Recording a podcast together. Now that I say all that, though, it's been a long time since I've read the book. So maybe I'll take a revisit. And definitely interested to hear more about your book club and how that goes. But shifting ever so slightly (I don't have a lot to say on this topic.) but there's a new framework technology thing out there that has caught my attention. And this hasn't happened for a while, so it's kind of novel for me. So I tend to try and keep my eye on where is the sort of trend of web development going? And I found Inertia a while ago, and I've been very, very happy with that as sort of this is the default answer as to how I build websites. To be clear, Inertia is still the answer as to how I build websites. I love Inertia. I love what it represents. But I'm seeing some stuff that's really interesting that is different. Specifically, Remix.run is the thing that I'm seeing. I mentioned it, I think, in the last episode talking about there was some stuff that they were doing with data loading and async versus synchronous, and do you wait on it or? They had built some really nice levers and trade-offs into the framework. And there's a really great talk that Ryan Florence, one of the creators of Remix.run, gave about that and showed what they were building. I've been exploring it a little bit more in-depth now. And there is some really, really interesting stuff in Remix. In particular, it's a meta-framework, I think, is the nonsense phrase that we use to describe it. But it's built on top of React. That won't be true for forever. I think it's actually they would say it's more built on top of React Router. But it is very similar to Next.js for folks that have seen that. But it's got a little bit more thought around data loading. How do we change data? How do we revalidate data after? There's a ton of stuff that, having worked in many React client-side API-heavy apps that there's so much pain, cache invalidation. How do you think about the cache? When do you fetch from the network? How do you avoid showing 19 different loading spinners on the page? And Remix as a framework has some really, I think, robust and well-thought-out answers to a lot of that. So I am super-duper intrigued by what they're doing over there. There's a particular video that I think shows off what Remix represents really well. It's Ryan Florence, that same individual, the creator of Remix, building just a newsletter signup page. But he goes through like, let's start from the bare bones, simplest thing. It's just an input, and a form submits to the server. That's it. And so we're starting from web 2.0, long, long ago, sort of ideas, and then he gradually enhances it with animations and transitions and error states. And even at the end, goes through an accessibility audit using the screen reader to say, "Look, Remix helps you get really close because you're just using web fundamentals." But then goes a couple of steps further and actually makes it work really, really well for a screen reader. And, yeah, overall, I'm just super impressed by the project, really, really intrigued by the work that they're doing. And frankly, I see a couple of different projects that are sort of in this space. So yeah, again, very early but excited. STEPH: On their website...I'm checking it out as you're walking me through it, and on their website, they have "Say goodbye to Spinnageddon." And that's very cute. [laughs] CHRIS: There's some fundamental stuff that I think we've just kind of as a web community, we made some trade-offs that I personally really don't like. And that idea of just spinners everywhere just sending down a ball of application logic and a giant JavaScript file turning it on on someone's computer. And then immediately, it has to fetch back to the server. There are just trade-offs there that are not great. I love that Remix is sort of flipping that around. I will say, just to sort of couch the excitement that I'm expressing right now, that Remix exists in a certain place. It helps with building complex UIs. But it doesn't have anything in the data layer. So you have to bring your own data layer and figure out what that means. We have ActiveRecord within Rails, and it's deeply integrated. And so you would need to bring a Prisma or some other database connection or whatever it is. And it also doesn't have more sort of full-featured framework things. Like with Rails, it's very easy to get started with a background job system. Remix has no answer to that because they're like, no, no, this is what we're doing over here. But similarly, security is probably the one that concerns me the most. There's an open conversation in their discussion portal about CSRF protection and a back and forth of whether or not Remix should have that out of the box or not. And there are trade-offs because there are different adapters that you can use for auth. And each would require their own CSRF mitigation. But to me, that is the sort of thing that I would want a framework to have. Or I'd be interested in a framework that continues to build on top of Remix that adds in background jobs and databases and all that kind of stuff as a complete solution, something more akin to a Rails or a Laravel where it's like, here we go. This is everything. But again, having some of these more advanced concepts and patterns to build really, really delightful UIs without having to change out the fundamental way that you're building things. STEPH: Interesting. Yeah, I think you've answered a couple of questions that I had about it. I am curious as to how it fits into your current tech stack. So you've mentioned that you're excited and that it's helpful. But given that you already have Rails, and Inertia, and Svelte, does it plug and play with the other libraries or the other frameworks that you have? Are you going to have to replace something to then take advantage of Remix? What does that roadmap look like? CHRIS: Oh yeah, I don't expect to be using Remix anytime soon. I'm just keeping an eye on it. I think it would be a pretty fundamental shift because it ends up being the server layer. So it would replace Rails. It would replace the Inertia within the stack that I'm using. This is why as I started, I was like, Inertia is still my answer. Because Inertia integrates really well with Rails and allows me to do the sort of it's not progressive enhancement, but it's like, I want fancy UI, and I don't want to give up on Rails. And so, Inertia is a great answer for that. Remix does not quite fit in the same way. Remix will own all of the request-response lifecycle. And so, if I were to use it, I would need to build out the rest of that myself. So I would need to figure out the data layer. I would need to figure out other things. I wouldn't be using Rails. I'm sure there's a way to shoehorn the technologies together, but I think it sort of architecturally would be misaligned. And so my sense is that folks out there are building...they're sort of piecing together parts of the stack to fill out the rest. And Remix is a really fantastic controller and view from their down experience and routing layer. So it's routing, controller, view I would say Remix has a really great answer to, but it doesn't have as much of the other stuff. Whereas in my case, Inertia and Rails come together and give me a great answer to the whole story. STEPH: Got it. Okay, that's super helpful. CHRIS: But yeah, again, I'm in very much the exploratory phase. I'm super intrigued by a lot of what I've seen of it and also just sort of the mindset, the ethos of the project as it were. That sounds fancy as I say it, but it's what I mean. I think they want to build from web fundamentals and then enhance the experience on top of that, and I think that's a really great way to go. It means that links will work. It means that routing and URLs will work by default. It means that you won't have loading spinner Armageddon, and these are core fundamentals that I believe make for good websites and web applications. So super interested to see where they go with it. But again, for me, I'm still very much in the Rails Inertia camp. Certainly, I mean, I've built Sagewell on top of it, so I'm going to be hanging out with it for a while, but also, it would still be my answer if I were starting something new right now. I'm just really intrigued by there's a new example out there in the world, this Remix thing that's pushing the envelope in a way that I think is really great. But with that, my now…what was that? My second or my third rave? Also called the positive rant, as we call it. But yeah, I think on that note, what do you think? Should we wrap up? STEPH: Let's wrap up. CHRIS: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

It's the second episode of the night at Murf's with Pete Logan! Andy Morton also lurks at the edge of things . . . Also lurking is a live 350th episode coming in late July, details next episode! The Notes: Andy Morton derailed a train recently! Train-flattened pennies and other uncle pastimes! Missing the hobo lifestyle! Pete Logan's Hobo Pie Recipe! Will's hobo name is Slow Foot Willie! For the price of a warm pie and a warm bed you can get married! Will's got some sloppy hashtags! Pete makes that dented top hat look good! #DDHoboNameMe! Listening to the trains! Will's seagull impression! Will makes a really bad techno song! Nelson has forgotten his muses! Will explains the plot of Yellow Submarine! Beatles talk! Contact Us! Follow Us! Love Us! Email: doubledeucepod@gmail.com Twitter & Instagram: @doubledeucepod Facebook: www.facebook.com/DoubleDeucePod/ Patreon: patreon.com/DoubleDeucePod Also, please subscribe/rate/review/share us! We're on Apple, Android, Libsyn, Stitcher, Google, Spotify, Radio.com, RadioPublic, pretty much anywhere they got podcasts, you can find the Deuce! Podcast logo art by Jason Keezer! Find his art online at Keezograms! Intro & Outro featuring Rob Schulte! Check out his podcasts at Pink Jeans! Brought to you in part by sponsorship from Courtney Shipley, Official Superfans Stefan Rider & Molly Scanlon, and listeners like you! Join a tier on our Patreon! Advertise with us! Check out the Lawrence Times's 785 Collective at https://lawrencekstimes.com/785collective/ for a list of local LFK podcasts including this one!

An airhacks.fm conversation with Jack Franklin (@Jack_Franklin) about: A thick, chunky Dell Laptop, Playing Tycoon, creating a soccer website with DreamWeaver, learning PHP and CSS, learning python, Java and prolog at the university, writing Rails code, the popularity of Ruby on Rails, Python vs. Ruby, switching from Angular to React, Angular 1 vs. Angular 2, backward compatibility and React, React Hooks, hooks vs. lifecycle methods, starting at Google Chrome Dev Tools Team, working on Chrome Performance Insights, Chrome Dev Tools is a Web Application, from custom framework to Web Components and lit-html, Chrome SDK manages state, Polymer was chatty, lit-html is a tagged template literal, lit-html performs partial updates, the bar for using frameworks gets higher, lit-html optimises the rendering, console.begin and console.end for better developer experience, lit-html is used in Chrome, what happens if FaceBook looses interests on React, what is the worst case scenario for loosing a dependency, using Chrome's ninja and rollup.js for bunding, Chrome supports import maps, chrome -custom-devtools-frontend storybook for WebComponents, adding JS-comments with JSDoc for type annotations for better refactoring in plain ES 6, any and unkonwn in typescript, Performance Insights panel lowers the bar for website optimizations, the Chrome Recorder generates pupeteer script, the Recorder panel is also implemented with Web Components, big UI features are implemented as Web Components, Jack's post: "Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform", Jack Franklin on twitter: @Jack_Franklin, Jack's blog jackfranklin.co.uk

On this week's show, we spoke with Miles Schwartz, Co-Founder @ Zum Rails.  Experienced FinTech entrepreneur with a successful track record of building businesses from scratch. His passion for excellence and achieving results stems from his drive to continuously improve in all aspects of his life. He's had the luxury of working with some very inspiring mentors who have helped shape him into the entrepreneur, leader, and team player he is today.   On the show, we spoke about:  Choosing the non-corporate life Being the first employee at Flinks Starting Zum Rails and building a company entirely remote  Scaling to 7 figures ARR and fundraising strategy  His ambition in building a unicorn   Miles shares some great insights about a winning mindset and what it takes to succeed in the startup world. I hope that you enjoy the conversation! Subscribe | iTunes | Google Play |Spotify | YouTube | Stitcher |

[00:01:36] Colleen and Aaron introduce themselves and tell us what they do. [00:03:04] There was a workshop at RailsConf that Colleen and Aaron had around Advanced Active Record and we learn about the purpose of the workshop.  [00:04:42] We find out what Arel is and what it gives us, and how Laravel handles everything you need but in a different way. [00:09:07] We find out where the query builders are in the process of launching for each side. [00:10:57] Andrew wonders if Aaron used CSS variables to make it customizable or if he went with a manual approach, and Aaron tells us a problem they ran across. [00:12:49] Jason asks if they are able to share the front-end libraries between both the Rails and Laravel one or if they're shipping separately.  [00:13:54] For the Rails side, Jason asks if they are mounting a Rails engine to access a query builder or how does someone access it once it's in the app. [00:16:06] Colleen and Aaron explain what it's like to maintain feature parity between the two. [00:20:56] We hear the story of how Colleen and Aaron ended up in a place where they're both working on a product for two different frameworks, the beginnings of Refine, and how they met. [00:27:40] Colleen tells us all about Simple File Upload, which is predominately a Heroku add-on, and how the adoption has been over the past year. [00:31:18] Aaron tells us all about Torchlight, which is a syntax highlighter, and the positive responses he's had from releasing this product. [00:40:24] We learn all about using Serverless. [00:44:02] Aaron shares his thoughts on what his experience has been coming from the outside world as a Laravel developer and going to RailsConf. [00:48:17] Colleen shares what she's going to talk about at The Rails SaaS Conference. [00:52:32] Find out where you can follow Colleen and Aaron online and their podcasts.   Panelists:Jason CharnesAndrew Mason  Guests:Colleen SchnettlerAaron Francis  Sponsor:Honeybadger  Links:Jason Charnes TwitterAndrew Mason TwitterColleen Schnettler TwitterAaron Francis TwitterAaron Francis WebsiteHammerstoneSimple File UploadTorchlightTupleLaravelThe Hammerstone PodcastSoftware Social PodcastFramework Friends PodcastFly.ioThe Rails SaaS Conference (October 6-7, 2022)Ruby Radar NewsletterRuby Radar Twitter

In this episode we have #Swedengate, how to make a quick $2, double high 5, fake Klay, Disney's notes, elephants never forget, never forget Steve Irwin, real squid game, monkey pox guidance, littering and... Hot hairy dude summer, no tampons, that bitch, Georgia NOPE, and no sex robot because will was not supposed to be here. #podcast #new #comedy #stand #up #funny #advice #how #cast #hilarious #lol #haha #wtf #tiktok #show #host #comedic #comedy #offtherails #offtherailstm #rails #germancomedy #funnypodcast #hiddengem #milwaukee #mke

The Night Man, Saga, and Curse Words! Join us next week for more Night Man, X-Men (2021), and Deadpool: Samurai! Thank you DJ VON MIER for "FROM DA GO". Facebook Twitter Ralf Dave Donny Patreon

Three Man Weave This Week with Tom, Tim, And DeGraftIs the episode late? Heck No! We had Father's Day and Juneteenth, and it was a Pettywise edited episode. Lucky to get it when you did!We discuss Imposter Syndrome at work for most of the episode but sprinkle in the following: Father's Day, Drake's New Album, Golden State Warriors, NBA Trades, and a random Am I the A**hole that does off the Rails in True TGOT Fashion.Timestamps? HA! Pettywise edited episode remember?Twitter - www.twitter.com/TGOTpodcastFacebook - www.facebook.com/TGOTpodcastInstagram - www.instagram.com/TGOTpodcastPodchaser - www.podchaser.com/TGOTpodcastDiscord - www.discord.gg/5PN3kNzTheme music can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/flyboicamp/entertain-prod-tony-heat

Chris is weathering through a slight lull, a holding period, where his team waits for new features to become available with some of the platforms they integrate with, and as they think out new facets of the platform they're building. Steph has been thinking recently about working in isolation. It's a topic that Joël Quenneville pointed out to her and mentioned. Can engineers work in isolation and be successful? Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: CHRIS: Always be singing. STEPH: I can't remember if I've shared the story with you. But I had a beautiful little human moment with someone at airport security. Because when I travel with my mic, I always get stopped because there's the middle long, thin piece that looks like what you would screw on to a gun like for a silencer. And so [laughs] as he was going through, the person was looking at it, and then he called over a buddy. And then they called over another buddy, and there's like three TSA agents all looking at the X-ray screen. And finally, they're like, "Yeah, we need to flag it." So they moved it over. And then he was digging through, and he pulled out the big metal piece. And I said, "It's for a microphone." And he's like, "Okay," and he kept looking, and then he finally found the microphone. And he lit up because I guess he wasn't really sure to believe me at first when I said it. But he lit up, and he was like, "Karaoke?" [laughs] I was like, "No, it's for podcasting." CHRIS: But not 100% no because we do sing plenty on this show, so... STEPH: I think that's what made me think of it. It was your singing. [laughs] CHRIS: Yep. My wonderful, wonderful singing. 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. So, hey, Chris? What's new in your world? CHRIS: What's new in my world? We are in sort of a...what's the word? There's a bit of a lull right now, not like a big lull, but we had a bunch of clear work that came into the team, did a bunch of iterations, some testing, built some new features, et cetera. And now there's a small holding period basically where we wait for some new features to become available with some of the platforms that we integrate with and also as we think out some new facets of the platform that we're building. So we've got this little bit of time here where we're not necessarily building out as many new novel features. But instead, as a dev team, we're taking this moment to be like, oh, cool, let's tie down. I want to make a sailing analogy here, but I don't know sailing. It's like tie down the somethings and batten the hatches, maybe. That sounds like a thing. [chuckles] But so we have a couple of projects going right now. We want to really accept the truth and lean into Sidekiq. So right now, we have a mix of ActiveJob and Sidekiq jobs. And they're confusing, and et cetera, et cetera. So we want to kind of lean into that, upgrade dependencies, that sort of thing. We are, again, doing a little bit of work on the observability foundation of our system. so how do we know what's going on at runtime? Also, working on just some core features and functionality. We have done a little bit of an exploration into the event processing stuff, some of that that I've been talking about. It's actually been very interesting. So we're working with Customer.io as a platform, which is omnichannel communication behavior-based messaging sort of thing. So when a user does X, send them an email and then wait three days. And if they haven't responded, then do this other thing. And I think I've said this in previous episodes; I'm so wildly impressed with that platform. They have done such a good job. And I know that good software doesn't happen in a vacuum. In fact, if we're being honest, a lot of the software out there is not very good. And not only do they do a good job, but it's across...there's a ton of functionality in Customer.io. And it's interesting because we're finding ourselves leaning into it even more because it is such a solid platform and because it connects into our event system. Like, it's a segment destination, so all of our analytics events get piped into Customer.io, and then we can action on any of them. And the actions can be quite complicated. And this is where we're getting into good idea, terrible idea space. And to be clear, this is still just an exploration. But we basically wanted a way to do more. There are a bunch of different actions that you can take so, like send an email, send an SMS, or there are a couple of other slightly fancier ones. You can trigger an event within the Customer.io system. You can actually do an arbitrary HTTP POST, PUT, PATCH, whatever, any web requests you want to make. So if you want to integrate with essentially anything else out there, you can do that. You can send some structured data over the wire. And so we've now been like, okay, what if, and stay with me here, what if we use our analytic system and we send events whenever a user does something, and then that event eventually trickles down to Customer.io? Within that, we allow ourselves to respond to that event by emitting a different event within the system, within Customer.io. And then, via the webhook functionality, we fire that back to the Rails application. And then there we can do whatever we want. And in a way, that sounds absurd because we're starting from our app, and then we're sending some events down, processing them in certain ways, sending it back to the app, and then maybe doing something. In particular, one of the things we want to do is richly formatted Slack alerts. And Customer.io has a Slack alert functionality, but they can't have any of the fancy stuff. They can't link to our customer in the admin dashboard. So we found that that functionality is particularly useful for our admin team. And so we're like, ah, this feels weird. But if we were to do this loop out and back, then ideally, we get the power of Customer.io for non-technical users or non-engineering team users to configure workflows and to say, "When a user does this, I actually want to alert the admin team via Slack." And we want it to be rich and have buttons that you can click and all that kind of stuff. And although the thing that I just described seems complicated, is a word that I'll use for it, confusing at times, it isn't...like, I don't want to do all of that in the app. I don't want the app to have to think about how do I wait three days? We technically can do that with Sidekiq, but it gets us in trouble and whatnot, whereas Customer.io that's a core concept for them. And so, again, very much exploration. This will probably be a future good idea, terrible idea segment. But that's been an interesting one to explore. STEPH: You have quite a talent for you preface something as a bad idea, and you do a very good job of making it sound reasonable and good. [laughs] So it's interesting to be on that side of like, good idea, bad idea. It's like, I'm looking for the bad. And I have questions, but overall, [chuckles] you do a very good job of being very thoughtful and walking through why it makes sense or what are the benefits of it. So you answered some of my questions around why still send it to Customer.io versus just having it all in-house. So the fact that the admin team has access to it makes a lot of sense. I want to clarify one point. So when you send it to Customer.io, Customer.io then needs to send a message back to your application. And then that's when you customize the Slack message. Do you need Customer.io to send that message, or could you just fire off an event to Customer.io to say, "Hey, capture this, but don't do anything with this. And then we're going to send the Slack message because we want to customize it."? CHRIS: I think the key is that we want to leverage the fact that Customer.io is the platform that our operations team really is now becoming comfortable with and using for this behavioral automation workflow type logic. So that idea of when this event, you know, when this triggering event happens, if this condition is true, then respond in this way. And so because Customer.io is the platform that A, is quite good at that and B, is where our admin team is now thinking about doing that, one thing that we might do let's say a user completes some action within the application. So they fill out a form to submit their interest in some new platform feature. Initially, what we might want to do there is alert ourselves to say, "Hey, this happened. Take some action." And then eventually, we may want to instead switch that over and send an email to the customer with the next steps that they need to do. And the ability to gradually transition across that spectrum is really interesting to me, and again, Customer.io being the platform, sort of the hub for how we respond to these events. At the same time, I know that this feels like a generic message processing system that might be a Kafka queue somewhere else. And so I've got that in the back of my head of like, is this weird? I think it's a little weird. But it also, thus far as we're exploring it, is very approachable for the admin team, very familiar for them, and reasonably powerful. And also, there's a drag and drop editor for the events and the payloads. And it knows for this event, here's the stuff that's available to you. And so the ability for our admin team to interact with that interface is really great. And we don't have to build it. We don't have to think about it. But I will say I've worked at so many different companies that have their ad hoc system that makes it easy to do generic X, Y, and Z. And it's bad, and it falls down. And it's impossible to know when anything happens. And so, I've got a lot of concerns in the back of my head, which I will want to at least think through and understand the trade-offs that we're making if we pursue this path, but it is very interesting to me. So right now, a lot of this logic does live in the app. But it means that it requires a code change for anything that we want to do like this. We want to have a Slack alert whenever X happens. Now, the developers are in the loop for all of that. And really, it's the operations team that owns the decisioning on that. And so if they can also self-serve and instrument the action, the alert, the follow-up, the whatever it is, if we can give them those primitives in a platform that they already understand, that sounds nice. I'm intrigued, is what I'll say. So anyway, while we're in this lull period, we are trying out some fun stuff like that and exploring those sorts of things. STEPH: I like that perspective that you're putting on it, or at least the one that's standing out to me is the concept of ownership is like who gets to own these actions. But then beyond that, that's the part where I feel a little squirmy is, so we are using this third-party tool because it makes life easier. But then, at what point when we start building software around this third-party tool to then customize it back on our own side. Then if someone is in Customer.io, so if an admin user is in there and then they trigger an event, is there going to be confusion as to what's going to happen? And can they retry an event? Because I'm realizing my initial suggestion where it was like, hey, notify Customer.io that this is there but then also manage sending the Slack message that would prevent them from being able to have that retry capability. And that may be very much worth preserving. So then it's understood that hey, if you want to manage this, we are giving you full access to manage this work. We may customize it, but this is still the interface in which you go through to have three tries or to manage that workflow or these actions that get sent to users. CHRIS: Yeah. I think you've perfectly highlighted the why this might not be a great idea or at least the concerns to explore before adopting this more thoroughly. And even just the idea of adopting it more thoroughly, like, how tied into the system are we? How business-critical does this new external piece of software become? Because I've seen that to be really problematic where there are organizations that I've worked with that are like, "Oh God, we would love to move off of system X. But unfortunately, it's basically the one thing holding this business up." And I'm like, yeah, I get that. And that happens. So yeah, being really intentional with that. And that's why we're very much in an exploration place. But we have a bunch of stuff that we've done that required engineering work. And we're now seeing like, actually, could we map this into this other tool? And can we build the set of primitives in that space that now this team can own that whole experience? And then critically, can they debug it? Will we know when something goes wrong, et cetera? Those are always parts. At this point, I don't think I can just imagine a happy path. And I hope this isn't true for the rest of my life. But the work as a software developer, especially after having done a couple of rounds of it and as a consultant, I just imagine failure modes. It's all I do. I'll be like, okay, we just need to wire X up to Z, and then we need to fire off a request. And then, once we get the message back, then we can process them. I'm like, right. You just described 13 things that can go wrong. Now let's imagine each of the different failure states because that's all I'm going to do. Who cares about the happy path? Those are easy. Those write themselves. It's all of the failure modes that I need to think about. And someday, when I retire, and I go to a log cabin in the woods, and I don't talk to people for a while, maybe I'll go back to a place of only happy paths. But that is not my truth right now. STEPH: I can't tell you how many people in my personal life I have annoyed so much [laughs] because all I see are failure modes. And one, that's a delightful t-shirt. [laughs] I'd love to have that. And then yeah, I feel you because there are so many times where someone is...like, I'm with someone who's like a big idea person. And so they're just launching into what-ifs, and we did this. And I can't help it, and I have learned to help it. But it has been a struggle with some strong feedback from family and friends to reel it in. Because then I will start to think through okay, well, what's the details? And I have some questions. What happens when this happens? And yeah, all I see are failure modes. [laughs] It is very true for me too, and not always...not so great. So I, too, shall get a log cabin one day and try to forget all of that. CHRIS: I will say I painted that as a particularly glib version of myself. But some of what I'm doing right now, particularly joining an early-stage startup and taking the role of CTO, was very much to try and intentionally resist that. Because right now, I have to be really careful with how much of the potential edge cases and whatnot. I'm considering exactly how robust of a platform are we building? Very is the answer. But what about extremely? Because extremely is an option but extremely costs four times as much. Mostly in time being the critical element there. And so part of the work that I'm doing now is just trying to push on those edges, push on those boundaries, find the places where we can move quickly, and still build a robust platform because frankly, we're building...Sagewell is a financial platform under the hood, and I can't be flippant with that. We as a team have to be really careful with the thing that we're building. But we also have to move quickly. We have to be able to iterate. We have to be able to build something and try it out and see if it works. And then, if it doesn't, maybe shelve it and pull it out of the codebase. And it has been a real challenge, but it was the challenge that I wanted here. And so I've been enjoying that work, but it has been a stretch, a growth moment, let's call it. STEPH: I don't know if you've shared that particular goal with me in transitioning to a CTO role, but I really, really like it. One, it's very aligned with who you are. You're very thoughtful, and you look for areas to push and ways to do that. And then I also struggle in those areas, and thoughtbot specifically and consulting has helped push me in directions, push me out of my comfort zones but still in a safe space where I have other people to talk to as I'm making those decisions and pushing past the comfort areas that I have. But one of them is that I will initially think things have to be perfect or really planned. And I had a really nice conversation with Chad Pytel, who is one of the Founders of thoughtbot and also COO and host of the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast. And we were chatting about a new offering that thoughtbot is bringing to the market. And it's one that I've been involved with. And I started getting really in the weeds of like, but we really have to plan out how this is going to look and all the actions that need to take place before then we can really sell this type of engagement to a new client. And as I was going through this list of worries, when I was done, he mentioned he's like, "All of those are valid and something to consider." He's like, "But we don't have any customers yet." So the first part is we feel that we are in a space that we have enough of information to get started. And it's something that we've done before. And then, we'd like to see where customers align with us on this need because we're going to end up shaping this work in response to what their needs are. And so, we can't really begin that shaping until we understand more of what people are looking for. I was like, oh yeah, that's such a nice point. It just reminded me in regard to pushing those boundaries of yes, we need planning upfront, and we look for failure modes. But then there's also an important aspect of then finding ways to keep moving forward and getting more feedback and then balancing those two. CHRIS: Yeah, I think that's definitely right the as always, anchoring it to the customer. What is it that they need? How do we connect with them and hear from them? And ideally, keep those feedback loops as short as possible. That's the game, and everything else fits around that. But yeah, so we're trying some stuff. We'll see how it goes. I will certainly report back, depending on how it plays out. But that's a little bit of what's up in my world. What's up in your world? STEPH: I have been thinking recently about working in isolation. It's a topic that Joël Quenneville, who's another thoughtboter and has been on the show a number of times, it was a topic that he'd actually pointed out to me and mentioned. And so, I wanted to bring that here and share it with you because I'd love to get some of your thoughts on this as well. But I've typically had the viewpoint that when developers are sent off to work on a large, nebulous task, that it's a recipe for disaster, and almost everyone's going to lose in that scenario. And it tends to be a combination of isolation, very distant due dates, and loosely defined scope that leads to those really poor results. However, as developers, it's not inconceivable for us to land in that position. And it's very similar to my current project, who I'm working with Joël on, where we were given a very fuzzy project with some really aggressive goals, and the engagement is going really well. So that led Joël and I to wonder why is this working? This is the thing that we said that people should never do, but it's actually going quite well for us. So reflecting upon some of the things that are working well for us, even though we are in more of an isolated state than we would typically work, some of the things that I've been reflecting on or some of the strategies I should say that we've applied to this situation is number one, we did work hard to plug into an existing team. So when we joined, we joined more of an ad hoc volunteer team. And in everybody's spare time, those individuals were then contributing to the CI process in terms of trying to speed things up and improve things for the rest of the team. But otherwise, there wasn't really a team. There wasn't much structure to it. So it felt like everybody was very much off in their own world doing their own thing, occasionally putting up some code changes for review. And then you had to gain a lot of context to understand what it was that they were doing. So one of the things that I advocated for early on that I thought was more of just my personal preference but I think has actually worked well in regards to the success of the project as well is to plug into an existing team. So even if you are not working with that team on their day-to-day tasks, but you want to have more people to interact with and more people to share your context with. So you are essentially reducing the isolation of you're no longer these two people who are off in a corner working on something, and nobody has any idea what you're doing, and only one person is getting a status update. There is now a whole channel or team of people that have some insight as to what's going on. And they can also really unblock you for when you get stuck because then if you do have a question, but there's that one person who has been like your go-to person for this whole project, if they're out on vacation, or if they leave, or just something happens, you're suddenly blocked. And you don't know who to go to because you've been part of this larger company, but you haven't interacted with anybody outside of that one person. So at least if you're plugged into another team, you've immediately got some friends or some other people to go to and say, "Hey, I'm not sure who can help me with this, but I have this problem." And then, from there, you can get more help. CHRIS: This is super interesting. To start, I really like that you're framing this in terms of this is a thing that we often recommend against or see as an anti-pattern, and yet in this particular case, it's working. Let's look at that. Because I think the things that you're like, huh, that's interesting. That phrase "Huh, that's interesting" is very interesting. It often highlights like oh, something is behaving counter to how we would expect it to, so let's dig in and explore that. And so I love that that was the reaction and then sort of the conversation that spilled out of that. I'm also not super surprised that the combination of you and Joël were able to find a way to make this successful because you are two of the most capable developers that I've worked with but also particularly excellent communicators and advocates for the work that you're doing and the way that one should do the work. So the idea that there's a situation that may not be the ideal mode of working and that you're able to take that and say, "What if we shift it just a little bit and make it a little bit more manageable and whatnot?" So unsurprised, frankly, that you found a way collectively to make this a little bit better. And then I think yeah, it sounds like you're doing the things...so just like, we're in isolation, hmm, that doesn't seem great. Let's unisolate and connect to some people, and that just feels so true. I'm very interested to hear, though. I'm guessing there's more to this story or other things that you've done. Are there other tactics or ways that you've shifted this around? STEPH: Yeah, there's a couple more. So this is one that (And thank you for the kind words.) this was one that I think Joël is really exceptional at. So Joël is really good at building diagrams and graphs and then sharing that with the team as sort of like we've spent a couple of days understanding this big, messy concept. Here's a nice condensed graph that shows how we went about understanding this. And then here's the big overall picture of what we've learned from this, which has been wonderful for so many reasons. And every time that we share something with the team, one, it just helps build camaraderie, especially in remote days, it just builds camaraderie on hey, we're all online. And we're working. And here's the thing that I'm working through or struggling with or something that I learned. I often do that, especially when I get frustrated and something goes wrong. I love to share the I did this today. It went terribly. [laughs] Let me tell you about it, so you're aware of it in case it helps you. And specifically, the diagrams are really nice because then other people can just see and appreciate it, or they can point something out that we didn't know. Or they'll see a different angle because they're more familiar with the system. So they can say, "Oh yeah, that totally makes sense," or "I had no idea that was happening." So that's been a really nice way to engage with the team. And so, essentially, the little title for that strategy is just overshare. Just share all the things that you're doing and find ways to make it digestible for the team so then they can go along on this big, nebulous journey with you. And you can also put it in threads so that way, you're not flooding a channel, but then people can opt-in to that oversharing if they would like more insight into the work that you're doing. CHRIS: Opt-in to that oversharing. [laughs] STEPH: Exactly. I mean, it's not forced oversharing; it's just it's here if people would like it. That was a really nice compliment that some other thoughtboters received from their client team is someone had mentioned that there's so much information that's getting shared from the thoughtboters that they had trouble keeping up. And they really liked that. They really appreciated that they could then go check out this channel or these threads and see exactly the type of work that was happening and the outcomes of it. And then they could just check it maybe beginning of the day, end of the day and get that knowledge dump. Some of the other strategies that we've used are giving ourselves mini-goals to accomplish as part of the larger, more nebulous task. So as we have this very large goal in mind, it's like, where's the small piece? Where's an entry point? What's a task or a goal that we can define? And then we want to break that down into what questions do we need to ask? How can we start moving in this direction? And we want to find something that has an answer. So each time that we start researching once we've gotten to that point...and this is hard. I feel like people may know that, but I should just say that this is hard to take something nebulous and then find the entry point and break down some goals. And that has been one of the wonderful parts of then having a buddy for this type of project because then we can bounce ideas off of each other. And we can also help the other person not go too deep into an area. Because I have definitely had moments where I've been very passionate about like, "We need to do this," and Joël is just like, do we? And I'm like, "Yeah." And he's like, "Do we though?" And I'm like, "I guess not. I just really, really want to." [laughs] It's been very helpful to have a partner balance some of those feelings. And once you can break down some of that amorphous problem into those smaller goals, then you can also create tickets, which is also a really nice way to then surface the work that you're doing. You can document how you're researching, document the question. And then once you have that question of what you're in search of, it's so nice because then once you find the answer, that's immediately a good moment to pause and reflect. So I think in a recent episode, we were chatting about this where Joël and I were trying to understand why the tests weren't being balanced properly across each process that was available. And we found the answer, and we started immediately digging into fixing it or solutions. And then it took us a moment to go back and say, "Actually, this ticket is really just about understanding the problem, not fixing the problem." And so that was a nice; now that we understand the problem, let's go back high-level to define our next goal from this big, nebulous task because maybe fixing that balancing is the right thing to do, but maybe not, and we just need to reconsider. So for that portion of breaking down a big, nebulous task and then identifying smaller tasks that you can achieve, time-boxing has been huge for us in regards of what's something that we can accomplish this week, or what's something we can accomplish today that will then move us forward? And then making sure that we are setting deadlines for ourselves. So normally, this is another area where it's like, huh, that's interesting. I'm a big believer in deadlines. But I do think self-imposed deadlines are really helpful. CHRIS: I'm intrigued to hear you say that you're not a big fan of deadlines because I assume we're actually more aligned on this. But deadlines that are arbitrary and also come with fixed scope and other immovable things, yes, those are the worst in the world. But deadlines that we set for ourselves, and then we use that as a mechanism to hone and refine the scope that we're going to get out the door by that deadline, I find those incredibly useful. And that sounds like that's the same sort of thing you have going on here is like by saying we're willing to expend this much to get a result, that defines the work going into it. STEPH: Yeah, that's fair. Everything that you said is true, too; in regards to, I'm realizing I default that when I hear the word deadline, I'm so used to teams having deadlines that are defined by other individuals that are not part of the work. And as you said, the scope has already been defined, and it can't be changed. And it's all of the bad things that then go with it. So when I think of deadlines, I immediately think of that type of deadline versus the more self-imposed, yes, we can revisit, yes, the team has bought in and understands why this is important. Those types of deadlines are very helpful. It's that first part that I default to that I think of immediately, and I need some reassurance that that is not the type of deadline that I'm looking at or being forced to meet. I have a very similar feeling for estimates. Like, those both fall in the same category for me is; as soon as I hear estimation and deadline, I get nervous. And then I just need to understand the purpose of both and who is setting both of those and the communication around them. And then what does that failure mode look like, the one that we're always looking for? So yeah, deadlines and estimations fit into that. Initially, I'm very hesitant and cautious, but I think they're both very good tools. CHRIS: Yeah, I feel like those are very closely related. And they're definitely tools that can be used for great good or for great evil. And so, ideally, we advocate for the great good usage. But more generally, I love, again, the sharing around the process and what's worked for you in this less typical or often somewhat problematic workflow. I will say, again, so I gave you the series of compliments earlier, and I stand by those compliments for you and Joël. But I think also the sort of related aspect is that you two are both quite senior, very capable, very comfortable suggesting changes, suggesting workflows. So I think the potential dangers of isolation are still very much there. And the fact that the two of you have been able to find a way to work more effectively and perhaps change the terms of things just a little bit to make this effective is A, unsurprising but B, not something that I would expect of every team. I think you've described a wonderful list of the specifics as to how you did that. And ideally, if folks that are perhaps a little earlier on in their career are sent out for a month with a wild project, and they're sent to do it in isolation, hopefully, they can borrow from that list. But again, I do think this is a thing that, from an organizational perspective, we should be very careful with when we're imposing this isolation on it because it takes two fantastic folks like you and Joël to break out of the shackles of it. STEPH: The more we're talking about this, the more apparent it's also becoming that I started with this; how do you manage isolation? And my answer is you get out of it. [laughs] Get out of isolation as quickly as possible. Someone thought it was a good idea to put you there or a good idea to structure it that way. Or maybe they didn't mean it intentionally, but that's how things then shook out. So that's really what a lot of those strategies are about is, then how do I get myself out of this corner that you put me in? Because nobody put Stephanie in a corner. So it's essentially that's all the strategies are looking for ways to say, hey, I'm isolated, but I really don't want to be, and it's dangerous for me to be isolated in this way. Even as a more senior capable developer, it's more likely that things could go wrong, and miscommunications, misaligned expectations. So I need to find ways to then bring the work that I'm doing to make it more relevant to other people on the team. So then we can have more overlap, or at least I can share a lot of the work that's being done. CHRIS: Yeah, absolutely. I think with that wonderful summary and, frankly, utterly fantastic movie reference, what do you think? Should we wrap up? STEPH: Let's do it. Let's wrap up. CHRIS: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeeeee!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

This week we talk with special guest Ton Johnson. We talk Sexy Trash cans, a weird sex crime, F**ck the French, ER warns of a new invention, Tom's new fishing lure, pillars of sexting, the power of an orangutan, spider night light, relax it's just bed bugs, and a really strange car insurance claim. #podcast #new #comedy #stand #up #funny #advice #how #cast #hilarious #lol #haha #wtf #tiktok #show #host #comedic #comedy #offtherails #offtherailstm #rails #germancomedy #funnypodcast #hiddengem #milwaukee #mke

Listener Barry says about eight carriages have come off the tracks. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Making his second appearance on the podcast, Maciej Mensfeld joins the show to share his latest developments with his Kafka and Karafka integrations and libraries. He shares his framework for Kafka 2.0, his personal approach to Rails, and how to integrate Kafka and Karafka most effectively. The panel also discusses regulation and security risks with open-source libraries for developers. About this Episode… What is Kafka and Karafka and how are they used? The Rails mindset with Kafka and Karafka vs. batches What is making Karafka faster? Open-source libraries and regulation and security risks Sponsors Top End Devs (https://topenddevs.com/) Coaching | Top End Devs (https://topenddevs.com/coaching) Links Apache Kafka (https://kafka.apache.org/) GitHub - karafka/karafka: Framework for Apache Kafka based Ruby and Rails applications development. (https://github.com/karafka/karafka) Closer to Code (https://mensfeld.pl/) Mitigate Open Source Supply Chain Risks (https://www.mend.io/mend-supply-chain-defender/) GitHub:Maciej Mensfeld (https://github.com/mensfeld) Picks Charles- Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/129437/legendary-marvel-deck-building-game) Charles- FTP and SSH online - upload, edit, copy, move, rename & more (https://www.net2ftp.com/) Charles - domainagents.com (http://domainagents.com/) Dave- Thunderbolt 4 Pro Cable (3 m) (https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MWP02AM/A/thunderbolt-4-pro-cable-3-m) John- Speyside Single Malt Scotch Whisky | Aberlour (https://www.aberlour.com/en-us/) John- OS 10 - Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_10) Maciej- 100 W 1.5 Ohms Resistors (https://www.mouser.com/c/passive-components/resistors/?power%20rating=100%20W&resistance=1.5%20Ohms) Valentino- Lint Filenames - GitHub Marketplace (https://github.com/marketplace/actions/lint-filenames) Valentino- GitHub - domialex/Sidekick: A Path of Exile helper (https://github.com/domialex/Sidekick) Valentino- Scoped gems proposal by mullermp · Pull Request #40 · rubygems/rfcs (https://github.com/rubygems/rfcs/pull/40) Special Guest: Maciej Mensfeld.

Making his second appearance on the podcast, Maciej Mensfeld joins the show to share his latest developments with his Kafka and Karafka integrations and libraries.  He shares his framework for Kafka 2.0, his personal approach to Rails, and how to integrate Kafka and Karafka most effectively.  The panel also discusses regulation and security risks with open-source libraries for developers. About this Episode…1. What is Kafka and Karafka and how are they used?2. The Rails mindset with Kafka and Karafka vs. batches3. What is making Karafka faster?4. Open-source libraries and regulation and security risks  Sponsors Top End Devs Coaching | Top End Devs Links Apache Kafka GitHub - karafka/karafka: Framework for Apache Kafka based Ruby and Rails applications development. Closer to Code Mitigate Open Source Supply Chain Risks GitHub:Maciej Mensfeld Picks Charles- Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game Charles- FTP and SSH online - upload, edit, copy, move, rename & more Charles - domainagents.com Dave- Thunderbolt 4 Pro Cable (3 m) John- Speyside Single Malt Scotch Whisky | Aberlour John- OS 10 - Wikipedia Maciej- 100 W 1.5 Ohms Resistors Valentino- Lint Filenames - GitHub Marketplace Valentino- GitHub - domialex/Sidekick: A Path of Exile helper Valentino- Scoped gems proposal by mullermp · Pull Request #40 · rubygems/rfcs

The difference between a nice vacation and an adventures vacation is where your travel takes you. If you're looking for a vacation that feeds your soul and strips away the stress of your everyday life. Adventure doesn't have to be limited to hiking in the mountains, cycling through Europe, or simply exploring the great outdoors. Christine's guest today is a Bicycle Travel Pioneer.After graduating in anthropology from Cornell University, Lauren Hefferon studied fine arts and photography in Florence and annually cycles thousands of miles throughout the Europe and her beloved New England. She has been a professional bicycle tour guide for over 40 years and as the founder of bike tour company Ciclismo Classico, is considered a pioneer in the bicycle travel. She is a bicycle travel visionary, bike educator, advocate and supports many cycling causes, such as Rails to Trails, Bikes Belong, Pan Mass Challenge and Mass Bike.Lauren has been a panelist at the National Bike Summit Panel on Bike Tourism, is a bike photographer, founded the annual Ciclismo Classico Bike Travel Film Festival and leads the Jingle Ride, an annual holiday event now in its 25th year that pedals, sings and jingles its way from Arlington to Boston and back. She and her bicycling passion have been featured in an array of media outlets, ranging from Inc. Magazine, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, to Bicycling, CNN.com and Forbes. Her purpose in life is simple: to share her passion for bicycle travel, especially to those who are new to this wondrous two-wheeled activity (for life).For full show notes and to access resources mentioned in this episode, head to https://www.lotussojourns.com/podcast-episodes/episode81Learn more about Lotus Sojourns and ways to be a part of the community here.Find Lotus Sojourns on Facebook, or join the Lotus Sojourns Collective, our FB community for like-hearted women.Follow us on Instagram: @lotussojourns or @souloftravelpodcastLOVE these conversations...support the production of this podcast by making a donation here! Credits. Christine Winebrenner Irick (Host, creator, editor.) Lauren Hefferon(Guest). Original music by Clark Adams. Editing and production by Rayna BoothSupport the show

Dave Zohrob is the co-founder of Chartable (a podcast analytics startup), talks about selling his company to Spotify in February 2022. Highlights (go straight to

Another toaster strudel debate?! Plus, the results are in for the most listened-to podcast in the RoR community! :: drum roll :: Steph has a "Dear Gerrit" message to share. Chris has a follow-up on mobile app strategy. The Bike Shed: 328: Terrible Simplicity (https://www.bikeshed.fm/328) When To Fetch: Remixing React Router - Ryan Florence (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95B8mnhzoCM) Virtual Event - Save Time & Money with Discovery Sprints (https://thoughtbot.com/events/save-time-money-with-discovery) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: STEPH: thoughtbot's next virtual event "Save Time & Money with Discovery Sprints" is coming up on June 17th, from 2 - 3 PM Eastern. It's a discussion with team members from product management, design and development. From a developer perspective, topics will include how to plan a product's architecture, both the MVP and future version, how to lead a tech spikes into integrations and conduct a build vs buy reviews of third party providers. Head to thoughtbot.com/events to register, the event is June 17th 2 - 3 PM ET. Even if you can't make it, registering will get you on the list for the recording. CHRIS: We're the second-best. We're the second-best. 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: I'm very happy to report that I picked up a treat from the store recently. So while I was in Boston and we were hanging out in person, we talked about Pop-Tarts because that always comes up as a debate, as it should. And then also Toaster Strudels came up, so I now have a package of Toaster Strudels, and those are legit. Pop-Tart or Toaster Strudel, I am team Toaster Strudel, which I know you're going to ask me about icing and if I put it on there, so go ahead. I'm going to pause. [laughs] CHRIS: It sounds like I don't even need to say anything. But yes, inquiring minds want to know. STEPH: I think that's also my very defensive response because yes, I put icing on my Toaster Strudel. CHRIS: How interesting. [laughs] STEPH: But it feels like a whole different class of pastry. So I'm very defensive about my stance on Pop-Tarts with no icing put Strudel with icing. CHRIS: A whole different class of pastry. Got it. Noted. Understood. So did you travel? Like, were these in your luggage that you flew back with? STEPH: [laughs] Oh no. They would be all gooey and melty. No, we bought them when we got back to North Carolina. Oh, that'd be a pro move; just pack little individual Strudels as your airplane snack. Ooh, I might start doing that now. That sounds like a great airplane snack. CHRIS: You got to be careful though if the icing, you know, if it's pressurized from ground level and then you get up there, and it explodes. And you gotta be careful. Or is it the reverse? It's lower pressure up in the plane. So it might explode. STEPH: [laughs] Either way, it might explode. CHRIS: Well, yeah. If you somehow buy a packet of icing that is sky icing that is at that pressure, and you bring it down, then...but if you take it up and down, I think it's fine. If you open it at the top, you might be in danger. If you open icing under the ocean, I think nothing's going to happen. So these are the ranges that we're playing with. STEPH: I will be very careful sky icing and probably pack two so that way I have a backup just in case. So if one explodes, we'll be like, all right, now I know what I'm working with and be more prepared for the next one. CHRIS: That's just smart. STEPH: I try to make smart travel decisions, Toaster Strudels on the go. Aside from travel treats and sky icing, I have some news regarding Planet Argon, who is a Ruby on Rails consultancy regarding their latest published this year's Ruby on Rails community survey results. And so they list a lot of fabulous different topics in there. And one of them includes a learning section that highlights most listened to podcasts in the Ruby on Rails community as well as blogs and some other resources. And Bike Shed is listed as the second most listened to podcast in the Ruby on Rails community, so whoo, golf clap. CHRIS: Fantastic. STEPH: And in addition to that, the thoughtbot blog got a really nice shout-out. So the thoughtbot blog is in the number two spot for the most visited blogs in the community. In the first spot is Ruby Weekly, which is like, you know, okay, that feels fair, that feels good. So it's really exciting for the thoughtbot blog because a lot of people work really hard on curating and creating that content. So that's wonderful that so many people are enjoying it. And then I should also highlight that for the podcast in first place is Remote Ruby, so congrats to Chris, Jason, and Andrew for grabbing that number one spot. And Brittany Martin, host of the Ruby on Rails Podcast, along with Brian Mariani, Jemma Issroff, and Nick Schwaderer, are in the number three spot. And some people say that Ruby is losing steam but look at all that content and all those highly ranked podcasts. I mean, we like Ruby so much we're spending time recording ourselves talking about it. So I say long live Ruby, long live Rails. CHRIS: Yes. Long live Ruby indeed. And yeah, it's definitely an honor to be on the list and to be amongst such other wonderful shows. Certainly big fans of the work of those other podcasts. We even did a joint adventure with them at one point, and that was a really wonderful experience, so yeah, honored to be on the list alongside them. And to have folks out there in the world listening to our tech talk and nonsense always nice to hear. STEPH: Yeah. You and I show up and say lots of silly things and technical things into the podcast. The true heroes are the ones that went and voted. So thank you to everybody who voted. That's greatly appreciated. It's really nice feedback. Because we get listener responses and questions, and those are wonderful because it lets us know that people are listening. But I have to say that having the survey results is also really nice. It lets us know people like the show. Oh, but I did go back and look at some of the previous stats because then I was like, huh, so I'm paying attention. I looked at this year's, and I was like, I wonder what last year's was or the year before that. And I think this survey comes out every two years because I didn't see one for 2021. But I did find the survey results for 2020, which we were in the number one spot for 2020, and Remote Ruby was in the second spot. So I feel like now we've got a really nice, healthy podcasting war situation going on to see who can grab the first spot. We've got two years, everybody, to see who [laughs] grabs the number one spot. That's a lot of prep time for a competition. CHRIS: Yeah, I feel like we should be like, I don't know, planning elaborate pranks on them or something like that now. Is that where this is at? It's something like that, I think. STEPH: I think so. I think this is where you put like sky frosting inside someone's suitcase, and that's the type of prank that you play. [laughs] CHRIS: The best of pranks. STEPH: We'll definitely put together a little task force. And we'll start thinking of pranks that we all need to start playing on each other for the podcasting wars that we're entering for the next few years. But anywho, what's going on in your world? CHRIS: Let's see, what's going on in my world? A fun thing happened recently. I had a chance to reflect back on some architectural choices that we've made in the Sagewell platform. And one of those specific choices is how we've approached building our native mobile apps. We made what some listeners may remember is an interesting set of choices. In particular, in Episode 328, which we'll include a link to in the show notes, I shared with you the approach that we're doing, which is basically like, Inertia is great, web user great. We like the web as a platform. What if we were to wrap it in a native shell and find this interesting and somewhat unique hybrid trade-off point? And so, at that point, we were building it. We had most of it built out, and things were going quite well. I think we maybe had the iOS app in the store and the Android app approaching the store or something like that. At this point, both apps have been released to the store, so they are live. Production users are signing in. It's wonderful. But I had a moment in the past couple of weeks to reassess or look at that set of choices and evaluate it. And thankfully, I'm happy with the choices that we've made. So that's good. But to get into the specifics, there were two things that happened that really, really framed the choice that we made, so one was we introduced a major new feature. We basically overhauled the first-run experience, the onboarding that users experience, and added a new, pretty fundamental facet to the platform. It's a bunch of new screens, and flows, and error states, and all of this complexity. And in the process, we iterated on it a bunch. Like, first, it looked like this, and then we changed the order of the screens and switched out the error messages, and et cetera, et cetera. And I'll be honest, we never even thought about the mobile apps. It just wasn't even a consideration. And interestingly, we did as a final check before going fully live and releasing this out to the full production audience; we did spot check it in the mobile apps, and it didn't work. But it didn't work for a very specific, boring, technical reason that we were able to resolve. It has to do with iframes and WebViews and embedded something, something. And we had to set a flag. Thankfully, it was solvable without a deploy of the native mobile apps. And otherwise, we never thought about the native apps. Specifically, we were able to add this fundamental set of features to our platform. And they just worked in native mobile. And they were the same as they roughly are if you're on a mobile WebView or if you're on a desktop web, you know, slightly different in terms of form factor. But the functionality was all the same. And critically, the error states and the edge cases and the flow, there's so much to think about when you're adding a nontrivial feature to an app. And the fact that we didn't have to consider it really spoke to the choice that we made here. And again, to name it, the choice that we made is we're basically just reusing the same WebViews, the same Rails controllers, and the same what are Svelte components under the hood but the same essentially view layer as well. And we are wrapping that in a native iOS. It's a Swift application shell, and on Android, it's a Kotlin application shell. But under the hood, it's the same web stuff. And that was really great. We just got these new features. And you know what? If we have to rip that whole set of functionality out, again, we won't need to deploy. We won't need to rethink it. Or, if we want to subtly tweak it, we can do that. If we want to think about feature flags or analytics, or error states or error reporting, all of this just naturally falls out of the approach that we took. And that was really wonderful. STEPH: That's super nice. I also love this saga of like, you made a choice, and then you're coming back to revisit and share how it's going. So as someone who's never done this before, in regards of wrapping an application in the manner that you have and then publishing it and distributing it that way, what does that process look like? Is this one of those like you run a command, and literally, it's going to wrap the application and then make it hostable on the different mobile app stores? Or what's that? Am I oversimplifying the process? What does that look like? CHRIS: I think there are a lot of platforms or frameworks I think would probably be the better word like Capacitor is something that comes to mind or Ionic or Expo. There are a handful of them that are a little more fully featured in what they provide. So you just point us at your React Views and whatnot, and we'll wrap that up, and it'll be great. But those are for, I may be overgeneralizing here, but my understanding is those are for more heavy client-side bundles that are talking to a common API. And so you're basically taking your same rich client-side application and bundling that up for reuse on the native app, the native app platforms. And so I think those do have some release to the store sort of thing. In our case, we went a little bit further with that integration wrapper thing that we built. So that is a thing that we maintain. We have a Sagewell iOS repo and a Sagewell Android repo. There's a bunch of Swift and Kotlin code, respectively, in each of them, and we deploy to the stores manually. We're doing that whole process. But critically, the code that is in each of those repositories is just the bridge glue code that says, oh, when this Inertia navigation event happens, I'm going to push a WebView to the navigation stack. And that's what that is. I'm going to render the tab bar of buttons at the bottom with the navigation elements that I get from the server. But it's very much server-driven UI, is the way that I would describe it. And it's wrapping WebViews versus actually having the whole client bundle wrapped up in the thing. It's unfortunately subtle to try and talk through on the radio, but yeah. [laughs] STEPH: You're doing great; this is helping. So if there's a change that you want to make, you go to the Rails application, and you make that change. And then do you need to update anything on that iOS repo? It sounds like you don't, which then you don't have to push a new update to the store. CHRIS: Correct. For the vast majority of things, we do not need to make any changes. It's very rare for us to deploy the iOS or the Android app is a different way to put it or to push new releases to the store. It happens we may want to add a new feature to the sort of bridge layer that we built, but increasingly, those are rare. And now it's basically like, yeah, we're just wrapping those WebViews, and it's going great. And again, to name it, it's a trade-off. It's an intentional trade-off that we've made. We're never going to have the richest, most deep platform integration, smooth experience. We are making a small trade-off on that front. But given where we're at as an organization, given how early we are, how much iteration and change, we chose an architecture that optimizes for that change. And so again, like what you just said, yeah, I can...you know how it's really nice to be able to deploy six times a day on a web app, and that's a very straightforward thing to do? It is not so straightforward in the native mobile world. And so, we now have afforded ourselves the ability to do that. But critically, and this is the fun part in my mind, have the trade-offs in the controls. So if we were just like, it's just a WebView, and that's it, and we put it in the stores, and we're done, that is too far of an extreme in my mind. I think the performance trade-offs, the experience trade-offs, it wouldn't feel like a native app like in a deep way, in a problematic way. And so as an example, we have a navigation bar at the top of our app, particularly on iOS, that is native iOS navigation. And we have a tab bar at the bottom, which is native tab UI element. I forget actually what it's called, but it's those elements. And we hide the web application navigation when we're in the mobile context. So we actually swap those out and say, like, let's actually promote these to formal native functionality. We also, within our UI on the web, have a persistent button in the top right corner of your screen that says, "Need help? Reach out to your retirement advocate." who is the person that you get to work with. You can send questions, et cetera, et cetera. It's this little help sidebar drawer thing that pops out. And we have that as a persistent HTML button in the top corner of the web frame. But when we're on native, we push that up as a distinct element in the native UI section. And then again, the bridge that I'm talking about allows for bi-directional communication between the JavaScript side and the native side or the native side and the JavaScript side. And so it's those sorts of pieces that have now afforded us all of the freedom to tinker, and we don't need to re-release where we're like, oh, we want to add a new weird button that does a thing in the WebView when you click on a button outside the WebView. We now just have that built-in. STEPH: Yeah, I really like the flexibility that you're describing. When you promoted those elements to be more native-friendly so, like the navigation or the footer or the little get help chat, is that something that then your team implemented in like the iOS or the Kotlin repo? Okay, I see you nodding, but other people can't see that, so...[laughs] CHRIS: Yeah. I was going to also say the words, but yes, those are now implemented as native parts. So the thing that we built isn't purely agnostic decoupled. It is Sagewell-specific; a lot of it is low-level. Like, let's say we want to wrap an Inertia app in a native mobile wrapper. Like, 90% of the code in it is that, but then there are little bits that are like, and put a button up there. And that button is the Sagewell button. And so it's not entirely decoupled from us. But it mostly is this agnostic bridge to connect things together. STEPH: Yeah, the way you're describing it sounds really nice in terms of you're able to get out the app quickly and have a mobile app quickly that works on both platforms, and then you're still able to deploy changes without having to push that. That was always my biggest mental, or emotional hurdle with the idea of mobile development was the concept of that you really had to batch everything together and then submit it for review and approval and then get it released. And then you got to hope people then upgrade and get the newest version. And it just felt like such a process, not that I ever did much of it. This was all just even watching like the mobile team and all the work that they had to do. And I had sympathy pains for them. But the fact that this approach allows you to avoid a lot of that but still have some nice, customized, more native elements. Yeah, I'm basically just recapping everything you said because I like all of it. CHRIS: Well, thank you, friend. Like I said, I've really enjoyed it, and similar to you, I'm addicted to the feedback loop of the web. It's beautiful. I can deploy ten times or however many I want. Anytime I want, I can push out a new version. And that ability to iterate, to test, to explore, to tweak, to not have to do as much formal testing upfront because I'm terrified that if a bug sneaks out, then, it'll take me two weeks to address it; it just is so, so freeing. And so to give that up moving into a native context. Perhaps I'm fighting too hard to hold on to my dream of the ability to rapidly iterate. But I really do believe in that and especially for where we're at as an organization right now. But, and a critical but here, again, it's a trade-off like anything else. And recently, I happened to be out about in the town, and I decided, oh, you know what? Let me open up the app. Let me see what it's like. And I wasn't on great internet. And so I open the app, and it loads because, you know, it's a native app, so it pops up. But then the thing that actually happened is a loading spinner in the middle of the screen and sort of a gray nothing for a little while until the server request to fetch the necessary UI elements to render the login screen appeared. And that experience was not great. In particular, that experience is core to the experience of using the app every single time. Every time you use it, you're going to have a bad time because we're re-downloading that UI element. And there's caching, and there's things that could happen there to help with that. But fundamentally, that experience is going to be a pretty common one. It's the first thing that you experience when you're opening the app. And so I noticed that and I chatted with the team, and I was like, hey, I feel like this is actually something that fixing this I think would really fundamentally move us along that spectrum of like, we've definitely made some trade-offs here. But overall, it feels snappy and like a native app. And so, we opted to prioritize work on a native login screen for both platforms. This also allows us to more deeply integrate. So particularly, we're going to get biometric logins like fingerprints or face scans, or whatever it is. But critically, it's that experience of like, I open the Sagewell native app on my iOS phone, and then it loads immediately. And then I show it my face like we do these days, and then it opens up and shows me everything that I want to see inside of it. And it's that first-run experience that feels worth the extra effort and the constraints. Because now that it's native mobile, that means in order to change it, we have to do a deploy, not a deploy, release; that's what they call it in the native world. [laughs] You can tell I'm well-versed in this ecosystem. But yeah, we're now choosing that trade-off. And what I really liked about this sort of set of things like the feature that we were able to just accidentally get for free on native because that's how this thing is built. And then likewise, the choice to opt into a fully native login screen like having that lever, having that control over I'm going to optimize for iteration generally, but where it's important, we want to optimize for performance and experience. And now we have this little slider that we can go back and forth. And frankly, we could choose to screen by screen just slowly replace everything in the app with true native WebViews backed by APIs. And we could Ship of Theseus style replace every element of the app with true native mobile things until none of the old bridge code exists. And our users, in theory, would never know. Having that flexibility is really nice given the trade-off and the choice that we've made. STEPH: You said a word there that I missed. You said ship something style. CHRIS: Ship of Theseus. STEPH: What is that? CHRIS: It's like an old biblical story, I want to say, but it's basically the idea of, like, you have the ship. And then some boards start to rot out, so replace those boards. And then the mast breaks, you replace the mast. And slowly, you've replaced every element on the ship. Is it still the same ship at that point? And so it's sort of a philosophical question. So if we replace every single view in this app with a native view, is it still the same map? Philosophers will philosophize about it forever, but whatever. As long as we get to keep iterating and shipping software, then I'm happy. STEPH: [laughs] Y'all philosophize. That's that word, right? CHRIS: Yeah. STEPH: And do your philosopher thing. We'll just keep building and shipping. CHRIS: I don't know if I pronounced it right. It's like either Theseus or Theseus, and I'm sure I said the wrong one. And now that I've said the other, I'm sure both of them are wrong somehow. It's like a USB where there's up and down, and yet somehow it takes three tries. So anyway, I may have mispronounced it, and I may be misattributing it, but that's the idea I was going for. STEPH: Well, given I wasn't even familiar with the word until just now, I'm going to give both pronunciations a thumbs up. I also really like how you decided that for the login screen, that's the area that you don't want people to wait because I agree if you're opening an application or opening...maybe it's the first time, maybe it's the 100th time. Who knows? But that feels important. Like, that needs to be snappy. I need to know it's responsive. And it builds trust from the minute that I clicked on that application. And if it takes a long time, I just immediately I'm like, what are y'all doing? Are y'all real? Do you know what you're doing over there? So I like how you focused on that experience. But then once I log in, like if something is slow to log me in, I will make up excuses for the application all day where I'm like, well, you know, maybe it's my connection. It's fine. I can wait for the next screen to load. That feels more reasonable. And it doesn't undermine my trust nearly as much as when I first click on the app. So that feels like a really nice trade-off as well, or at least a nice area that you've improved while still having those other trade-offs and benefits that you mentioned. CHRIS: To highlight it, you used a phrase there which I really liked. Like, it's building trust. If something's a little bit off in that first run experience every single time, then it kind of puts a question in the back of your head, maybe not even consciously. But you're just kind of looking at it, and you're like, what are you doing there? What are you up to, friend? Humans say to the apps they use on their phone. That's normal, right? When you talk... But to name it, we've also done a round of performance work throughout the app. And so there are a couple of layers to it. But it was work that we had planned for a while, but we kept deferring. But now that we're seeing more usage of the native apps, the native apps experience the same surface area of performance stuff but all the more so because they may be on degraded network connections, et cetera. And so this is another example where this whole thing kind of pays off. The performance work that we did affects everything. It affects the web. It's the same under the hood. It's let's reduce the network requests that we're making in the payloads that we're sending, particularly the network requests to upstream things, so like the banking partner that we're using and those APIs, like, collating all the data to then render the screen. Because of Inertia, we only have a single sort of back and forth conversation via the API as opposed to I think it's pretty common to have like seven different APIs and four different spinners on the screen. We're not doing that, none of that on my watch. [chuckles] But we minimize the background calls to the other parties that we're integrating with. And then, we reduce the payload of data that we're sending on each request. And each of those were like, we had to think about things and tweak and poke, but again it's uniform. So mobile web has that now, desktop web has that now. Android, iOS, they all just inherited it sort of that just happened one day without a deploy or release, without a release of either of the native mobile apps. We did deploy to the web to make that happen, but that's easy. I can do that a bunch of times a day. One last thing I want to share as we're on this topic of trade-offs and levers, there was a really great conference talk that I watched recently, which was Ryan Florence of remix.run also React Router fame if you're familiar with him from that. But he was talking about the most recent version of Remix, which is their meta framework on top of React. But they've done some really interesting stuff around processing data, fetching data, when and how to sequence that. And again, that thing that I talked about of nine different loading spinners on the screen, Remix is taking a very different approach but is targeting that same thing of like, that's not great for user experience. Cumulative layout shift being the actual number that you can monitor for this. But in that talk, there are features that they've added to Remix as a framework where you can just decide, like, do we wait for this or do we not? Do we make sure we have all of the data, or do we say, you know what? Actually, this is going to be below the fold. So it's okay to defer loading this until after we send down the first payload. And then we'll kick in, and we'll do it from the client-side. But it's this wonderful feature of the framework that they're adding in where there's basically just a keyword that you can add to sort of toggle that behavior. And again, it's this idea of like trade-offs. Are we okay with more layout shift, or are we okay with more waiting? Which is it that we're going to optimize for? And I really love that idea of putting that power very simply in the hands of the developers to make those trade-off decisions and optimize over time for what's important. So we'll share a link to that talk in the show notes as well. But it was very much in the same space of like, how do I have the power to decide and to change my mind over time? That's what I want. But yeah, with that, I think that's enough of me updating on the mobile app. I'll continue to share as new things happen. But again, I'm at this point very happy with where we're at. So yeah, it's been fun. But yeah, what else is up in your world? STEPH: I have a dear Gerrit message that I wrote earlier, so I want to share that with you. Gerrit is the system that we're using for when we push up code changes that then manages very similar in the competitive space of like GitHub and GitLab, and Bitbucket. And so the team that I'm working with we are using Gerrit. And Gerrit and I, you know, we get along for the most part. We've managed to have a working relationship. [chuckles] But this week, I wrote my dear Gerrit letter is that I really miss being able to tell a story with my commit messages. That is the biggest pain that I'm feeling right now. So for anyone that's less familiar or if you already are familiar with Gerrit, each change that Gerrit shows represents a single commit that's under review. And each change is identified by a Change-Id. So the basic concept of Gerrit is that you only have one commit per review. So if you were to translate that to GitHub terminology, every pull request is only going to have one commit, and so you really can't push up multiple. And so, where that has been causing me the most pain is I miss being able to tell a story. So like even simple stories that are like, hey, I removed something that's not used. I love separating that type of stuff into its own commit just so then people can see that as they're going through review. Now, before I merge, I'm likely to squash, and that doesn't feel important that it needs to be its own commit. That's really just for the reviewer so they can follow along for the changes. But the other one, I can slowly get over that one. Because essentially, the way I get around that is then when I do push up my code for review, is I then go through my change request, and then I just add comments. So I will highlight that line and say, "Hey, I'm removing this because it's not in use." And so, I found a workaround for that one. But the one I haven't found a workaround for is that I don't push up my local work very often because I love having lots of local, tiny, green commits so that way I can know the progress that I'm at. I know where I'm headed. Also, I have a safe space to roll back to, but then that means that I may have five or six commits that I have locally, but I haven't pushed up somewhere. And that is bothering me more and more hour by hour the more I think about it that I can't push stuff up because it makes me nervous. Because, I mean, usually, at least by the end of the day, I push everything up, so it's stored somewhere. And I don't have to worry about that work disappearing. Now I am working on a dev machine. So there is that aspect of it's technically...it's not even on my local machine. It is stored somewhere that I should still be able to access. CHRIS: What's a dev machine? The way you're saying it, it sounds like it's a virtual machine, not like a laptop. But what's a dev machine? STEPH: Good question. So the dev machine is a remote server or remote machine that then I am accessing, and then that's where I'm performing. That's where I'm writing all of my work. And then that's also kind of the benefit is everything is not local; it's controlled by the team. So then that also means that other teams, other individuals can help set up these environments for future developers. So then you have that consistency across everyone's working with the same Rails version, or gems, or has access to the same tools. So in that sense, my work isn't just on my laptop because then that would really worry me because then I've got nowhere...it's not backed up anywhere. So at least it is somewhere it's being stored that then could be accessed by someone. So actually, now, as I'm talking this through, that does help alleviate my concern about this a bit. [laughs] But I still miss it; I still miss being able to just push up my work and then have multiple commits. And I looked into it because I was like, well, maybe I'm misunderstanding something about Gerrit, and there's a way around this. And that's still always a chance. But from the research that I've done, it doesn't seem to be. And there are actually two very fiery takes that I saw that I have to share because they made me laugh. When I was Googling, the question of like, "Can I push up multiple commits to one single Gerrit CR? Or is there just a way to, like, can I have this concept of like a branch and then I have many commits, but then I turn it into one CR? Whatever the world would give me. What do they have? [laughs] I'm laughing just looking at this now. One of the responses was, have you tried squashing your commits into one commit? And I was like, [laughs] "Yeah, that's not what I had in mind, but sure." And then the other one, this is the more fiery take. They were very defensive about Gerrit, and they wrote that "People who don't like Gerrit usually just hack shit together. They cut corners and love squashing commits or throwing away history. And those people hate Gerrit. Developers who care love it. It's definitely possible and easy to produce agile software." And I just...that made me laugh. I was like, cool, I'm a developer that cuts corners and loves squashing commits. [laughs] CHRIS: So you don't care is what that take says. STEPH: I'm a developer who does not care. CHRIS: You know, Steph, I've worked with you for a while. And I've been looking for the opportunity to have this hard conversation with you. But I just wish you cared a little more about the software that you're writing, about the people that you're working with, about the commits that you're authoring. I just see it in every facet of your work. You just don't care. To be very clear for anyone listening at home, that is the deepest of sarcasm that I can make. Steph cares so very much. It's one of the things that I really enjoy about you. STEPH: I mean, we had the episode about toxic traits. This would have been the perfect time to confront me about my lack of caring about software and the processes that we have. So winding down on that saga, it seems to be the answer is no, friend; I cannot push up multiple commits. Oh, I tried to hack it. I am someone that tries to hack shit together because I tried to get around it just to see what would happen. [laughs] Because the docs had suggested that each change is identified by a Change-Id. And I was like, hmm, so what if there were two commits that had the same Change-Id, would Gerrit treat those as patch sets? Because right now, when you push up a change, you can see all the different patch sets, so that's nice. So that's a nice feature of Gerrit as you can see the history of, like, someone pushed up this change. They took in some feedback. They pushed up a new change. And so that history is there for each push that someone has provided. And I wondered maybe if they had the same Change-Id that then the patch sets would show the first commit and then the second commit. And so I manually altered the commits two of them to reference the same Change-Id. And I have to say, Gerrit was on to me because they gave me a very nice error message that said, "Same Change-Id and multiple changes. Squash the commits with the same Change-Ids or ensure Change-Ids are unique for each commit. And I thought, dang, Gerrit, you saw me coming. [laughs] So that didn't work either. I'm still in a world of where I now wait. I wait until I'm ready for someone to review stuff, and I have to squash everything, and then I go comment on my CRs to help out reviewers. CHRIS: I really like the emotional backdrop that you provided here where you're spending a minute; you're like, you know what? Maybe it's me. And there's the classic Seymour Skinner principle from The Simpsons. Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong. [laughs] And I liked that you took us on a whole tour of that. You're like, maybe it's me. I'll maybe read up. Nope, nope. So yeah, that's rough. There's a really interesting thing of tools constraining you. And then sometimes being like, I'm just going to yield control and back away and accept this thing that doesn't feel right to me. Like, Prettier does a bunch of stuff that I really don't like. It shapes code in a way, and I'm just like, no, that's not...nope, you know what? I've chosen to never care about this again. And there's so much utility in that choice. And so I've had that work out really well. Like with Prettier, that's a great example whereby yielding control over to this tool and just saying, you know what? Whatever you produce, that is our format; I don't care. And we're not going to talk about it, and that's that. That's been really useful for myself and for the teams that I'm on to just all kind of adopt that mindset and be like, yeah, no, it may not be what I would choose but whatever. And then we have nice formatted code; it's great. It happens automatically, love it. But then there are those times where I'm like; I tried to do that because I've had success with that mindset of being like, I know my natural thing is to try and micromanage and control every little bit of this code. But remember that time where it worked out really well for me to be like, I don't care, I'm just going to not care about this thing? And I try to not care about some stuff, which it sounds like that's what you're doing right here. [laughs] And you're like, I tried to not care, but I care. I care so much. And now you're in that [chuckles] complicated space. So I feel for you, Steph. I'm sorry you're in that complicated space of caring so much and not being able to turn that off [laughs] nor configure the software to do the thing you want. STEPH: I appreciate it. I should also share that the team that I'm working with they also don't love this. Like, they don't love Gerrit. So when I shared in the Slack channel my dear Gerrit message, they're both like, "Yeah, we feel you. [laughs] Like, we're in the same spot," which was also helpful because I just wanted to validate like, this is the pain I'm feeling. Is someone else doing something clever or different that I just don't know about? And so that was very helpful for them to say, "Nope, we feel you. We're in the same spot. And this is just the state that we're in." I think they have started transitioning some other repos over to GitLab and have several repos in Gitlab, but this one is still currently using Gerrit. So they very much commiserate with some of the things that I'm feeling and understand. And this does feel like one of those areas where I do care deeply. And frankly, this is one of those spaces that I do care about, but it's also like, I can work around it. There are some reasonable things that I can do, and it's fine as we just talked through. Like, the fact that my commits are not just locally on my machine already makes me feel better now that I've really processed that. So there are lower risks. It is more of just like a workflow. It's just, you know, it's crushing my work vibe. CHRIS: Harshing your buzz. STEPH: In the great words of Queen Elsa, I gotta let it go. This is the thing I'm letting go. So that's kind of what's going on in my world. What else is going on in your world? CHRIS: Well, first and foremost, fantastic reference and segue. I really liked that. But yeah, let's see, [laughs] what else is going on in my world? We had an interesting thing happen last week. So we had an outage on the platform last week. And then we had an incident review today, so a formal sort of post-mortem incident review. There are a couple of different names that folks have given to these. But this is a practice that we want to build within our engineering culture is when stuff goes wrong, we want to make sure that we have meaningful conversations around to try to address the root causes. Ideally, blameless is a word that gets used often in this context. And I've heard folks sort of take either side of that. Like, it's critical that it's blameless so that it doesn't feel like it's an attack. But also, like, I don't know, if one person did something, we should say that. So finding that gentle middle ground of having honest, real conversations but in a context of safety. Like, we're all going to make mistakes. We're all going to ship bugs; let's be clear about that. And so it's okay to sort of...anyway, that's about the process. We had an outage. The specific outage was that we have introduced a new process. This is a Sidekiq process to work off a specific queue. So we wanted that to have discrete treatment. That had been running, and then it stopped running; we still don't know why. So we never got to the root-root cause. Well, we know what the mechanism was, which was the dyno count for that process was at zero. And so, eventually, we found a bunch of jobs backed up in the Sidekiq admin. We're like, that's weird. And then, we went over to Heroku's configuration dashboard. And we saw, huh, that's weird. There are zero dynos processing this. That wasn't true yesterday. But unfortunately, Heroku doesn't log or have an audit trail around changes to those process counts. It's just not available. So that's unfortunate. And then the actual question of like, how did this happen? It probably had to be someone on the team. So there is like, someone did a thing. But that is almost immaterial because, again, people are going to do things, bugs will get shipped, et cetera. So the conversation very quickly turned to observability and understanding. I think we've done a pretty good job of instrumenting error reporting and being quite responsive to that, making sure the signal-to-noise ratio is very actionable. So if we see a bug or a Sentry alert come through, we're able to triage that pretty quickly, act on it where it is a real bug, understand where it's a bit of noise in the system, that sort of thing. But in this case, there were no errors. There was no Sentry. There was nothing; there was the absence of something. And so it was this really interesting case of that's where observability, I think, can really come in and help. So the idea of what can we do here? Well, we can monitor the count of jobs backed up in Sidekiq queue. That's one option. We could do some threshold alerting around the throughput of processed events coming from this other backend. There are a bunch of different ways, but it basically pushed us in the direction of doubling down and reinforcing the foundation of our observability within the platform. So we're just kicking that mini-project off now, but it is something we're like, yeah, we feel like we could add some here. In particular, we recently added Datadog to the stack. So we now have Datadog to aggregate our logs and ideally do some metric analysis, those sort of things, build some dashboards, et cetera. I haven't explored Datadog much thus far. But my sense is they've got the whiz-bang things that we need here. But yeah, it was an interesting outage. That wasn't fun. The incident conversation was actually a good conversation as a team. And then the outcome of like, how do we double down on observability? I'm actually quite excited for. STEPH: This is a fun moment for me because I have either joined teams that didn't have Datadog or have any of that sort of observability built into their system or that sort of dashboard that people go to. Or I've joined teams, and they already have it, and then nobody or people rarely look at it. And so I'm always intrigued between like what's that catalyst that then sparked a team to then go ahead and add this? And so I'm excited to hear you're in that moment of like, we need more observability. How do we go about this? And as soon as you said Datadog, I was like, yeah, that sounds nice because then it sounds like a place that you can check on to make sure that everything is still running. But then there's still also that manual process where I'm presuming unless there's something else you have in mind. There's still that manual process of someone has to check the dashboard; someone then has to understand if there's no count, no squiggly lines, that's a bad thing and to raise a concern. So I'm intrigued with my own initial reaction of, like, yeah, that sounds great. But now I'm also thinking about it still adds a lot of...the responsibility is still on a human to think of this thing and to go check it. Versus if there's something that gets sent to someone to alert you and say like, "Hey, this queue hasn't been processed in 48 hours. There may be a concern that actually feels nicer." It feels safer. CHRIS: Oh yeah, definitely. I think observability is this category of tools and workflows and whatnot. But I think what you're describing of proactive alerting that's the ideal. And so it would be wonderful if I never had to look at any of these tools ever. And I just knew if I got, let's say, it's PagerDuty connected up whatever, and I got a push notification from PagerDuty saying, "Hey, go look at this thing." That's all I ever need to think about. It's like, well, I haven't gotten a PagerDuty in a while, so everything must be fine, and having a deep trust in that. Similar to like, if we have a great test suite and it's green, I feel confident deploying the sort of absence of an alert being the thing that I can trust. But right now, we're early enough in this journey that I think what we need to do is stand up a bunch of these different graphs and charts and metric analysis and aggregations and whatnot, and then start to squint at it for a while and be like, which of these would I be really concerned if it started to wibble? And then you can figure the alerting around said wibble rate. And that's the dream. That's where we want to get to, but I think we've got to crawl, walk, run on this. So it'll be an adventure. This is very much the like; we're starting a thing. I'll tell you about it more when we've done it. But what you're describing is exactly what we want to get to. STEPH: I love wibble rate. That's my new measurement I'm going to start using for everything. It's funny, as you're bringing this up, it's making me think about the past week that Joël Quenneville and I have had with our client work. Because a somewhat similar situation came up in regards where something happened, and something was broken. And it seemed it was hard to define exactly what moment caused that to break and what was going on. But it had a big impact on the team because it essentially meant none of the bills were going through. And so that's a big situation when you got 100-plus people that are pushing up code and expecting some of the build processes to run. But it was one of those that the more we dug into it, the more it seemed very rare that it would happen. So, in this case, as a sort of a juxtaposition to your scenario, we actually took the opposite approach of where we're like; this is rare. But we did load up a lot of contexts. Actually, I was thinking back to the advice that you gave me in a previous episode where I was talking about at what point do you dig in versus try to stay at surface level? And this was one of those, like, we've spent a couple of days on getting context for this and understanding. So it felt really important and worthwhile to then invest a little bit more time to then document it. But then we still went with the simplest approach of like, this is weird. It shouldn't happen again. We think we understand it but then let's add a little bit of documentation or wiki page around like, hey, if you do run into this, here are some steps that will fix everything. And then, if you need to use this, let somebody know because this is so odd it shouldn't happen. So we took that approach in this case where we didn't increase the observability. It was more like we provided a fire extinguisher very close to the location in case it happens. And so that way, it's there should the need arise, but we're hoping it just never gets used. We're also in the process of changing how a lot of that logic works. So we didn't really want to optimize for observability into a system that is actively being changed because it should look very different in upcoming months. But overall, I love the conversations that you bring about observability, and I'm excited to hear about what wibble rates you decide to add to your Datadog dashboard. CHRIS: There's a delicate art and science to the selection of the wibble rates. So I will certainly report back as we get into that work. But with that, shall we wrap up? STEPH: Let's wrap up. CHRIS: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeee!!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

Off the Rails with Anna and Blitz - 6/10/22See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week another NASA Asteroid, filter fun, never China's fault, strippers eye view, a record I could break, 3D printed parts, Church work, AI, Dress coded, a reality check, gene editing, no more Elvis weddings, sperm ban, I'm offended coin, and somehow we will get sex robots in this bonus episode!!! #podcast #new #comedy #stand #up #funny #advice #how #cast #hilarious #lol #haha #wtf #tiktok #show #host #comedic #comedy #offtherails #offtherailstm #rails #germancomedy #funnypodcast #hiddengem #milwaukee #mke

Today may be the most Off the Rails episode of Off the Rails we've ever done. First, we FINALLY have a call with the incomparable Wali P! Then the train completely leaves the tracks when Jimmie Lee the Jersey Outlaw calls in with the most deranged interaction imaginable. Jump into it!

If the term “Serverless,” has you uttering "Oofda", this episode is for you, where Bryson Tyrrell and AJ Stuyvenberg prove why they're serverless subject matter experts. **SHOW LINKS** AJ on Twitter | https://twitter.com/astuyve  Bryson on Twitter | https://twitter.com/bryson3gps  Serverless MN Meetup | https://www.meetup.com/Serverless-MN/ Connect with The Jed Mahonis Group on LinkedIn | https://linkedin.com/company/the-jed-mahonis-group  Show notes | https://constantvariables.co Chat with The Jed Mahonis Group about your app dev questions | https://jmg.mn Are you an iOS, Android or Rails developer? Connect with us | careers@jmg.mn 

Steph and Chris are recording together! Like, in the same room, physically together. Chris talks about slowly evolving the architecture in an app they're working on and settling on directory structure. Steph's still working on migrating unit tests over to RSpec. They answer a listener question: "As senior-level developers, how do you set goals to ensure that you keep growing?" This episode is brought to you by BuildPulse (https://buildpulse.io/bikeshed). Start your 14-day free trial of BuildPulse today. Faking External Services In Tests With Adapters (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/faking-external-services-in-tests-with-adapters) Testing Third-Party Interactions (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/testing-third-party-interactions) Jen Dary - On Future Goals (https://www.beplucky.com/on-future-goals/) Charity Majors - The Engineer Manager Pedulum (https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/) Charity Majors Bike Shed Episode (https://www.bikeshed.fm/302) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: 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. So, hey, Chris, what's new in your world? CHRIS: What is new in my world? Actually, this episode feels different. There's something different about it. I can't quite put my finger on it. I think it may be that we're actually physically in the same room recording for the first time in two years and a little bit more, which is wild. STEPH: I can't believe it's been that long. I feel like it wasn't that long ago that we were in The Bike Shed...oh, I said The Bike Shed studio. I'm being very biased. Our recording studio [laughs] is the more proper description for it. Yeah, two and a half years. And we tried to make this happen a couple of months ago when I was visiting Boston, and then it just didn't work out. But today, we made it. CHRIS: Today, we made it. Here we are. So hopefully, the audio sounds great, and we get all that more richness in conversation because of the physical in-person manner. We're trying it out. It'll be fun. But let's see, to the normal tech talk and nonsense, what's new in my world? So we've been slowly evolving the architecture in the app that we're working on. And we settled on something that I kind of like, so I wanted to talk about it, directory structure, probably the most interesting topic in the world. I think there's some good stuff in here. So we have the normal stuff. There are app models, app controllers, all those; those make sense. We have app jobs which right now, I would say, is in a state of flux. We're in the sad place where some things are application records, and some things are Sidekiq workers. We have made the decision to consolidate everything onto Sidekiq workers, which is just strictly more powerful as to the direction we're going to go. But for right now, I'm not super happy with the state of app jobs, but whatever, we have that. But the things that I like so we have app commands; I've talked about app commands before. Those are command objects. They use dry-rb do notation, and they allow us to sequence a bunch of things that all may fail, and we can process them all in a much more reasonable way. It's been really interesting exploring that, building on it, introducing it to new developers who haven't worked in that mode before. And everyone who's come into the project has both picked it up very quickly and enjoyed it, and found it to be a nice expressive mode. So app commands very happy with that. App queries is another one that we have. We've talked about this before, query objects. I know we're a big fan. [laughs] I got a golf clap across the room here, which I could see live in person. It was amazing. I could feel the wind wafting across the room from the golf clap. [chuckles] But yeah, query objects, they're fantastic. They take a relation, they return a relation, but they allow us to build more complex queries outside of our models. The new one, here we go. So this stuff would all normally fall into app services, which services don't mean anything. So we do not have an app services directory in our application. But the new one that we have is app clients. So these are all of our HTTP clients wrapping external third parties that we're interacting with. But with each of them, we've taken a particular structure, a particular approach. So for each of them, we're using the adapter pattern. There's a blog post on the Giant Robots blog that I can point to that sort of speaks to the adapter pattern that we're using here. But basically, in production mode, there is an HTTP backend that actually makes the real requests and does all that stuff. And in test mode, there is a test backend for each of these clients that allows us to build up a pretty representative fake, and so we're faking it up before the HTTP layer. But we found that that's a good trade-off for us. And then we can say, like, if this fake backend gets a request to /users, then we can respond in whatever way that we want. And overall, we found that pattern to be really fantastic. We've been very happy with it. So it's one more thing. All of them were just gathering in-app models. And so it was only very recently that we said no, no, these deserve their own name. They are a pattern. We've repeated this pattern a bunch. We like this pattern. We want to even embrace this pattern more, so long live app clients. STEPH: I love it. I love app clients. It's been a while since I've been on a project that had that directory. But there was a greenfield project that I was working on. I think it might have been I was working with Boston.rb and working on giving them a new site or something like that and introduced app clients. And what you just said is perfect in terms of you've identified a pattern, and then you captured that and gave it its own directory to say, "Hey, this is our pattern. We've established it, and we really like it." That sounds awesome. It's also really nice as someone who's new to a codebase; if I jump in and if I look at app clients, I can immediately see what are the third parties that we're working with? And that feels really nice. So yeah, that sounds great. I'm into it. CHRIS: Yeah, I think it really was the question of like, is this a pattern we want to embrace and highlight within the codebase, or is this sort of a duplication but irrelevant like not really that important? And we decided no, this is a thing that matters. We currently have 17 of these clients, so 17 different third-party external things that we're integrating with. So for someone who doesn't really like service-oriented architecture, I do seem to have found myself in a place. But here we are, you know, we do what we have to with what we're given. But yes, 17 and growing our app clients. STEPH: That is a lot. [laughs] My eyes widened a bit when you said 17. I'm curious because you highlighted that app services that's not really a thing. Like, it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't have the same meaning of the app queries directory or app commands or app clients where it's like, this is a pattern we've identified, and named, and want to propagate. For app services, I agree; it's that junk drawer. But I guess in some ways...well, I'm going to say something, and then I'm going to decide how I feel about it. That feels useful because then, if you have something but you haven't established a pattern for it, you need a place for it to go. It still needs to live somewhere. And you don't necessarily want to put it in app models. So I'm curious, where do you put stuff that doesn't have an established pattern yet? CHRIS: It's a good question. I think it's probably app models is our current answer. Like, these are things that model stuff. And I'm a big believer in the it doesn't need to be an application record-backed object to go on app models. But slowly, we've been taking stuff out. I think it'd be very common for what we talk about as query objects to just be methods in the respective application record. So the user record, as a great example, has all of these methods for doing any sort of query that you might want to do. And I'm a fan of extracting that out into this very specific place called app queries. Commands are now another thing that I think very typically would fall into the app services place. Jobs naming that is something different. Clients we've got serializers is another one that we have at the top level, so those are four. We use Blueprinter within the app. And again, it's sort of weird. We don't really have an API. We're using Inertia. So we are still serializing to JSON across the boundary. And we found it was useful to encapsulate that. And so we have serializers as a directory, but they just do that. We do have policies. We're using Pundit for authorization, so that's another one that we have. But yeah, I think the junk drawerness probably most goes to app models. But at this point, more and more, I feel like we have a place to put things. It's relatively clear should this be in a controller, or should this be in a query object, or should this be in a command? I think I'm finding a place of happiness that, frankly, I've been searching for for a long time. You could say my whole life I've been searching for this contented state of I think I know where stuff goes in the app, mostly, most of the time. I'm just going to say this, and now that you've asked the excellent question of like, yeah, but no, where are you hiding some stuff? I'm going to open up models. Next week I'm going to be like, oh, I forgot about all of that nonsense. But the things that we have defined I'm very happy with. STEPH: That feels really fair for app models. Because like you said, I agree that it doesn't need to be ActiveRecord-backed to go on app models. And so, if it needs to live somewhere, do you add a junk drawer, or do you just create app models and reuse that? And I think it makes a lot of sense to repurpose app models or to let things slide in there until you can extract them and let them live there until there's a pattern that you see. CHRIS: We do. There's one more that I find hilarious, which is app lib, which my understanding...I remember at one point having one of those afternoons where I'm just like, I thought stuff works, but stuff doesn't seem to work. I thought lib was a directory in Rails apps. And it was like, oh no, now we autoload only under the app. So you should put lib under app. And I was just like, okay, whatever. So we have app lib with very little in it. [laughs] But that isn't so much a junk drawer as it is stuff that's like, this doesn't feel specific to us. This goes somewhere else. This could be extracted from the app. But I just find it funny that we have an app lib. It just seems wrong. STEPH: That feels like one of those directories that I've just accepted. Like, it's everywhere. It's like in all the apps that I work in. And so I've become very accustomed to it, and I haven't given it the same thoughtfulness that I think you have. I'm just like, yeah, it's another place to look. It's another place to go find some stuff. And then if I'm adding to it, yeah, I don't think I've been as thoughtful about it. But that makes sense that it's kind of silly that we have it, and that becomes like the junk drawer. If you're not careful with it, that's where you stick things. CHRIS: I appreciate you're describing my point of view as thoughtfulness. I feel like I may actually be burdened with historical knowledge here because I worked on Rails apps long, long ago when lib didn't go in-app, and now it does. And I'm like, wait a minute, but like, no, no, it's fine. These are the libraries within your app. I can tell that story. So, again, thank you for saying that I was being thoughtful. I think I was just being persnickety, and get off my lawn is probably where I was at. STEPH: Oh, full persnicketiness. Ooh, that's tough to say. [laughs] CHRIS: But yeah, I just wanted to share that little summary, particularly the app clients is an interesting one. And again, I'll share the adapter pattern blog post because I think it's worked really well for us. And it's allowed us to slowly build up a more robust test suite. And so now our feature specs do a very good job of simulating the reality of the world while also dealing with the fact that we have these 17 external situations that we have to interact with. And so, how do you balance that VCR versus other things? We've talked about this a bunch of times on different episodes. But app clients has worked great with the adapter pattern, so once more, rounding out our organizational approach. But yeah, that's what's up in my world. What's up in your world? STEPH: So I have a small update to give. But before I do, you just made me think of something in regards to that article that talks about the adapter pattern. And there's also another article that's by Joël Quenneville that's testing third-party interactions. And he made me reflect on a time where I was giving the RSpec course, and we were talking about different ways to test third-party interactions. And there are a couple of different ways that are mentioned in this article. There are stub methods on adapter, stub HTTP request, stub request to fake adapter, and stub HTTP request to fake service. All that sounds like a lot. But if you read through the article, then it gives an example of each one. But I've found it really helpful that if you're in a space that you still don't feel great about testing third-party interactions and you're not sure which approach to take; if you work with one API and apply all four different strategies, it really helps cement how to work through that process and the different benefits of each approach and the trade-offs. And we did that during the RSpec course, and I found it really helpful just from the teacher perspective to go through each one. And there were some great questions and discussions that came out of it. So I wanted to put that plug out there in the world that if you're struggling testing third-party interactions, we'll include a link to this article. But I think that's a really solid way to build a great foundation of, like, I know how to test a third-party app. Let me choose which strategy that I want to use. Circling back to what's going on in my world, I am still working on migrating unit tests over to RSpec. It's a thing. It's part of the work that I do. [laughs] I can't say it's particularly enjoyable, but it will have a positive payoff. And along that journey, I've learned some things or rediscovered some things. One of them is read expectations very carefully. So when I was migrating a test over to RSpec, I read it as where we expected a record to exist. The test was actually testing that a record did not exist. And so I probably spent an hour understanding, going through the code being like, why isn't this record getting created like I expect it to? And I finally went back, and I took a break, and I went back. And I was like, oh, crap, I read the expectation wrong. So read expectations very carefully. The other one...this one's not learned, but it is reinforced. Mystery Guests are awful. So as I've been porting over the behavior over to RSpec, the other tests are using fixtures, and I'm moving that over to use factorybot instead. And at first, I was trying to be minimal with the data that I was bringing over. That failed pretty spectacularly. So I have learned now that I have to go and copy everything that's in the fixtures, and then I move it over to factorybot. And it's painful, but at least then I'm doing that thing that we talked about before where I'm trying to load as little context as possible for each test. But then once I do have a green test, I'm going back through it, and I'm like, okay, we probably don't care about when you were created. We probably don't care when you're updated because every field is set for every single record. So I am going back and then playing a game of if I remove this line, does the test still pass? And if I remove that line, does the test still pass? And so far, that has been painful, but it does have the benefit of then I'm removing some of the setup. So Mystery Guests are very painful. I've also discovered that custom error messages can be tricky because I brought over some tests. And some of these, I'm realizing, are more user error than anything else. Anywho, I added one of the custom error messages that you can add, and I added it over to RSpec. But I had written an incorrect, invalid statement in RSpec where I was looking...I was expecting for a record to exist. But I was using the find by instead of where. So you can call exist on the ActiveRecord relation but not on the actual record that gets returned. But I had the custom error message that was popping up and saying, "Oh, your record wasn't found," and I just kept getting that. So I was then diving through the code to understand again why my record wasn't found. And once I removed that custom error message, I realized that it was actually because of how I'd written the RSpec assertion that was wrong because then RSpec gave me a wonderful message that was like, hey, you're trying to call exist on this record, and you can't do that. Instead, you need to call it on a relation. So I've also learned don't bring over custom error messages until you have a green test, and even then, consider if it's helpful because, frankly, the custom error message wasn't that helpful. It was very similar to what RSpec was going to tell us in general. So there was really no need to add that custom step to it. For the final bit that I've learned or the hurdle that I've been facing is that migrating tests descriptions are hard unless they map over. So RSpec has the context and then a description for it that goes with the test. Test::Unit has methods like method names instead. So it may be something like test redemption codes, and then it runs through the code. Well, as I'm trying to migrate that knowledge over to RSpec, it's not clear to me what we're testing. Okay, we're testing redemption codes. What about them? Should they pass? Should they fail? Should they change? What are they redeeming? There's very little context. So a lot of my tests are copying that method name, so I know which tests I'm focused on, and I'm bringing over. And then in the description, it's like, Steph needs help adding a test description, and then I'm pushing that up and then going to the team for help. So they can help me look through to understand, like, what is it that this test is doing? What's important about this domain? What sort of terminology should I include? And that has been working, but I didn't see that coming as part of this whole migrating stuff over. I really thought this might be a little bit more of a copypasta job. And I have learned some trickery is afoot. And it's been more complicated than I thought it was going to be. CHRIS: Well, at a minimum, I can say thank you for sharing all of your hard-learned lessons throughout this process. This does sound arduous, but hopefully, at the end of it, there will be a lot of value and a cleaned-up test suite and all of those sorts of things. But yeah, it's been an adventure you've been on. So on behalf of the people who you are sharing all of these things with, thank you. STEPH: Well, thank you. Yeah, I'm hoping this is very niche knowledge that there aren't many people in the world that are doing this exact work that this happens to be what this team needs. So yeah, it's been an adventure. I've certainly learned some things from it, and I still have more to go. So not there yet, but I'm also excited for when we can actually then delete this portion of the build process. And then also, I think, get rid of fixtures because I didn't think about that from the beginning either. 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Pivoting just a bit, there's a listener question that I'm really excited for us to dive into. And this listener question comes from Joël Quenneville. Hey, Joël. All right, so Joël writes in, "As senior-level developers, how do you set goals to ensure that you keep growing? How do you know what are high-value areas for you to improve? How do you stay sharp? Do you just keep adding new languages to your tool belt? Do you pull back and try to dig into more theoretical concepts? Do you feel like you have enough tech skills and pivot to other things like communication or management skills? At the start of a dev career, there's an overwhelming list of things that it feels like you need to know all at once. Eventually, there comes a point where you no longer feel like you're drowning under the list of things that you need to learn. You're at least moderately competent in all the core concepts. So what's next?" This is a big, fun, scary question. I really like this question. Thank you, Joël, for sending it in because I think there's so much here that can be discussed. I can kick us off with a few thoughts. I want to first highlight one of the things that...or one of the things that resonates with me from this question is how Joël describes going through and reaching senior status how it can really feel like working through a backlog of features. So as a developer, I want to understand this particular framework, or as a developer, I want to be able to write clear and fast tests, or as a developer, I want to contribute to an open-source project. But now that that backlog is empty, you're wondering what's next on your roadmap, which is where I think that sort of big, fun scariness comes into play. So the first idea is to take a moment and embrace that success. You have probably worked really hard to get where you're at in your career. And there's nothing wrong with taking a pause and enjoying the view and just being appreciative of the fact that you are able to get your work done quickly or that you feel very confident in the work that you're doing. Growth is often very important to our careers, but I also think it's important to recognize when you've achieved certain growth and then, if you want to, just enjoy that and pause. And you're not constantly pushing yourself to the next level. I think that is a totally reasonable and healthy thing to do. The second thing that comes to mind is that you're on a Choose Your Own Adventure mode now, so you get to...I would encourage folks, once you've reached this stage, to reflect on where you're at and consider what is your dream? What are your aspirations? Maybe they're related to tech; maybe they're not. And consider where is it that you want to go next? And then, what are the concrete steps that will help you achieve those goals? So there's a really great article by Jen Dary, who's a career coach and owner of Plucky Manager Training, that describes this process. And there's a really great blog post that I'll be sure to include a link to in the show notes. But she has a couple of great questions that will then help you identify, like, what are my goals? Some of those questions are, "If I could do anything and money wasn't an object, I'd spend my time doing dot dot dot." And that doesn't necessarily mean sitting on a beach with your toes in the sand all day. I mean, it could, but then that probably just means you need a vacation. So take the vacation. And then, once you start to get bored, where does your mind start to wander? What are the things that you want to do? Where are you interested in spending your time? And then, once you have an idea of how you'd like to spend your time, you can consider what actions you could take next that will point you in that direction. There's also the benefit that by this point, you probably have an idea of the type of things that you like to do and where you like to spend your time. And so you can figure out which areas of expertise you want to invest in. So do you like more greenfield projects? Do you like architecture discussions? Do you like giving talks? Do you like teaching? Or maybe you're interested in management. I think there's also a more concrete approach that you can take that. You can just talk to your managers in your team and say, "Hey, what big, hard problems are you looking to solve? And then, you can get some inspiration from them and see if their problems align with your interests. Maybe it's not even your own team, but you can talk to other companies and see what other problems industries are trying to solve. That might be an area that then spurs some curiosity or some interest. And then, where do you feel underutilized? So with your current day-to-day, are there areas where you feel that you wish you had more responsibilities or more opportunities, but you feel like you don't have access to those opportunities? Maybe that's an area to explore as well. This feels like a wonderful coaching question in terms of you have done it; congratulations. You've reached a really great spot in your career. And so now you're figuring out that big next step. This is going to be highly customized to each person to then figuring out what it is that's going to help you feel fulfilled over the next five years, ten years, however long you want to project out. Those are some of my thoughts. How about you? What do you think? CHRIS: Well, first, those are some great thoughts. I appreciate that I get to follow them now. It's going to be a hard act to follow. But yeah, I think Joël has asked a fantastic question. And coming from Joël, I know how intentional and thoughtful a learner, and sharer, and teacher and all of these things are. So it's all the more sort of framed in that for me knowing Joël personally. I think to start, the kernel of the question is as senior developers, that's the like...or senior level developers is the way Joël phrased it, but it treats it as sort of this discrete moment in time, which I think there's maybe even something to unpack. And I think we've probably talked about this in previous episodes, but like, what does that even mean? And I think part of the story here is going from reactive where it's like, I don't know how anything works. I know a little bit. I can code some. And every day, I'm presented with new problems that I just don't understand. And I'm trying to build up that base of knowledge. Slowly, you know, you start, and it's like 95% of the time you feel like that. And slowly, the dial switches over, and maybe it's only 25% of the time you feel like that. Somewhere along that spectrum is the line of senior developer. I don't actually know where it is, but it's somewhere in there. And so I think it's that space where you can move from reactive learning things as necessitated by the work that's coming at you to I want to proactively choose the things that I want to be learning to try and expand the stuff that I know, and the ways that I can think about the work without being in direct response to a piece of work coming at me. So with that in mind, what do you do with this proactive space? And I think the way Joël frames the question, again, to what I know of Joël, he's such an intentional person. And I wouldn't be surprised if Joël is very purposeful and thinks about this and has approached it as a specific thing that he's doing. I have certainly been in more of “I'll figure it out when I get there.” I'll explore. Or actually, probably the most pointed thing that I did was I joined a consultancy. And that was a very purposeful choice early on in my career because I'm like, I think I know a little bit. I don't think I know a lot. I would like to know a lot. That seems fun. So what do I think is the best way to do that? My guess, and it turned out to be very much true, is if I join a consultancy, I'm going to see a bunch of different projects, different types of technologies, organizations, communication structure, stuff that works, stuff that doesn't work. And to be honest, I actually thought I would try out the consultancy thing for a little while, like a year or two, and then go on to my next adventure. Spoiler alert: I stayed for seven years. It was one of the best periods of my professional life. And I found it to be a much deeper well than I expected it to be. But for anyone that's looking for, like, how can I structure my career in a way that will just automatically provide the sort of novelty and space to grow? I would highly recommend a consultancy like thoughtbot. I wonder if they're hiring. STEPH: Well, yes, we are hiring. That was a perfect plug that I wasn't expecting for that to come. But yes, thoughtbot is totally hiring. We'll include a link in the show notes to all the jobs. [laughs] CHRIS: Sounds fantastic. But very sincerely, that was the best choice that I could have made and was a way to flip the situation around such that I don't have to be thinking about what I want to be learning. The learning will come to me. But even within that, I still tried to be intentional from time to time. And I would say, again, I don't have a holistic theory of how to improve. I just have some stuff that's kind of worked out well. One thing is focusing on fundamentals wherever I can, or a different way to put it is giving myself permission to spend a little bit more time whenever my work brushes up against what I would consider fundamentals. So things that are in that space are like SQL. Every time I'm working on something, I'm like, ah, I could use like a CROSS JOIN here, but I don't know what that is. Maybe I'll spend an extra 30 minutes Googling around and trying to figure out what a CROSS JOIN is. Is that a thing? Is a CROSS JOIN a real thing? I may be making it up. [laughs] A window function, I know that those are real. Maybe I'll learn what a window function is. I think a CROSS JOIN is a real thing. A LEFT OUTER JOIN that's a cool thing. And so, each time I've had that, SQL has been something that expanding my knowledge; I've continually felt like that was a good investment. Or fundamentals of HTTP, that's another one that really has served me well. With Ruby being the primary language that I program in, deeply understanding the language and the fundamentals and the semantics of it that's another place that has been a good investment. But by contrast, I would say I probably haven't gone as deep on the frameworks that I work with. So Rails is maybe a little bit different just because, like many people, I came to Ruby through Rails, and I've learned a lot of Rails. But like in JavaScript, I've worked with many different JavaScript frameworks. And I have been a little more intentional with how much time I invest into furthering my skills in them because I've seen them change and evolve enough times. And if anything, I'm trying to look for ones that are like, what if it's less about the framework and more about JavaScript and web fundamentals underneath? Thus, I've found myself in Svelte land. But I think it's that choice of trying to anchor to fundamentals wherever possible. And then I would say the other thing that's been really beneficial for me is what can I do that's wildly outside the stuff that I already know? And so probably the most pointed example I have of this is learning Elm. So I previously spent most of my career working in Ruby and JavaScript, so primarily object-oriented languages without a strong type system. And then, I was able to go over and experience this whole different paradigm way of working, way of structuring programs, feedback loop. There was so much about it that was really, really interesting. And even though I don't get to work in Elm, frankly, as much as I would want at this point or really at all, it informs everything that I do moving forward. And I think that falls out of the fact that it was so different than what I was doing. So if I were to do that again, probably the next type of language I would learn is Lisp because those are like, well, that's a whole other category of thing that I've heard about. People say some fun stuff about them, but I don't really know. So it's that fundamentals and weird stuff is how I would describe it. And by weird, I mean outside of the core base of knowledge that I have. STEPH: I love that categorization, and I'll stick with it, fundamentals and weird stuff, to stretch and grow and find some other areas. I also really like your framing, the reactive versus proactive. I think that's a really nice way to put it because so much of your career is you are just learning what your company needs you to learn, or you're learning what you need to keep progressing and to feel more competent with the types of features or the work that you're handling. And I think that's why Jen Dary's blog post resonates with me so much because it's probably...up until now, a lot of someone's career, maybe not Joël's particularly, but I know probably for my career, a lot of it has been reactive in terms of what are the things that I need to learn? And so then once you reach that point of like, okay, I feel competent and reasonably good at all the things that I needed to know, where do I want to go next? And rather than focus on necessarily the plans that are laid out in front of me, I can then go wide and think about what are some of the bigger things that I want to tackle? What are the things that are meaningful to me? Because then I can now push forward to this bigger goal versus achieving a particular salary band or title or things like that. But I can focus on something else that I really want to contribute to. And there do seem to be two common paths. So once you reach that level, either you typically go into management, or you become that more like principal and then onward and upward, whatever is after principal. I don't even know what's after that, [laughs] but the titles that come after principal. So there's management, and then I've seen the other very strong contributors, so Aaron Patterson comes to mind. And I feel like those people then typically will migrate to places where they get to contribute to a language or to a framework. And I think it comes down to the idea of impact because both of those provide a greater impact. So if you go into management, you can influence and affect a team of individuals, and you can increase the value created by that team. Then you've likely exceeded the value that you would have created as your own individual contributor. Or, if you contribute to a language or a framework, then your technical decisions impact a larger community. So I think that would be another good thing to reflect on is what type of impact am I looking for? What type of communities do I want to have a positive impact on? And that may spur some inspiration around where you want to go next, the things that you want to focus on. CHRIS: Yeah, I think one of the things we're picking up in that that Joël mentioned in his question is the idea of there is the individual contributor path. But then there's also the management path, which is the typical sort of that's the progression. And I think, for one, naming that the individual contributor path and the idea of going to principal dev and those sorts of outcomes is a fantastic path in and of itself. I think often it's like, well, you know, you go along for a certain amount of time, and then you become a manager. It's like, those are actually distinctly different things. And people have different levels of interest and aptitude in them, and I think recognizing that is critically important. And so, not expecting that management just comes after individual contributor is an important thing. The other thing I'll say is Charity Majors, who we had on the podcast a bit back, has a wonderful blog post about the pendulum swing called The Engineer/Manager Pendulum. And so in it, she talks about folks that have taken an exploration over into manager land and then come back to the individual contributor path or vice versa sort of being able to move between them, treating them as two potentially parallel career tracks but ones that we can move between. And her assertion is that often folks that are particularly strong have spent some time in both camps because then you gain this empathy, this understanding of what's the whole picture? How are we doing all of this? How do we think about communication, et cetera? So, again, to name it, like, I think it's totally fine to stay on one of those tracks to really know which of those tracks speaks to you or to even move between them a little bit and to explore it and to find out what's true. So we'll include a link to that in the show notes. And we'll also include a link to the previous episode a while back when we had Charity on. But yeah, those I think are some critical thoughts as well because those are different areas that we can grow as developers and expand on our impact within the team. And so, we want to make sure we have those options on the table as well. STEPH: Absolutely. I love where teams will support individuals to feel comfortable shifting between experiences like that because it does make you a more well-rounded contributor to that product team, not just as an engineer, but then you will also understand what everybody else is working on and be able to have more meaningful conversations with them about the company goals and then the type of work that's being done. So yeah, I love it. If you're in a place that you can maybe fail a little bit, hopefully not in a too painful way, but you can take a risk and say, "Hey, I want to try something and see if I like it," then I think that's wonderful. And take the risk and see how it goes. And just know that you have an exit strategy should you decide that you don't like that work or that type of work isn't for you. But at least now you know a little bit more about yourself. Overall, I want to respond directly to something that Joël highlighted around how do you know what are high-value areas for you to improve? And I think there are two definitions there because you can either let the people around you and your team define that high value for you, and maybe that really resonates with you, and it's something that you enjoy. And so you can go to your manager and say, "Hey, what are some high-value areas where I can make an impact for the team?" Or it could be very personal. And what are the high-value areas for you? Maybe there's a particular industry that you want to work on. Maybe you want to hit the public speaking circuit. And so you define more intrinsically what are those high-value areas for you? And I think that's a good place to start collecting feedback and start looking at what's high value for you personally and then what's high value to the company and see if there's any overlap there. With that, I think we've covered a good variety of things to explore and then highlighted some of the different ways that you and I have also considered this question. I think it's a fabulous question. Also, I think it's one, even if you're not at that senior level, to ask this question. Like, go ahead and start asking it early and often and revisit your answers and see how they change. I think that would be a really powerful habit to establish early in your career and then could help guide you along, and then you can reflect on some of your earlier choices. So, Joël, thank you so much for that question. STEPH: On that note, shall we wrap up? CHRIS: Let's wrap up. The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeee!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

Fall in line for Mike's 18xx Boot Camp Series, today we're taking on The Opening Auction, The Initial Stock Round, The Private Auction - whatever you call it, let's get you whipped into shape to dominate (or at least not lose) yours. Culminating in our own live Private Auction of 1830.  (0:00) Intro & Plugs (3:28) Listener Feedback (10:41) Quad Jumps (15:23) Recent Plays: Mini Express, Ride the Rails, The Old Prince, Riding Through England (28:44) Mike's Boot Camp: The Private Auction (93:33) Live 1830 Auction Follow along with our game of 1830: https://18xx.games/game/86506 http://www.dadsonamap.com http://www.twitch.tv/choochoocrew https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIiB1kOCxeuSYyXamoCPdwQ Support the Show - Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/dadsonamap Twitter - @dadsonamap Instagram - @choo_choo_crew_podcast BGG Guild - http://tiny.cc/DoaMGuild Merch Store - https://teespring.com/stores/dads-on-a-map Contact us at dadsonamap@gmail.com

This week we are back with Actor, comedian, writer, all around groovy dude Clay Newman!!! This week gave us crows saving the planet, a Zimbabwe bank, hanger reflex, porn again Christian, period crunch, mind blowing sex, new hands, roman graffiti, robot crabs, flight whacking, mandog, erect nipple study, apocalypse nope, instead of a dick pic, and Will's sex robot story of elderly companion robots!!!! #podcast #new #comedy #stand #up #funny #advice #how #cast #hilarious #lol #haha #wtf #tiktok #show #host #comedic #comedy #offtherails #offtherailstm #rails #germancomedy #funnypodcast #hiddengem #milwaukee #mke

On this episode, Mike talks to cofounder of Merge, Gil Feig, about building a service that integrates with many APIs. Find Merge at https://merge.dev Gil Feig @GilFeig Merge is Hiring! Thank you so much to our sponsors: Lob: https://lob.com/careers Treblle: https://treblle.com/apisyoulove

Live from Portland, OR is the Ruby Podcast Panel recording from Railsconf 2022! The panelists discuss why they are loyal to podcasting, the state of the Ruby and Rails communities, opening doors for juniors into our industry and themes they noted from the conference. Moderated By: Jemma Issroff, The Ruby on Rails Podcast (https://twitter.com/JemmaIssroff) Panelists: Brittany Martin, The Ruby on Rails Podcast (https://twitter.com/BrittJMartin) Nick Schwaderer, The Ruby on Rails Podcast (https://twitter.com/schwad_rb) Andrew Mason, Remote Ruby (https://twitter.com/andrewmcodes) Jason Charnes, Remote Ruby (https://twitter.com/jmcharnes) Chris Oliver, Remote Ruby (https://twitter.com/excid3) Andrew Culver, Framework Friends (https://twitter.com/andrewculver) Colleen Schnettler, Software Social Podcast (https://twitter.com/leenyburger) Robby Russell, Maintainable Podcast (https://twitter.com/robbyrussell) Sponsored By: Honeybadger (https://www.honeybadger.io/) Honeybadger makes you a DevOps hero by combining error monitoring, uptime monitoring and check-in monitoring into a single, easy to use platform. Go to Honeybadger.io (https://www.honeybadger.io/) and discover how Starr, Josh, and Ben created a 100% bootstrapped monitoring solution. Scout APM (http://scoutapm.com/rubyonrails) Try their error monitoring and APM free for 14-days, no credit card needed! And as an added bonus for Ruby on Rails listeners: Scout will donate $5 to the open-source project of your choice when you deploy. Learn more at http://scoutapm.com/rubyonrails (http://scoutapm.com/rubyonrails).

  Chicago band the Handcuffs will release their finest moment to date on Friday (6/3), “Burn the Rails,” on Pravda Records.   ⅗ of the band joined me to talk about the new album onsite at Sketchbook Brewing in Skokie, which is where the Handcuffs will perform in a few weeks for Pravda Fest:   Friday June 24:  Boom Hank  Hushdrops  Steve Dawson  Josh Caterer    Saturday June 25:  The Handcuffs  Diplomats of Solid Sound  The Service  The Slugs

Patrick Campbell just sold his startup, ProfitWell, to Paddle for $200 million.Highlights (go straight to

Steph is joined by a very special guest and fellow thoughtboter, Rob Whittaker. ngrok (https://ngrok.com/) Time Off Book (https://www.timeoffbook.com/) Rob's Codespace Setup (https://github.com/purinkle/codespace) Rob Whittaker on Twitter (https://twitter.com/purinkle) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: 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. And today, I'm joined by a very special guest and fellow thoughtboter, Rob Whittaker. Rob has been in the software business for the past 15 years and spent the last five and a half years at thoughtbot. Rob is the Director of Software Development for our Europe, Middle East, and Africa team and, in his spare time, likes to hunt down delicious beers and coffee. Rob, welcome to The Bike Shed. It's so lovely to have you on the show today. ROB: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, thank you for that lovely introduction and my far too complicated job title. It sounds more serious than it actually is. STEPH: Well, you do have a fancy job title, yeah, Director of Software Development. [laughs] ROB: Yeah, it's the added on bit where it's Europe, Middle East, and Africa where I feel like there's about 20 of us maximum. But that sounds more grandiose than it actually is. STEPH: Yeah, that's something that Chris and I haven't dug into too much on previous episodes are all the different teams that we have at thoughtbot. So the shorter way of saying that is Launchpad II, but not everybody knows that. But I'm going to circle back to that because I would love to talk a bit more about that specific team and the dynamic. But before we do that, I'm realizing I'm not familiar with your origin story as to how you came to thoughtbot and then how you became this very fancy grand title of Director of Software Development for Europe, Middle East, and Africa team. ROB: Yeah, there's a bit of history about thoughtbot London as well that kind of ties into this. So before thoughtbot Launchpad II, it was thoughtbot London before we went remote. And initially, we had the plan of setting up a new studio in London to help expand thoughtbot outside of the Americas, but that plan fell through. But he knew some people from another agency called New Bamboo, and so we merged with or acquired that agency, and that agency then became the thoughtbot London team. I'm actually the first hire or...not the first hire, that's not true, the first development hire for the thoughtbot London team that would then become launchpad II. I was at the Bath Ruby Conference six years ago, I guess. And there was just an advert up on the hiring board that Nick Charlton, who's a Senior Developer and Development Team Lead at Launchpad II now, had put up. And I saw it, and I was talking to somebody who was my mentor at the time that I'd worked with at a previous job at onthebeach.co.uk, a guy called Matt Valentine-House who now works at Shopify who, actually, fun fact, his face appears at the top of Ruby Weekly this week. If you open up this week's Ruby Weekly, you can see Matt Valentine-House, who said to me, "Yeah, apply for it, why not? You see what happens." And I was like, "Okay," and just kind of took the leap. So I thought, thoughtbot, why would thoughtbot want me? Which is something I think a lot of people think when they want to join thoughtbot. They think, well, I can't do that. But I would implore people to apply. And so, from there, I never really wanted to move to London. I'd always lived in the North West of the UK. I made that leap to London because I wanted to work at thoughtbot. And then, gradually, over time, the London team expanded, and we needed to split out the management roles, and the development director role came up. And I've always enjoyed the coaching side of software development. It seems that you gain more experience as you help people with less experience, and I've always enjoyed coaching. And that was a big part of the role for me. So I was fortunate enough to be allowed to do it. And then, from there, things have grown. Yeah, so it's been a really interesting journey as a development director. The London studio went through a pretty tough time at one point where not long after I became development director that two-thirds of the team, in the space of two weeks, decided to hand their notice in and unbeknownst to each other. And so, all of a sudden, we didn't have a very big team. We didn't have very many prospects, and so it was a tough time. And so it's really nice to look back on the last three years and go, okay, we came through that. We're now one of the stronger teams at thoughtbot. And somebody actually asked me in an interview the other day, somebody we actually hired, not just based on this question, but he said, "What is your proudest moment of working at thoughtbot?" And I was like, that's one of the best questions I've heard from a candidate. And I said, "Hmm, that's interesting." It's not anything development-related, but it's that I can now look back on this team and say this is the team that I have grown in my image and all these people apart from Nick, who was the person who put the advert of it at Bath Ruby. I've hired all these people, and so the buck stops with me really because if anybody isn't able to perform, then it's kind of my fault because these are the people that I want to grow into being the team and see be a successful product design team or product development team, which brings us to modern-day I guess. So yeah, that was a long origin story. That's pretty much my whole thoughtbot biography. And I apologize. STEPH: That was perfect. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing it. And yeah, that's an awesome question. What's your proudest moment, like, part of a team? That can yield so many insights. I love that question. And I love your answer as well in terms of this is the team. We've pulled through a hard time. And then we've built everybody to the point that they are now, which kind of leads in perfectly to my next question. So being the software development director, could you walk us through a little bit of like, that's one of those titles I feel like a lot of companies have, but they can be very different from company to company. Would you mind walking us through a bit of the day-to-day in the life of being a development director? ROB: Yeah, sure. It's one of those things where I think this is something that I'm not sure if it's unique to thoughtbot, but you end up taking on a lot of hats at thoughtbot. So I know you're a team lead. So you have to balance your responsibilities as an individual contributor, which is a term I don't like, but I haven't got a better way to say it yet, and your development team lead roles. And I have similar sort of responsibilities where I have to do my individual contributor work. I have to do my director work. I'm also on our DEI Council. So I have to add that work in too, and make sure it's balanced out. So the start of my day is very much about prioritizing things. I know you and Chris, a few episodes ago, had quite lengthy discussions about productivity systems and what tools Chris wants to use. And I'm a big fan of Things, and I've been using it for maybe ten years, if not more, that I've now got my system down that I'm able to prioritize things in the way that I can pick up the right task at the right time. So a big part of my day-to-day is figuring out what is the most important thing to work on? So I have my client work, and then it's about supporting the team from that point. And the big part of my idea of what a manager is is that my job isn't to tell you what to do; my job is to find out what you want to do and direct you in a place where you can find the answer. Or I can give you some guidance about where to find the answer. And I feel like I'm doing a bad job as a manager where if I have to act as a middle person. Because if somebody comes to me and says, "Oh, I want to do this thing," And I say, "Well, I'll talk to that person for you," and then come back, I have failed. And my job is to say, "Oh, you should talk to that person about this." And to some extent, it's about being lazy. I don't want to be doing too much stuff because I have other things to do. But I want to make sure that those people have the right frameworks and guidelines in place so that I can point them in the right direction. STEPH: I think the fancy term for that is just delegating. [laughs] ROB: Yes, thank you. [laughs] STEPH: But I like lazy. [laughter] I like that one as well. I love that framing of a manager where you're not telling someone to do, but as your job, you are helping that person figure out what they want to do and then supporting them. I've been chatting with Chris recently and some others because I've been reading the book Resilient Management by Laura Hogan. And it's really helped me cement the difference between mentorship, coaching, and sponsorship. And I realized that I'm already falling a lot into the coaching and sponsorship because mentorship can be wonderful, but it is more directive of like, this is what I've done. And this is what has worked for me, and you should do this too. Versus the coaching and sponsorship, I think aligns far more perfectly with what you described as management, where it is my job to figure out what brings you joy, what brings you energy, and then how to help you progress to your next goals and your next steps in your career. ROB: Yeah, I think Laura Hogan is a great resource like her blog posts and books. I haven't read Resilient Management. But I know that the team leads on my team had been on her training courses, and they say how great it is. And there's also a blog post of hers that's about managing in tough times. It has a much better title than that. But it's about how do we be good managers in such uncertain times when there are a lot of things going on around the world right now that we all have to deal with? And helping people deal with those situations. Because at the end of the day, work isn't the most important thing; the most important thing is living. And it's something I say to my team, especially when people feel like...it's something that I say to my team when they're not feeling well. The most important thing is that you get better. And thoughtbot is still going to be here. The most important thing is how you live your life and how you look after yourself, and everything else is secondary. STEPH: Absolutely. Well, and everybody needs something different from work too. Some people may be in a state where they really need more stability and predictability from their work. And some people may be in a space where everything else outside of work is very stable and calm, and then they want work to bring the challenge and the volatility and the variety to life. So I remind myself very often that not everybody wants the same thing from work and to figure out what it is that someone wants from work. And then your seasons change. You may be in a season of where you want stability, or then you may be in a season of like, I'm ready to grow and push and take some risks. So helping someone identify which season of work they're in. ROB: Yeah, I 100% agree. What people can't see is me nodding vigorously on the other side of this call. It's very much about understanding because everybody is different. And that's what we want from a good team; it's understanding everybody's different approach to things. And so sometimes people want the distraction of work because they don't want the time off to think about other things. They want to be able to sit and concentrate on something. And it's understanding different people. STEPH: Yeah, that's a great point. I'm curious; you mentioned that as part of being development director, you are also, in addition to managing the team and being part of DEI then, there's also your day-to-day client work. I think you've started a new client recently. Could you tell me more about that? ROB: Yeah, I'd recently been working for a client for two and a half years, which is a very long time to be working with one client at thoughtbot. And it came to the time where I was ready for a new challenge, and it was stable enough for me to move on. So I've been working for a company in the UK. They allow customers to buy and sell cars, not between customers, the customers like companies like Auto Trader but customers to dealers and back and forth. And primarily, they worked with buying cars. And they've launched a product in the UK where people can sell their cars as well because they found that 70% of people who are buying cars also want to sell their cars. And from there, they're now looking to expand into Germany and Spain, so we are helping them to do that. And it's an interesting project, not necessarily from a technical point of view, but I might come back to that but definitely from a cultural point of view. The product at the moment allows you to put in a license plate or a registration plate for a car. And there's then a service in the UK that will allow you to pull up the maker model and the service history of that car. But you can't do that in Germany because it's against the privacy laws to find something from registration plates. And so it's interesting these different cultural aspects that you have to take into account when expanding into other countries that you aren't from and that you have less knowledge about. Because I'm also aware that credit cards aren't a big thing in Germany either. So you have to think about how they pay for things in different countries. And the previous company I was working for they're based in the Middle East. And so we had to take into account how we would do right to left design in a mobile app, which is really interesting from a western point of view that you get so used to swiping through an experience from left to right. But then it's not just the screen that's right to left. The journey moves from right to left. So you have to get used to the transitions of the screen going the other way and not thinking of that as going backwards. It's one of the best things about working in this region is that we get to deal with so many different cultures and how they expect to use applications. It's really satisfying. STEPH: That's fascinating. Yeah, I haven't gotten to work on a project like that that has those types of considerations. I think the most relatable experience I have is more working in healthcare because that's one of those areas that I'm certainly not proficient. I've become more proficient because of the type of projects that I've worked on. But I'm curious, for expanding into other regions and cultures, do those teams typically have an expert on their team that then helps guide the development process? Or, as you mentioned, the process of buying a car could be very different in some of the legal aspects that you're up against. Is there someone that you can turn to that's then helping mentor or be aware of that process? ROB: Yes, the current client they have a team based in Germany, people who are from Germany that are advising us on different cultural aspects or legislative things. They are doing a lot of data analysis for us because we need a new service that we can use for looking up car details. Because there is a service that you give different information to to get information about the car back from. So yeah, we do have that team there. But that's not always the case because every client is different. The company that we're working for in the Middle East didn't have a team. They had two developers who were helping us. But we have to figure things out just from their cultural background to ask them questions about things and allow them to advise us, but nobody who was really a specialist. But that's an interesting thing as well, not just the cultural aspects of the customers but the cultural aspects of the company that you work for. We definitely found that the company in the Middle East was more hierarchical. And so that's another challenge that you have to work with because we tend to work in quite a flat way where we tend to default as on thoughtbot projects, of not having a point person on a project. Everybody is there to answer the questions. But some teams or clients want that point person. And so, we adapt and change to allow for that to happen and work in that way. But it is interesting to work in different companies as well as working as an agency. STEPH: Yeah, you bring up a really good point of something that I don't reflect on very often, but it's something that I really appreciate about our thoughtbot culture is that we do try to strive for a very flat hierarchy. But also in working with clients, we purposely will avoid like, if there are two or more thoughtboters on a project, we don't want one person that is then the primary contact between the client and the thoughtbot team. The goal is that everybody shows up. Everybody is part of the process; everybody is part of meetings. And we do have an advisor for projects, but otherwise, we work very hard to make sure that there's not just one person that's then responsible for communication. We want everybody to have opportunities to be part of meetings, to lead meetings, to take on initiatives versus having that one person. That is something that I really appreciate that we do. ROB: Yeah. And it's more noticeable when you go to places where that isn't the norm, and you appreciate it more. And I think a big part of that is how much we are trusted. And we trust people to trust us, I guess. STEPH: Yeah. And I think it fits in nicely with circling back to the management conversation is that when people have access to those opportunities, that makes my job so much easier as a team lead where then there are more opportunities to sponsor someone or to coach someone as to how they can then be the person that then takes on a project or if they want to lead a particular meeting, or if they want to help a team introduce retrospectives into their process. So it gives more opportunities for me to then coach someone into expanding their skill set in those ways. ROB: Yeah, that's interesting to think about, allowing yourself to coach other people in that role. Because as we gain more experience and become senior developers, we naturally fall into that role of taking the lead on projects, even when we're not asked to. But then, when you gain other responsibilities in the management track, so you as a team lead and me as a team lead and a development director, it could be better for you to not take that role and allow somebody else to come into that role so you can coach them. That's been playing on my mind the last couple of days. Josh Clayton, who's the Managing Director for one of our teams in the Americas, raised it on our pull request in our handbook where we were talking about team leads having a dedicated day to concentrate on team lead things. It's one of those things where somebody says something, and it's like, oh yeah, that really clicks. Maybe that's why we have been having certain struggles on projects where we need to rearrange things and learn from that and so we can be better on projects in the future. So that's something that really resonated with me, and it's flying around in the back of my mind at the moment. STEPH: Yeah, that really resonates with me because while the predominant part of being a team lead at thoughtbot is having one-on-ones with folks, I find that when I have more time, a lot of the work also falls outside of that one-on-one where it's following up on conversations around hey, this person mentioned they're really interested in growing their skill. How can I help them? How can I help find opportunities? Or I know that they're currently stretching their skill set right now. If I have some extra time, then I can check in with them. I can pair with them. I can see how things are going. So I find that while the one-on-ones are the staple thing that happens every two weeks, there's a lot of other behind-the-scenes work that's going on as well to make sure that that person is growing and feeling really fulfilled by their work. ROB: I know we've spoken a lot about the product side and the client side of working on the new project that I'm working on. There are some interesting technical sides to it as well. The client has found that they have had some issues with Haskell and running on M1 Macs. And so, they've decided to take the leap and use GitHub Codespaces as their primary development environment, which has been interesting. I had heard about it but only in the background. I hadn't read anything about it or hadn't had any direct conversations. I just heard that there was a thing. So it's been quite interesting to play with that. It's interesting the way the client is using it as well because they're using a Dockerized environment effectively inside Docker by using Codespaces. So you start the Codespace, which very basically is a Docker instance somewhere on GitHub's infrastructure. It's built very much for Visual Studio Code, and so you can just directly attach your Visual Studio Code session to the Codespace and go from there, but I'm a Vim user. I've started to feel like a bit of an old guard or a curmudgeon recently where I've been like; maybe I need to use Visual Studio Code. Maybe I should just unlearn my Vim key bindings and learn the Visual Studio ones. And people say, "Oh, you could just use The Vim key bindings in VS Code." I'm like, that's cheating. I spent the time to learn the key bindings for Vim. I will take the time to learn the key bindings for Visual Studio Code and use it for the way it's intended. So it's been interesting to understand how Codespaces works, not necessarily in the way, it's intended. So you can still SSH into a Codespace session, but then you lose all the lovely setup stuff that you might have on your local machine. So I did spend half a day porting my dotfiles which are based off thoughtbot's dotfiles, into something that Codespaces can use and made it publicly available. So if you go to github.com/purinkle/codespace, you can see what I use to set up my Codespace environment. And once that's set up, it becomes a bit easier because then you have all the things that you're used to running locally. It is very much early days for how the client is using it. And so they're really open to saying like, okay, let's find out what's not working, and let's work and figure out how to get it up and running properly. So one of the things we do find is that Codespaces do timeout after a while. And then you might lose, like, even if I've created a tmux session, that tmux session disappears. And so I have to go in and create it again. I'm not sure what the timeouts are. I haven't had time to look into what those timeouts are yet. But that's definitely the main pain point at the moment of it being used as a development environment. It's been interesting. It's been kicking around in the back of my head like the difference between developing locally and deploying locally. And it's something that I wanted to talk to people at thoughtbot and outside of thoughtbot as well to understand that more. Because I don't think you need everything running to develop locally, but you might need it to deploy locally. It's interesting to me to understand how different companies work on their products from that point of view. STEPH: Yeah, I'm selfishly excited that you are using Codespaces for a client project because I have kept an eye on it, and I'm very intrigued by it. But I also haven't used it for a project. And it sounds really neat. I'm curious, have you found that it has helped them with onboarding or if you need to switch from working on one application to another? Have you found that it has helped them with some of those? I'm guessing that's the problem that they're optimizing to solve is how do we help people run everything quickly without having to set it up locally? ROB: It's an interesting question because I don't have the comparison of trying to set up the environment as it was before. It was smoother. The main thing with access tokens because once you can set up your SSH keys and your GitHub tokens, it's just a case of running a script and letting it run. So yes, from that point of view, I can imagine if I tried to set up their previous environment, that it'd be a lot more challenging because they were using Vagrant and running things that way, which I know from experience would not be fun. And I know that my Mac fans would just be spinning all the time. It would be like an aeroplane was trying to take off. So I'm thankful for that, that I don't have that experience anymore that my machine is going to slow down all the time. We've had on a previous client who had a Dockerized environment, but you have to have it all running on your machine. There are pros and cons to everything with these things. And it's like you said, what is the problem they're trying to solve with introducing this setup? STEPH: Yeah, I can't decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing. But I'm also intrigued by the idea that if a team is using Codespaces, then that means everybody else is using VS Code. And you can still customize it so you can still have your own preferences. But that does set a standard, so everybody is using the same editor. There's a lot of cross-collaboration in terms of if you do run into an issue, then you can help each other out. Versus when I join other teams, everybody's using their preferred editor, and then there you may have a day where someone's like, "Oh, I'm really stuck because my particular editor is suddenly having a problem and can't connect." And then you have less people that are able to help them if they're not using that same editor. And I can't decide if I like that or if I hate it [laughs] in terms of taking away people's ability to pick and choose their editor. But then the gains of everybody is using the same thing which is nice and would be really great for pairing too. ROB: Yeah, that's an interesting point. I was talking to...I have a management coach. He's a PHP developer, and I'm a Rails developer. And we were talking about the homogenization of things nowadays. And is that good, or is that bad to use with stuff like RuboCop that lints everything, so it's exactly the same? Does that stifle creativity? But then, at the same time, the thing I like about Codespaces is I think we're biased coming at it from the point of view of Rails developers. And if you look at how you can use Codespaces in the browser directly from GitHub, that's quite interesting because now you're lowering the barrier to entry to get started and saying you don't need to have an editor. You don't have to set up everything. You can just do it from your browser. A few years ago, I used to volunteer or coach at an organization called codebar. They help people who are less represented in the tech community get represented in the tech community. And we would see a lot of people coming for sessions using...I forgot what it's called. What was it called? Cloud 66 or something. There was some remote development environment that people would come and say, "Oh, I've been using this," because they didn't know how to set up the necessary infrastructure to just get a Rails server going or things like that or didn't know how to set up Sublime or Atom or editor of choice. And it's really interesting if you remove your bias of 15 years of professional software development and go okay, if I were starting today, what would the environment look like, and how would I get started? I'm lucky enough that I've grown up with the web and seen how web development has changed and been able to gain more knowledge as it's appeared. I don't envy anybody who has to come into the industry now and suddenly have to drink from this firehose of all these different frameworks, all these different technologies. Yeah, I started off by just right-clicking and viewing source on HTML files back in 1998 or something ridiculous like that. And CSS didn't even exist or wasn't used. And so it's a much different world than 24 years ago. STEPH: That is something that Chris and I have mentioned on previous episodes where people are coming into software development, and as much as we love Vim and it sounds like you love Vim, our advice is don't start with Vim. Don't start there. You've got so much to learn. Start with something like VS Code that's going to help you out. And you make such a great point in regards to this lowering the barrier to entry. Because I have been part of a number of classes where you have people coming in with Macs or with a Windows machine, and then you're trying to get everybody set up. You want them to use the same browser for testing. And we spend like a whole class just getting everybody on the same page and making sure their machines are working or then troubleshooting if something's not. But if they can just go to GitHub and then they can run things seamlessly there, that's a total game-changer in terms of how I would teach a class, and it would just be far easier. So I hadn't even considered the benefits that would have for teachers or just for onboarding teams as well. But yeah, specifically for leading a class, I think that is a huge benefit. GitHub did some pretty cool stuff around when they were launching that as well because I went back and watched some of their GitHub Universe sessions that they had where they were talking about Codespaces. And one of the things that they did that I really appreciated was how they went about launching Codespaces. So initially, it was how fast can this be? Or what's our proof of concept? And I think when they were building this, they found it took about 45 minutes if they wanted to spin up an application and then provide you a development environment. And they're like, okay, cool, like, we can do this, but it's 45 minutes, and that's not going to work. And so then their next iteration, they got it down to 25 minutes, and then they got it down to 5 minutes. And now they've got it to the point that it's instantaneous because they're building stuff in the background overnight. And so then that way, when you click on it, it's just all ready for you. But I loved that cycle, that process that they went through of can we even do this? And then let's see, slowly, incrementally, how fast can we get it? And then, to get feedback, instead of transitioning their own internal teams to it right away, they created this more public club. I think they called it The Computer Club, something like that. And they're like, hey, if you want to be part of Codespaces or try out this new feature that we have, delete all the source and the things that you need locally, and then just commit to using Codespaces. And then, if you are stuck or if you have trouble, then your job is to let us know so then we can iterate, and we can fix it. I really liked that approach that they took to launching this product and then getting feedback from everyone and then improving upon it. ROB: Yeah, that sounds like an Agile developer's dream where you just put something out there that's the bare bones, and you're given license to learn from that experience and how people are actually using that tool. That's something we've actually tried to do on the client project at the moment is adding all the...now that there's a different flow in Germany, there are different questions we need to ask. And so that could be quite a complex thing to put into place. So what we said is what we're going to do is just put in the different screens, and all you have is one option to click. So you click that option, you go to the next one, go to the next one, go to the next one. Then we have something that the customer can click on and play with and understand, and then we can iterate on top of that. But it also allows us to identify areas of risk because you can go; oh, where does this information come from? But now we need to get this from a third-party service. So that's the riskiest thing we've got to work on here, where this other thing is just a hard-coded list of three-door or five-door cars. And so that's an easier problem to solve. So allowing yourself to put something that could be quite complex like GitHub Codespaces and go okay, we're going to put something out there. It takes 45 minutes to run-up. But we're telling you it takes 45 minutes to run it. We're not happy with it, but we want to learn how you're using it so that we can then improve it but improve it in the right direction. Because it might be that we get it to 20 minutes to start up, but you need it in half a second. That's a ridiculous example. Or it might be that you need to be able to use RubyMine with it instead of VS Code, and that's where the market isn't. That's the thing that you can't learn in isolation that you have to put something out there for people to use and play with. STEPH: There's one other cool feature I want to highlight that I realized that they offer as well. So in the past, I've used a tool called ngrok, which then you can make your localhost public so other people can access. You can literally demo what you're working on locally, and someone else can access it. And I think that it's very cool. It's come in handy a number of times. And my understanding is that Codespaces has that feature where they can make your localhost accessible. So your work in progress you can then share with someone, and I love that. ROB: Oh, that's really interesting. I didn't know you could do that. I know you could forward ports from your local machine to that. But I didn't know you could share it externally. That'd be really cool. I can see how that can be really helpful in demos and pairing. And it makes sense because it's not running on your computer. It's running on some remote architecture somewhere. That's interesting. STEPH: Well, that's the dream I've been sold from what I've been reading about GitHub Codespaces. So if I'm telling lies, you let me know [laughs] as you're working further in it than I am. But yeah, that was one of the features that I read, and I was like, yeah, that's great because I love ngrok for that purpose. And it would be really cool if that's already built into Codespaces as well. ROB: ngrok is really interesting with things like trying to get third-party services to work. So from, the previous client, they wanted an Alexa Skill. And so, if you're trying to work with an Alexa Skill, you have to sign in from Amazon's architecture onto your local machine. You have to use ngrok as the tool there. So I wonder if that could potentially solve a problem where if there are three developers trying to develop on this if you could point to one Codespace that you're all working on rather than... Because the problem we had was if me or Fritz or Rakesh was working on this, we'd have to go and then change the settings on the Amazon Alexa Skill to point to a different machine. Whereas I wonder if Codespasces allows you to have this entry point, you could point to like thoughtbot.codespace.github.com or something like that that would then allow you to share that instance. That's something interesting that I think about now. I wonder if you could share Codespace instances amongst each other. I don't know. STEPH: Yeah, I'm intrigued too. That sounds like it'd be really helpful. So circling back just a bit to where we were talking about wearing different hats in terms of working on client work, and then also working on the team, and then also potentially some sales work as well, I'm curious, how do you balance that transition? How do you balance solving hard problems in a codebase and then also transition to solving hard problems in the management space? How do you make all of that fit cohesively in your day or your week? ROB: The main thing that somebody said to me recently is that you can only do so much in a day, and it's about the order that you approach those things. And just be content with the fact that you're not going to get everything done. But you have to make sure that you work on things in the right order and just take your time and then work through them. I read a really good book recently that was recommended to me by my coach called Time Off. And it's all about finding your rest ethic, which sounds a bit abstract and a bit weird. But all it is it's about understanding that you can't be working 100% all the time. It's not possible. As developers, sometimes we can forget that we're creative people, and creativity comes from a part of your brain that works subconsciously. So it's important for you to take breaks throughout the day and kind of go okay; I use the Pomodoro Technique. So I have an app that runs, and every 25 minutes, I just take a little break. I don't use it in the way that it's supposed to be used. I just use it to give me a trigger to have a break every 25 minutes. And so in that time, I'll just step away from my computer. I'll walk to the kitchen, grab a glass of water. I usually have a magazine or a book next to my table. So I have a magazine here at the moment. I'll just read a page of that just to kind of rest my eyes, so they focus at a different level but also just to get my brain thinking about something else. And it seems counterproductive that like, oh, you're stepping out of what you were doing. But then I find like, oh, I suddenly have a little refresher to like, oh, I need to get back into what I was doing. I know where I've got to go. That thing that I was thinking about now makes a little bit more sense. And even if it's a bigger break, give yourself the license to go for a walk and just kind of clear your head. And a big thing about going for a walk is not to concentrate on completing the task of walking but to concentrate on the walk itself and taking the things that are happening around you. And let your mind just kind of...you'll sometimes notice that oh, I can hear a bird. But that bird's been chirping for five minutes, and you didn't notice because your mind's kind of going. And if you concentrate on, I just want to complete this walk, that's what I'm out here to do, then you lose that ability to let your mind reset. That's a big thing that I'm working on personally to concentrate on the doing rather than the getting done. And it ties into the craft of being a software developer because if you concentrate on the actual writing of the code and the best practices that we all believe in, you end up with something better that you don't then have to revisit at a later time. Where if you just try and get something done, you're just going to end up having to come back to it or have to revisit in some other way. I've actually got a blog post coming out soon about notifications on phones. I'm a big believer that your phone belongs to you and that if your work wants you to have work notifications on your phone, then they could buy you a phone just for that purpose. The only thing where I kind of draw the line is I have notifications for meetings on my phone because I can't think of another way to get those things to ping up at me. And I understand that there are jobs where you do need to have those sorts of notifications, especially things like where you're on call; it's a big thing. But when it comes to things where a manager wants to get a hold of you straight away, from a trust point of view, that's where I think things fall down. And you're questioning, like, okay, why does this person need to get hold of me at 7:00, 8:00, 9:00, 10:00 o'clock at night? And should I be available? We build by the day at thoughtbot. And so when I find, not when I find but when I talk to people, and they say, "Oh, I was still working at 7:30, 8:00 o'clock," I will say, "Why? You're devaluing your own time at that point because we're not billing any extra for that time. So you're making your craft and your skill...you're cheapening it. And I want them to relish the skills and competencies that they have. That's a big thing for me. We're very lucky at thoughtbot that we can draw a boundary at the end of the day and go, okay, that's it. There's no expectation for me. It is much more difficult at product companies. But yeah, I think it's something that as an industry, and it's a bigger thing as a society, especially with younger people coming into the industry who have never worked in an office and may never work in an office, that idea of where is the cutoff? For so much of the pandemic, the people I would get concerned about the most are the people whose beds I could see behind them because I'm thinking to myself, you spend at least 16 hours a day in that same room. And that's going to become the norm for people. And if people don't have those rest periods and those breaks and aren't given the opportunities to do that by their managers, then it's not going to end well. And happy people and fulfilled people do the best jobs from a business point of view. But that's never the way I approach it, but that's what I say to people. STEPH: I think that's one of the biggest mistakes that I made early on in my career, and even now, I still have to coach myself through it. It's like you said, we are creative people and people in software and in general and not just developers, but it's a creative craft. And I wouldn't step away to take breaks. I just thought if I pushed hard enough, I would figure it out, and then I could get done with my work because I was so focused on getting it done versus the doing, as you'd highlighted earlier. I haven't really thought about it in that particular light of focusing on this is the thing that I'm working on. And yes, I do want to get it done, but let's also focus on the doing portion of it. And so I wouldn't step away for walks. I wouldn't step away for breaks. And that is something that I have learned the hard way that when I actually gave myself that time to breathe, if I gave myself a moment to relax, then I would come back refreshed and then ready to tackle whatever challenge was in front of me. And same for keeping a magazine that's near my desk; I have found that if I keep a book or something that I enjoy...because, at some point, my brain is going to look for some rest, like, it happens. That's when we flip open Twitter or Instagram or emails or something because our brain is looking for something easy and maybe a little bit of like brain candy, something to give us a little hit. And I have found that if I keep something else more intentional by my desk, something that I want to read or that I'm enjoying, then I find that when I am seeking for something that's short that I can look at, that I feel more relaxed and fulfilled from that versus then if I go to Twitter, and then I see a bunch of stuff, I don't like, and then I go back to work. [laughs] And it has the opposite effect of what I actually wanted to do with my downtime. I love the sound of this book. We'll be sure to include a link in the show notes because it sounds like a really good book to read. And I've also worked on improving the setup with my phone and notifications, where I have compartmentalized all the work-related apps into one folder, and then I keep it on the third screen of my phone. So if I want to see something that's work-related, it's very intentional of like, I have to scroll past all of the stuff that matters to me outside of work and then get to that work section and then click in that folder to then see like, okay, this is where I have Slack, and Gmail, and Basecamp, and all the other things that I might need for work. And I have found that has really helped me because I do still have the notifications on my phone, but at least putting it on its own screen further away from the home screen has been really helpful. ROB: Do you find that you still get distracted by that, though, when you're in the flow of doing something else? STEPH: I don't with my phone. I am a person who ignores my phone really well. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, [laughs] but it is a truth of who I am where I'm pretty good at ignoring my phone. ROB: That's a good skill to have. If there's any phone in the room and a notification goes off, my head swivels, and I pivot, and I'm like, oh, yeah, some dopamine hit over there that I can get from looking at somebody else's notification. STEPH: I have noticed that in the other people that I'm around. Yeah, it's that sound that just triggers people like, oh, I got to look. And even if you know it's not your phone like you heard someone else's phone ding, it still makes you check your phone even though probably there's a part of your brain that recognizes like, that wasn't mine, but I'm still going to check anyways. And I have worked hard to fight that where even if I hear my phone go off, I'm like, okay, cool, I'll get to it. I'll check it when I need to. And I'm that person that whenever apps always ask me, "Can we send you notifications?" I'm like, no, you may not send me notifications. [laughs] Something else you said that I haven't thought about until just now is the idea that there are some people who have never worked in an office or may never work in an office because we are leaning into more remote jobs. And that is fascinating to me to think about that someone won't have had that experience. But you make such a good point that we need to start thinking about these boundaries now and how we manage our remote work and our home life because this is, going forward, going to be the new norm for a number of people. So how do we go ahead and start putting good practices in place for those future workers? ROB: One of the things, as we've hired people from a remote point of view who've only worked with thoughtbot remotely, is the idea of visibility. And I don't mean the visibility of I want to see when somebody's working but maybe the invisibility of people. Because you can't see when people are taking breaks, you assume that everybody is working all the time, and so then you don't take those breaks. And so this is something we saw with people who we hired in the first six months of being remote. And they were burning out because they didn't realize that other people were taking breaks. Because they didn't know about the cultural norms of how we worked at thoughtbot. But people who had worked in the studio would know that people would get up and have breaks. People would get up and go get a coffee from a coffee shop and then have a walk around. They didn't know that that was the culture because they bring the culture from other places with them. But then it's much harder to get people to understand your way of working and how we think that we should approach things when you are sat in isolation in a room with a screen. And that's something that we've had to say to people to break that down. And even things that we took for granted when we worked in a studio where somebody would get up and ask somebody if they could pair with them even if they weren't on the same project. Somebody might have more Elm knowledge or React Native knowledge, or Elixir knowledge. And you'd get up and say, "Hey, can I borrow some of your time just to go over this thing, to pair?" And everybody would say, "Yeah, yeah, I can find some time. If not now, we can do it later." And recently, we've had people saying, "Oh, is it okay if we pair across projects? Is it okay if we pair with other people?" It's like, "Yeah, pair." One of the big things we say is that we have this vast amount of knowledge across thoughtbot, across the world that we can tap into and that you can use. And that's just one example of how do you get those core things that you take for granted and help people understand them? Because you don't know what people don't know. And it's all about that implied knowledge. So that's something that we learned. And we try and say to people and instill in them about yeah, take breaks. You can pair with people. There are people who bring in culture from other places with them. But then, to go back to where you started, how do you start with people who have no culture with them or have the culture of coming from maybe from school, or university, or from a different industry? How do you help those people add to your culture but also learn from your culture at the same time? Big people problems. STEPH: Have you found any helpful strategies to normalize that take a break culture? ROB: One thing we tried, but it doesn't last very long because people are lazy, is putting it in Slack saying, "I'm going for a break." And you can do that, but it's so artificial. After a week or two weeks, people just stopped doing it. It was through conversation. We have a regular retrospective as the Launchpad II team where we talk about what is working, what isn't working. And we have such a trusting environment where people will say things along the lines of this isn't working for me, or I feel like I'm burning out. Then we will talk to each other about it and figure out where it comes from. And it's a good point to raise that I don't think we have explicitly addressed it. But it is something that we will address. I'm not going to say could address; we will address it. I will talk to our latest hire, Dorian, who I have a one-on-one with next week, and to kind of talk to him about it. And we should maybe try and codify that in our handbook somewhere so everybody can learn from it, at least start a strategy and a conversation. Because I don't think it is something that we do talk about. It's the problem of being siloed and being remote and time zones as well. A lot of stuff that Launchpad I knows Launchpad II doesn't necessarily know because we only have three, maybe, hours if people are based on the East Coast where we overlap. I have meetings with Geronda, who's our DEI Program Manager, and she lives in Seattle. And so sometimes I'll talk to her at 5:00 o'clock, and it's 7:00 o'clock in the morning for her. And you have different energy levels. But yeah, so we spend time to try and figure out how we work together. STEPH: Yeah, I like that idea of highlighting that we take breaks somewhere that's part of your expectations as part of your role. Like, this is an expectation of your role; you're going to take breaks. You're going to step away for lunch. You're going to stick to a certain set of hours in terms of having like an eight-hour workday with a healthy lunch break in there. I think that's a really good idea. On the Boost team, I have found that people have adopted the habit of not always but typically sharing of, like, "Hey, I'm stepping away for a coffee break," or "I'm having lunch. Maybe like a late lunch, but I'm taking it," Or "I am stepping away for a walk." You often see later in the afternoon where there are a number of people that are then saying, "Hey, I'm going for a walk." And I feel that definitely helps me when I see it every day to reinforce like, yes; I should do this too because I already admitted I'm bad at this. So it helps reinforce it for me when I see other people saying that as well. But then I can see that that takes time to build that into a team's culture or to find easy ways to share that. So just putting it upfront in like a role expectation also feels like a really good place to then highlight and then to reinforce it as then people are setting that example. ROB: One thing that Nick Charlton tried to introduce was a Strava group. There's a thoughtbot Strava group. So you can see if people are members of it that they've been walking and things like that. It was quite an interesting way to automate it. I think it fell off a cliff. But it was something that we did try to how can we make the visibility of this a little bit easier? But yeah, the best thing I've seen is, like you say, having that notification in Slack or somewhere where you can see that other people are stepping away from their keyboards. STEPH: Well, as you mentioned, solving people problems is totally easy, you know. It's a totally trivial task although I'm sure we could spend too many hours talking about it. All right, so I do have one more very important question for you, Rob. And this goes back to a debate that Chris and I are having, and I'd love to get you to weigh in on it. So there are Pop-Tarts, these things called Pop-Tarts in the world. And I don't know if you're a fan, but if you were given the option to eat a Pop-Tart with frosting or a Pop-Tart without frosting, which one do you think you would choose? ROB: That's an interesting question. Is there a specific flavor? Because I think that the Strawberry Pop-Tart I would have with frosting but maybe the chocolate one I have without. I know there are all sorts of exotic flavors of Pop-Tarts. But I think I would edge towards with frosting as a default. That's my undiplomatic answer. STEPH: I like that nuanced answer. I also like how you refer to the flavors as exotic. I think that was very kind of you [laughs] other like melon crushed or wild flavors that they have. Awesome. All right. Well, I think that's a perfect note for us to wrap up. Rob, thank you so much for coming on the show and for bringing up all of these wonderful ideas and topics and sharing your experience with Codespaces. For folks that are interested in following your work or interested in getting in touch with you, where's the best place for them to do that? ROB: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's been fantastic to have a chat. If people do want to find me, the best place would be on Twitter. So my handle on Twitter is @purinkle which I understand is hard for people to maybe understand via a podcast, but we'll put a link in the show notes so people couldn't find me more easily. And that's probably also a good time to say that I am actually trying to find a development team lead to join our Launchpad II team. So we are looking for somebody who lives in Europe, Middle East, or Africa to join our team as a developer and manager of two to three people. There's more information on the thoughtbot website, and I do tweet about it very, very often. So feel free to reach out to me if that's of any interest to you. STEPH: Awesome. We'll be sure to include a link to that in the show notes as well. On that note, shall we wrap up? ROB: Yeah, let's wrap up. CHRIS: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeee!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.