Joël Quenneville

398: Developing Heuristics For Writing Software

August 22nd, 2023  |  34 mins 7 secs

Want a cool cucumber salad? Joël's got you covered. Stephanie has evolved and found some pickles she enjoys.

Experienced programmers use a lot of heuristics or "rules of thumb" about what makes their code better. These aren't always true, but they work in most situations. Stephanie and Joël discuss a range of heuristics, how to use them, how to come up with them, how to know when to break them, and how to teach them to more junior devs.

397: Dependency Graphs

August 15th, 2023  |  42 mins 53 secs

Stephanie is consciously trying to make meetings better for herself by limiting distractions. A few episodes ago, Joël talked about a frustrating bug he was chasing down and couldn't get closure on, so he had to move on. This week, that bug popped up again and he chased it down! AND he got to use binary search to find its source–which was pretty cool!

Together, Stephanie and Joël discuss dependency graphs as a mental model, and while they apply to code, they also help when it comes to planning tasks and systems. They talk about coupling, cycles, re-structuring, and visualizations.

396: Build vs. Buy

August 8th, 2023  |  33 mins 57 secs

Joël has been fighting a frustrating bug where he's integrating with a third-party database, and some queries just crash. Stephanie shares her own debugging story about a leaky stub that caused flaky tests.

Additionally, they discuss the build vs. buy decision when integrating with third-party systems. They consider the time and cost implications of building their own integration versus using off-the-shelf components and conclude that the decision often depends on the specific needs and priorities of the project, including how quickly a solution is needed and whether the integration is core to the business's value proposition.

395: Human Connection in a Virtual (Work) World

August 1st, 2023  |  30 mins 59 secs

Stephanie had a small consulting win: saying no to a client. GeoGuessr is all the rage for thoughtbot's remote working culture, which leads to today's topic of forming human connections in a virtual (work) environment.

394: Submitting a Conference Talk Proposal from Start to Finish

July 25th, 2023  |  38 mins 53 secs

Joël recently had a fascinating conversation with some friends about the power of celebrating and highlighting small wins in their lives. He talks about bringing this into his work life. May Stephanie interest you in a secret she learned regarding homemade pizza?

RubyConf is coming! Who's submitting talks?! It's hekkin scary. Don't fret! Joël and Stephannie are here to help. Today, they discussed submitting a conference talk proposal from start to finish.

393: Is REST the Best? APIs and Domain Modeling

July 18th, 2023  |  33 mins 49 secs

It's updates on the work front today! Stephanie was tasked with removing a six-year-old feature flag from a codebase. Joël's been doing a lot of small database migrations.

A listener question sparked today's main discussion on gerunds' interesting relationship to data modeling.

392: Managing Changing Business Requirements

July 11th, 2023  |  39 mins 14 secs

Joël has a fascinating discovery! He learned a new nuance around working with dependency graphs. Stephanie just finished playing a 100-hour video game on Nintendo Switch: a Japanese role-playing game called Octopath Traveler II. On the work front, she is struggling with a lot of churn in acceptance criteria and ideas about how features should work.

• How do these get documented?
• What happens when they change?
• What happens when people lose this context over time?

391: Learn with APPL

July 5th, 2023  |  40 mins 45 secs

Stephanie went to her first WNBA game. Also: Bingo. Joël's new project has him trying to bring in multiple databases to back their ActiveRecord models. He's never done multi-database setups in Rails before, and he doesn't hate it.

Stephanie shares bits from a discussion with former Bike Shed host Steph Viccari about learning goals. Four elements stood out:

Adventure (try something new)
Passion (topic)
Profit (from recent learnings)
Low-risk (applicable today)

= APPL

Stephanie and Joël discuss what motivates them, what they find interesting vs. what has immediate business value, and how they advocate for themselves in these situations. They ponder if these topics can bring long-term value and discuss the impact that learning Elm had on Joël's client work.

390: The Truth about Truthiness

June 27th, 2023  |  39 mins 58 secs

Joël's new work project involves tricky date formats. Stephanie has been working with former Bike Shed host Steph Viccari and loved her peer review feedback.

The concept of truthiness is tough to grasp sometimes, and JavaScript and Ruby differ in their implementation of truthiness.

• Is this a problem?
• Do you prefer one model over the other?
• What can we learn about these design decisions?
• How can we avoid common pitfalls?

389: Review Season

June 20th, 2023  |  33 mins 45 secs

Stephanie just got back from a smaller regional Ruby Conference, Blue Ridge Ruby, in Asheville, North Carolina. Joël started a new project at work.

Review season is upon us. Stephanie and Joël think about growth and goals and talk about reviews: how to do them, how to write them for yourself, and how to write them for others.

388: Empowering Other Departments Within a Company

June 13th, 2023  |  34 mins 11 secs

Joël has a bike shorts update; Stephanie has a garden one.

Often, power is centralized within the dev team. This is usually because they are the only ones able to execute. Sometimes this ends up interfering with team processes and workload. Joël is a fan of empowering other teams to do things themselves.

386: Value Objects Revisited: The `Tally` Edition

May 31st, 2023  |  41 mins 8 secs

If you're in the market for bicycle shorts, Joël's got you. Stephanie just returned from RubyKaigi in Japan and shares details of her trip.

Recently at thoughtbot, there have been conversations around an interesting data modeling exercise. Joël and Stephanie discuss the following:

• Value Objects vs. Hashes
• Doing Math on Compound Numbers
• Monoids and Folding
• Naming Concepts in Code

385: The Boring Parts of Tech

May 23rd, 2023  |  24 mins 41 secs

Joël is joined by thoughtbot Software Developer and Dirt Jumper Daniel Nolan. Dirt jumping is BMX-style riding 🏍️ with really enormous dirt jumps.

But for a person who loves excitement in his spare time, for Daniel at work, it's not the new and shiny that interests him. When he dives into something, the "boring" parts of tech are what he finds most fulfilling. He wants to know the "why," and in this conversation, he explains how it sustains his career.

384: Not All Numbers Are Numbers

May 16th, 2023  |  37 mins 56 secs

Joël gives a recap after attending RailsConf 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia (and yes, there was karaoke! 🎤 🎶). Stephanie plugs the The Tightly Coupled Book Club Podcast from friends and fellow thoughtboters Aji and Mina Slater where they're reading The Rails Guides from cover to cover and treating it like a book club and having a discussions about the documentation as they read it together.

Stemming from a Twitter thread by Joël, their main topic focuses on not all numbers being numbers. So: if someone is submitting a phone number through a form:

• How would you store that in the database?
• Would you store it as a string? Because sometimes it comes with some extra formatting.
• Would you normalize it and try to store it as an integer because it's a number?

Thoughts, Dear Listener?

382: Domain-Specific Languages

May 2nd, 2023  |  36 mins 9 secs

Joël has been integrating a third-party platform into a testing pipeline...and it has not been going well. Because it's not something she usually keeps up-to-date with, Stephanie is excited to learn about more of the open-source side of things in Ruby, what's new in the Ruby tooling world, and what folks are thinking about regarding the future of the language.

Today's topic is inspired by an internal thoughtbot Slack thread about writing a custom matcher for Rspec. Stephanie and Joël contrast DSLs vs. Object APIs and also talk about:

• CanCanCan vs Pundit
• RSpec DSL
• When is a DSL helpful?
• Why not use both DSLs & Object APIs?
• Extensibility
• When does a DSL become a framework?

381: To TDD or Not to TDD?

April 25th, 2023  |  40 mins 58 secs

It's gardening season! Stephanie swaps seeds with friends and talks about her Chicago garden. Joël recently started experimenting with a dedicated bookmark manager.

They discuss the aspirational (and sometimes dogmatic) sides of TDD and explore when to test: first or after.

How does that affect the tests?
How does that affect the code?
How does that affect workflow?
Are you a "better" programmer because you 100% TDD?