Steph Viccari

318: Successful Skills with Edward Loveall

December 7th, 2021  |  44 mins 5 secs

Fellow thoughtboter Edward Loveall joins Steph to cohost and talk about alternative frontends and his own that he created: scribe.rip: an alternative frontend to Medium, learning about what it's like to be a manager/non-IC, and helps answer a listener question re: how do you think about empathy in your work?

317: Burn The Ships!

November 30th, 2021  |  41 mins 41 secs

Steph gives an update about RSpec focus and how she often forgets to remove the focus feature from tests. She figured out two solutions: one using Rubocop, and the other from a Twitter user, suggesting using a GitHub gist. She also suggests that if you're one of those people who misses being in an office environment, you check out soundofcolleagues.com for ambient office noise selection.

Chris has been struggling to actually do any coding and is adjusting to doing more product management and shares some strategies that have been helping him.

They answer a listener question about dealing with large pull requests and how it's hard to recognize a good seam to break them up when you are in the thick of one.

316: Constrain and Refactor

November 16th, 2021  |  39 mins 33 secs

Chris finally got his new computer! 🎉 🎉 🎉 He gives his initial review. He's also super excited that GitHub announced a beta for pull requests merge queue, and even more excited that multiple people who listen to this show very kindly pointed that out to him on Twitter!

Steph discovered something that is quite niche, but she's excited to tinker with it more, called CookLang. It's a markup language that's designed for cooking and recipe management so you can store recipes and text files and there's no database required; making it easy to have control over recipes versus storing them in a separate application.

Then they answer a listener question about refactoring murky legacy code.

315: Emotions Are A Pendulum

November 9th, 2021  |  41 mins 23 secs

Steph talks about starting a new project and identifying "focused" tests while Chris shares his latest strategy for managing flaky tests. They also ponder the squishy "it depends" side of software and respond to a listener question about testing all commits in a pull request.

314: Communication, Testing, and Accountability

October 26th, 2021  |  40 mins 55 secs

Chris regains several of his developer merit badges and embarks on a perilous CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) adventure. Steph shares highlights from Plucky, a management training course, including ways we can "click" and "break apart" from our current role, and how to have hard conversations.

They also discuss how software development processes change at different team sizes, processes that break down as teams grow, and processes that are resilient at any team size.

313: Forty-Seven Percent

October 19th, 2021  |  42 mins 5 secs

Steph talks about binging a few Things Worth Learning podcast episodes and particularly enjoyed an episode that featured one of thoughtbot's design directors, Sameera Kapila. Sam shared her expertise about management and inclusion, and Steph shares her favorite parts.

Chris shares the story of a surprising error and the resulting journey through database transactions and Sidekiq that eventually resolved the issue. He also shares some follow up on the broken build and the merging process changes they introduced (spoiler, the process changes have been rolled back).

312: Spooky Stories

October 12th, 2021  |  38 mins 50 secs

Chris evaluates the pros and cons between using Sidekiq or Active Job with Sidekiq. He sees exceptions everywhere.

Steph talks about an SSL error that she encountered recently. It's officially spooky season, y'all!

311: Marketing Matters

October 5th, 2021  |  37 mins 37 secs

Longtime listener and friend of the show, Gio Lodi, released a book y'all should check out and Chris and Steph ruminate on a listener question about tension around marketing in open-source.

310: Schedule Shut Down, Complete

September 28th, 2021  |  39 mins 16 secs

Chris talks feature flags featuring Flipper (Say that 3x fast!), and Steph talks reducing stress by a) having a work shutdown ritual and b) the fact that thoughtbot is experimenting with half-day Fridays. (Fri-yay?)

309: Naming the Change

September 21st, 2021  |  35 mins 28 secs

Steph talks about a new GitHub feature and Twitter account (@RubyCards) she's really excited about and Chris talks about his new job as a CTO of a startup and shifting away from writing code regularly.

308: That’s Picante

September 14th, 2021  |  48 mins 5 secs

You know what really grinds Chris' gears? (Spoiler Alert: It's Single-Page Applications.)

Steph needs some consulting help. So much to do, so little time.

307: Walking Contradictions

September 7th, 2021  |  36 mins 56 secs

On this episode, Chris talks about testing external services and dissects a tweet on refinements for Result. Steph talks about thoughbot's recent improvement to their feature flag system.

306: If You Want To Go Far, Go Together

August 31st, 2021  |  45 mins 14 secs

In this episode, Steph and Chris talk about things they've changed their minds about over the course of their careers as software developers. Steph talks about as it turns out, arm chair rests are good, feature flags and comments are also good, she's changed her mind about how teams structure the work that each person is doing at once, and believes strongly in representation in the field.

Chris is not a fan up upgrading his operating system and when he first started out, he gravitated towards learning dynamic languages, and since then, much prefers functional languages, static typing or more broadly, static analysis. He also no longer believes in the 10x engineer, and also very much believes that URLs matter on the internet. So basically, don't call them single-page applications; call them client-side applications instead!

305: Burnout & Bugs

August 17th, 2021  |  50 mins 2 secs

This week Chris talks about Bifunctor optics and introduces an app he's been liking recently called CleanShot X, which is a replacement for the built-in screenshot utilities on OSX.

Steph talks about her experience using New Relic Browser Stats to troubleshoot a slow page and burnout. Who's feeling it? (Raise your hand.) How do we identify it? What do we do about it?

304: MEGA Crossover Episode (The Bike Shed x Rails with Jason x Remote Ruby x Ruby on Rails Podcast)

August 11th, 2021  |  34 mins 38 secs

This is the sweeps week episode, the epic crossover episode, the mega episode! We have a very special episode as Chris, and Steph teamed up with the hosts of three other podcasts to bring you one giant, mega Ruby episode!

In this episode, you'll hear from the hosts of Remote Ruby, Rails with Jason, and Brittany Martin, the host of the Ruby on Rails podcast. They cover the origins of their shows, their experiences as hosts, and why podcasting is so important in keeping the Ruby community thriving.

303: Dear Mr. Grumpy Goose

August 3rd, 2021  |  45 mins 45 secs

Chris gives a DB sessions update and talks bifunctors & command objects. Steph shares the coolness of a gem she's been using called after_party, and excitedly gushes about her new laptop. (Chris is hoping to hold off on replacing his until the end of the year and then they can compare!)

The two then answer a listener question on retrospectives and how they've seen productive ones run, while giving some of their own helpful opinions on dos and don'ts. They're talking to you, Grumpy Goose!