Steph Viccari

334: Name That Bike

April 19th, 2022  |  42 mins 24 secs

Chris got a bike. Specifically, he bought a bike to use in a triathlon he signed up to participate in. Now he needs to name the bike, and speaking of naming things, a more technical topic that he talks about is the Crispy Brussels Snack Hour.

Steph talks about Rescue Rails projects and increasing developer acceleration.

They answer a listener question asking, "Why do so many developers and agencies, thoughtbot included, replace the default test suite in Rails with RSpec?"

333: Tapas

April 12th, 2022  |  41 mins 53 secs

Being pregnant is hard, but this tapas episode is good! Steph discovered and used a #yelling Slack channel and attended a remote magic show. Chris touches on TypeScript design decisions and edge cases.

Then they answer a question captured from a client Slack channel regarding a debate about whether I18n should be used in tests and whether tests should break when localized text changes.

332: Ludicrous Speed

April 5th, 2022  |  39 mins 28 secs

Chris is back from vacation and gives hiring and onboarding updates.

Steph has an update about the CI slowdown and scaling CI.

They tackle a listener question regarding having some fear around potential merge conflicts.

331: Git Down

March 22nd, 2022  |  29 mins 28 secs

Steph celebrates Utah's adoption day and Daylight Savings Time and troubleshoots a CI build time that had suddenly spiked for a client project using TeamCity. She also shares a minor update regarding the work that thoughtbot is doing to scale horizontally and add more machines quickly and efficiently to process more RSpec tests.

Chris was alarmed by logs and unknown-unknowns and had some fun using Git down. Git bless his heart!

330: Bikeshed Baby

March 15th, 2022  |  33 mins 50 secs

BIG NEWS! Steph's expecting a baby boy! 🍼🎉

Aaaand unfortunately, the rest of the show isn't nearly as exciting. Chris talks about admin pagination using Pagy, and Steph wants to delete some code and has nervousness around that she's going to break something.

They answer a listener question from Slash, who asks, "What are the first keyboard shortcuts you teach junior devs?"

329: Fire Mode

March 8th, 2022  |  31 mins 41 secs

Steph is excited to be headed on a retreat with her mom in the mountains, but before that, she details how she helped troubleshoot a production issue with her team and appreciated their process. She's also looking into tooling around spinning up more machines to process more RSpec tests.

Chris had a developer start their new job at Sagewell and highlights how they involved the new person in rectifying potentially missing and/or confusing existing documentation. He also has a gripe, and that is accounts. Handling too many accounts. Additionally, he talks about triaging an error and how it was tough initially to understand if something was actually broken. And then it was even harder to understand what was broken. So he paired through it and used the power of putting two heads together.

328: Terrible Simplicity

March 1st, 2022  |  52 mins 36 secs

Chris is helping with efforts to introduce security, practices, and policies at Sagewell. Right now, they are refining the usage of 1Password to standardize passwords and secure information. He also shares (what he believes) is a terrible idea around fixing inconsistencies around symbols and strings.

Steph shares an update around factories.

Also, at Sagewell, Chris is helping to build mobile apps, one for iOS and one for Android, and is considering pursuing having them be all native. Good idea? Terrible idea? Chris and Steph riff on that a bit.

327: Estimate Crafting

February 22nd, 2022  |  42 mins 33 secs

Steph joins Chris in trying new things! For her, it's a new email client – the Newton email client – because she really wants to love her inbox. She also talks about implementing a suggestion from Chris on improving CI speed.

Chris continues his search for the perfect to-do list app. (It's not going great.) But he has made hiring progress and is excited to move on to the next step: onboarding.

Together they answer a listener question who asked for advice on crafting project estimates for clients.

326: Dongle Life

February 15th, 2022  |  41 mins 2 secs

Chris is making hiring progress and loves asdf and M1 laptops. Steph is anticipating the arrival of one dongle to rule them all and talks about moving away from having a lot of Bluetooth connections.

Two other big things on Steph's mind are education around factories because they're v important and shared examples and how they can be overused. She and Chris agree that it is better to tell stories in tests instead.

325: Pranting

February 8th, 2022  |  35 mins 12 secs

Steph is super excited about changing her schedule to dedicate a full day to focus on being a great team lead. Chris talks about his continued adventures in the world of hiring.

Together they answer a listener question about what they consider a “large” table in a database and how they review schema changes.

324: Coding Time!

February 1st, 2022  |  41 mins 23 secs

Chris updates us on his new window manager of choice, Moom, and tells us what's good with it. He's also giving yet another task manager a go: OmniFocus. (Sorry Things.) Steph talks about defining test classes in RSpec and readdresses flaky tests to improve CI build time.

Chris is worried about productivity. He's still not coding as much as he'd like to be. Steph lends an ear, and together, they discuss potential ways Chris could gain back a little bit of coding time at work.

323: Doing Things

January 25th, 2022  |  45 mins 43 secs

Steph talks about winter storms and thoughts on name pronunciation features. Chris talks about writing a query to add a new display of data in an admin panel and making a guest appearance on the Svelte Radio Podcast.

Finally, Chris decided that his productivity to-do list system was failing him. So he's on the search now for something new. He asks Steph what she uses and if she's happy with it. How do you, dear Listener, keep track of all your stuff in the world?

322: Toxic Traits

January 18th, 2022  |  35 mins 21 secs

Happy New Year (for real)! Chris and Steph both took some end-of-year time off to rest and recharge.

Steph talks about some books she enjoyed, recipes she tried, and trail-walking adventures with her dog, Utah. Chris' company is now in a good position to actually start hiring within the engineering team. He's excited about that and will probably delve into more around the hiring process in the coming weeks.

Since they aren't really big on New Year's Eve resolutions, Steph and Chris answer a listener question regarding toxic traits inspired by the listener question related to large pull requests and reflect on their own.

321: Leaving Breadcrumbs

January 11th, 2022  |  40 mins 20 secs

Steph tells a cute story about escape artist huskies, and on a technical note, shares a journey in regards to class variables and modules inheritance.

Chris talks about how he's starting to pursue analytics and one of the things that he's struggling with that he's always historically struggled with is the idea of historical data. He's also noticed a lack of formalization of certain things and is working with his team to remedy that.

320: Remember The Fun: 2021 Recap

December 21st, 2021  |  34 mins 2 secs

Steph and Chris recap their favorite things of 2019 and 2020 and share their 2021 list. Happy Holidays, y'all!

319: Wins & Losses

December 14th, 2021  |  35 mins 20 secs

Steph started a new project and shares details about the new tools she's using, including working on a remote dev environment. Chris shares a journey with Lograge and Rails flash messages as he strives to capture user-facing errors.

They also discuss "silencing" flaky tests, using Graphviz to visualize data dependencies, and porting Devise views to use Inertia and Svelte. It's also interesting how different their paths have been this year!