The Bike Shed   /     406: Working Solo

Description

Joël got to do some pretty fancy single sign-on work. And when it came time to commit, he documented the ridiculous number of redirects to give people a sense of what was happening. Stephanie has been exploring Rails callbacks and Ruby debugging tools, using methods like save_callbacks and Kernel.caller, and creating a function call graph to better understand and manage complex code dependencies. Stephanie is also engaged in an independent project and seeking strategies to navigate the challenges of solo work. She and Joël explore how to find external support and combat isolation, consider ways to stimulate creativity, and obtain feedback on her work without a direct team. Additionally, they ponder succession planning to ensure project continuity after her involvement ends. They also reflect on the unique benefits of solo work, such as personal growth and flexibility. Stephanie's focus is on balancing the demands of working independently while maintaining a connected and sustainable professional approach. ASCII Sequence Diagram Creator (https://textart.io/sequence) Callback debugging methods (https://andycroll.com/ruby/find-list-debug-active-record-callbacks-in-the-console/) Kernel.caller (https://ruby-doc.org/core-3.0.2/Kernel.html#method-i-caller) Method.source_location (https://ruby-doc.org/core-3.0.2/Method.html#method-i-source_location) Building web apps by your lonesome by Jeremy Smith (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr871vmV4YM) Transcript: STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: I got to do something really fun this week, where I was doing some pretty fancy single sign-on work. And when it came time to commit, I wanted to document the kind of ridiculous number of redirects that happen and give people a sense of what was going on. And for my own self, what I had been doing is, I had done a sequence diagram that sort of shows, like, three different services that are all talking to each other and where they redirect to each other as they all go through the sequence to sign someone in. And I was like, how could I embed that in the commit message? Because I think it would be really useful context for someone trying to get an overview of what this commit is doing. And the answer, for me, was, can I get this sequence diagram in ASCII form somewhere? And I found a website that allows me to do this in ASCII art. It's the textart.io/sequence. And that allows me to create a sequence diagram that gets generated as ASCII art. I can copy-paste that into a commit message. And now anybody else who is like, "What is it that Joël is trying to do here?" can look at that and be like, "Oh, oh okay, so, we got these, like, four different places that are all talking to each other in this order. Now I see what's happening." STEPHANIE: That's super neat. I love the idea of having it directly in your commit message just because, you know, you don't have to go and find a graph elsewhere if you want to understand what's going on. It's right there for you, for future commit explorers [laughs] trying to understand what was going on in this snippet of time. JOËL: I try as much as possible to include those sorts of things directly in the commit message because you never know who's reading the commit. They might not have access to some sort of linked resource. So, if I were like, "Hey, go to our wiki and see this link," like, sure, that would be helpful, but maybe the person reading it doesn't have access to the wiki. Maybe they do have access, but they're not on the internet right now, and so they don't have access to the wiki. Maybe the wiki no longer exists, and that's a dead link. So, as much as possible, I try to embed context directly in my commit messages. STEPHANIE: That's really cool. And just another shout out to ASCII art, you know [laughs], persevering through all the times with our fancy tools. It's still going strong [laughs]. JOËL: Something about text, right? STEPHANIE: Exactly. I actually also have a diagram graph thing to share about what's new in my world that is kind of in a similar vein. Another thoughtboter and former guest on the show, Sara Jackson, shared in our dev channel about this really cool mural graph that she made to figure out what was going on with callbacks because she was working on, you know, understanding the lifecycle of this model and was running into, like, a lot of complex behavior. And she linked to a really neat blog post by Andy Croll, too, that included a little snippet sharing a few callback debugging methods that are provided by ActiveRecord. So, basically, you can have your model and just call double underscore callbacks. And it returns a list of all the callbacks that are defined for that model, and I thought that was really neat. So, I played around with it and copypastad [laughs] the snippet into my Rails console to figure out what's going on with basically, like, the god object of that that I work in. And the first issue I ran into was that it was undefined because it turns out that my application was on an older [laughs] version of Rails than that method was provided on. But, there are more specific methods for the types of callbacks. So, if you are looking specifically for all the callbacks related to a save or a destroy, I think it's save underscore callbacks, right? And that was available on the Rails version I was on, which was, I think, 4. But that was a lot of fun to play around with. And then, I ended up chatting with Sara afterwards about her process for creating the diagram after, you know, getting a list of all these methods. And I actually really liked this hybrid approach she took where, you know, she automated some parts but then also manually, like, went through and stepped through the code and, like, annotated notes for the methods as she was traversing them. And, you know, sometimes I think about, like, wow, like, it would be so cool if this graph just generated automatically, but I also think there is some value to actually creating it yourself. And there's some amount of, like, mental processing that happens when you do that, as opposed to, like, looking at a thing that was just, you know, generated afterwards, I think. JOËL: Do you know what kind of graph Sara generated? Was it some kind of, like, function call graph, or was it some other way of visualizing the callbacks? STEPHANIE: I think it was a function call graph, essentially. It even kind of showed a lot of the dependencies, too, because some of the callback functions were quite complicated and then would call other classes. So, there was a lot of, I think, hidden dependencies there that were unexpected, you know, when you think you're just going to create a regular old [laughs] record. JOËL: Yeah, I've been burned by unexpected callbacks or callbacks that do things that you wouldn't want in a particular context and then creating bad data or firing off external services that you really didn't want, and that can be an unpleasant surprise. I appreciate it when the framework offers debugging tools and methods kind of built-in, so these helpers, which I was not aware of. It's really cool because they allow you to kind of introspect and understand the code that you're going through. Do you have any others like that from Rails or Ruby that you find yourself using from time to time to help better understand the code? STEPHANIE: I think one I discovered recently was Kernel.caller, which gives you the stack trace wherever you are when executing. And that was really helpful when you're not raising an exception in certain places, and you need to figure out the flow of the code. I think that was definitely a later discovery. And I'm glad to have it in my back pocket now as something I can use in any kind of Ruby code. JOËL: That can, yeah, definitely be a really useful context to have even just in, like, an interactive console. You're like, wait a minute, where's this coming from? What is the call stack right now? STEPHANIE: Do you have any debugging tools or methods that you like to use that maybe are under the radar a little bit? JOËL: One that I really appreciate that's built into Ruby is the source location method on the method object, so Ruby has a method object. And so, when you're dealing with some sort of method and, like, maybe it got generated programmatically through metaprogramming, or maybe it's coming from a gem or something like that, and you're just like, where is this define? I'm trying to find it. If you're in your editor and you're doing stuff, maybe you could run some sort of search, or maybe it has some sort of keyword lookup where you can just find the definition of what's under your cursor. But if you're in an interactive console, you can create a method object for that method name and then call dot source location on it. And it will tell you, here's where it's defined. So, very handy in the right circumstances. STEPHANIE: Awesome. That's a great tip. JOËL: Of course, one of the most effective debugging tools is having a pair, having somebody else work with you, but that's not always something that you have. And you and I were talking recently about what it's like to work solo on a project. Because you're currently on a project, you're solo, at least from the thoughtbot side of things. You're embedding with a team, with a client. Are you working on kind of, like, a solo subtask within that, or are you still kind of embedding and interacting with the other teammates on a regular basis? STEPHANIE: Yeah. So, the past couple of weeks, I am working on more of a solo initiative. The other members of my client team are kind of ramping up on some other projects for this next quarter. And since my engagement is ending soon, I'm kind of left working on some more residual tasks by myself. And this is new for me, actually. I've not really worked in a super siloed by-myself kind of way before. I usually have at least one other dev who I'm, like, kind of partnering up with on a project, or an epic, or something like that. And so, I've had a very quiet week where no one is, you know, kind of, like, reaching out to me and asking me to review their code, or kind of checking in, or, you know, asking me to check in with them. And yeah, it's just a little bit different than how I think I like to normally work. I do like to work with other people. So, this week has been interesting in terms of just kind of being a more different experience where I'm not as actively collaborating with others. JOËL: What do you think are some of the biggest challenges of being kind of a little bit out in your own world? STEPHANIE: I think the challenges for me can definitely be the isolation [laughs], and also, what kind of goes hand in hand with that is when you need help, you know, who can you turn to? There's not as much of an obvious person on your team to reach out to, especially if they're, like, involved with other work, right? And that can be kind of tough. Some of the other ones that I've been thinking about have been, you know, on one hand, like, I get to make all of the decisions that I want [laughs], but sometimes you kind of get, like, really in your own head about it. And you're not in that space of, like, evaluating different solutions that you maybe might not think of. And I've been trying to figure out how to, like, mitigate some of that risk. JOËL: What are some of the strategies that you use to try to balance, like making good decisions when you're a bit more solo? Do you try to pull in someone from another team to talk ideas through? Do you have some sort of internal framework that you use to try to figure out things on your own? What does that look like? STEPHANIE: Yeah, luckily, the feature I'm working on is not a huge project. Well, if it were, I think then I wouldn't be alone on it. But, you know, sometimes you find yourself kind of tasked with one big thing for a while, and you are responsible for from start to finish, like all of the architectural decisions to implementation. But, at least for me, the scope is a little more narrow. And so, I don't feel as much of a need to get a lot of heads together because I at least feel somewhat confident in what I'm doing [laughs]. But I have found myself being a bit more compelled to kind of just verbalize what I'm doing more frequently, even to, like, myself in Slack sometimes. It's just like, I don't know who's reading this, but I'm just going to put it out there because maybe someone will see this and jump in and say, "Oh, like, interesting. Here's some other context that I have that maybe might steer you away from that," or even validating what I have to say, right? Like, "That sounds like a good idea," or, you know, just giving me an emoji reaction [laughs] is sometimes all I need. So, either in Slack or when we give our daily sync updates, I am, I think, offering a little more details than I might if I already was working with someone who I was more in touch with in an organic way. JOËL: And I think that's really powerful because it benefits you. Sort of by having to verbalize that or type it out, you, you know, gain a little bit of self-awareness about what you're trying to do, what the struggles are. But also, it allows anybody else who has potentially helpful information to jump in. I think that's not my natural tendency. When I'm on something solo, I tend to kind of, like, zoom in and focus in on something and, like, ignore a little bit of the world around me. Like, that's almost the time when I should look at overcommunicating. So, I think most times I've been on something solo, I sort of keep relearning this lesson of, like, you know, it's really important to constantly be talking out about the things that you're doing so that other people who are in a broader orbit around you can jump in where necessary. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think you actually kind of touched on one of the unexpected positives, at least for me. Something I wasn't expecting was how much time I would have to just be with my thoughts. You know, as I'm implementing or just in my head, I'm mulling over a problem. I have less frequent, not distractions necessarily, but interruptions. And sometimes, that has been a blessing because I am not in a spot where I have a lot of meetings right now. And so, I didn't realize how much generative thought happens when you are just kind of, like, doing your own thing for a little bit. I'm curious, for you, is that, like, a space that you enjoy being when you're working by yourself? And I guess, you know, you were saying that it's not your natural state to kind of, like, share what's going on until maybe you've fully formed an idea. JOËL: I think I often will regret not having shared out before everything is done. The times that I have done it, I've been like, that was a really positive experience; I should do that more. I think it's easy to sort of wait too long before sharing something out. And with so many things, it feels like there's only one more small task before it's done. Like, I just need to get this one test to go green, and then I can just put up a PR, and then we'll have a conversation about it. But then, oh, this other test broke, or this dependency isn't installing correctly. And before you know it, you've spent a whole day chasing down these things and still haven't talked. And so, I think if some of those things were discussed earlier, it would help both to help me feel more plugged in, but also, I think everybody else feels like they're getting a chance to participate as well. STEPHANIE: So, you mentioned, you know, obviously, there's, like, the time spent just arriving at the solution before sharing it out for feedback. But have you ever been in a position where there is no one to give you feedback and, like, not even a person to review your code? JOËL: That's really challenging. So, occasionally, if I'm working on a project, maybe it would be, like, very early-stage startup that maybe just has, like, a founder, and then I'm, like, the only technical person on the team, generally, what I'll try to do is to have some kind of review buddy within thoughtbot, so some other developer who's not staffed on my project but who has access to the code such that I can ask them to say, "Hey, can you just take a look at this and give me a code review?" That's the ideal situation. You know, some companies tend to lock things down a lot more if you're dealing with something like healthcare or something like that, where there might be some concerns around personal information, that kind of thing. But generally, in those cases, you can find somebody else within the company who will have some technical knowledge who can take a look at your code; at least, that's been my experience. STEPHANIE: Nice. I don't think I've quite been in that position before; again, I've really mostly worked within a team. But there was a conference talk I watched a little bit ago from Jeremy Smith, and it was called Building Web Apps by Your Lonesome. And he is a, like, one-man agency. And he talked about, you know, what it's like to be in that position where you pretty much don't have other people to collaborate with, to review your code. And one thing that he said that I really liked was shifting between writer and editor mode. If you are the person who has to kind of just decide when your code is good enough to merge, I like that transition between, like, okay, I just spent however many hours putting together the solution, and now I'm going to look at it with a critical eye. And sometimes I think that might require stepping away for a little bit or, like, revisiting it even the next day. That might be able to help see things that you weren't able to notice when you were in that writing mode. But I have found that distinction of roles really helpful because it does feel different when you're looking at it from those two lenses. JOËL: I've definitely done that for some, like, personal solo projects, where I'm participating in a game jam or something, and then I am the only person to review my code. And so, I will definitely, at that point, do a sort of, like, personal code review where I'll look at it. Maybe I'm doing PRs on GitHub, and I'm just merging. Maybe I'm just doing a git diff and looking at a commit in the command line on my own machine. But it is useful, even for myself, to sort of switch into that editor mode and just kind of look at everything there and say, "Is it in a good place?" Ideally, I think I do that before putting it out for a co-worker's review, so you kind of get both. But on a solo project, that has worked actually pretty well for me as well. STEPHANIE: One thing that you and I have talked about before in a different context, I think, when we have chatted about writing conference talks, is you are really great about focusing on the audience. And I was thinking about this in relation to working solo because even when you are working by yourself on a project, you're not writing the code for yourself, even though you might feel like [laughs] it in the moment. And I also kind of like the idea of asking, like, who are you building for? You know, can you ask the stakeholder or whoever has hired you, like, "Who will maintain this project in the future?" Because likely, it won't be you. Hopefully, it won't be you unless that's what you want to be doing. There's also what my friend coined the circus factor as opposed to the bus factor, which is, like, if you ran away to the circus tomorrow [laughs], you know, what is the impact that would have? And yeah, I think working solo, you know, some people might think, like, oh, that gives me free rein to just write the code exactly how I want to, how I want to read it. But I think there is something to be said about thinking about the future of who will be [inaudible 18:10] what you just happen to be working on right now. JOËL: And keep in mind that that person might be future you who might be coming back and be like, "What is going on here?" So, yeah, audience, I think, is a really important thing to keep in mind. I like to ask the question, if somebody else were looking at this code, and somebody else might be future me, what parts would they be confused by? If I was walking somebody else through the code for the first time, where would they kind of stop me through the walkthrough and be like, "Hey, why is this happening? What's the connection between these two things? I can see they're calling each other, but I don't know why." And that's where maybe you put in a comment. Maybe you find a better method or a class name to better explain what happens. Maybe you need to put more context in a commit message. There's all sorts of tools that we can use to better increase documentation. But having that pause and asking, "What will confuse someone?" is, I think, one of the more powerful techniques I do when I'm doing self-review. STEPHANIE: That's really cool. I'm glad you mentioned that, you know, it could also be future you. Because another thing that Jeremy says in this talk that I was just thinking about is the idea of optimizing for autonomy. And there's a lot to be said there because autonomy is like, yeah, like, you end up being the person who has to deal with problems [laughs], you know, if you run into something that you can't figure out, and, ideally, you'll have set yourself up for success. But I think working solo doesn't mean that you are in your own universe by yourself completely. And thinking about future, you, too, is kind of, like, part of the idea that the person in this moment writing code will change [laughs]. You'll get new information. Maybe, like, you'll find out about, like, who might be working on this in the future. And it is kind of a fine balance between making sure that you're set up to handle problems, but at the same time, maybe it's that, like, you set anyone up to be able to take it away from where you left it. JOËL: I want to take a few moments to sort of talk a little bit about what it means to be solo because I think there are sort of multiple different solo experiences that can be very different but also kind of converge on some similar themes. Maybe some of our listeners are listening to us talking and being like, "Well, I'm not at a consultancy, so this never happens to me." But you might find yourself in that position. And I think one that we mentioned was maybe you are embedded on a team, but you're kind of on a bit of a larger project where you're staffed solo. So, even though you are part of a larger team, you do feel like the initiative that you're on is siloed to you a little bit. Are there any others that you'd like to highlight? STEPHANIE: I think we also mentioned, you know, if you're a single developer working on an application because you might be the first technical hire, or a one-person agency, or something, that is different still, right? Because then your community is not even your company, but you have to kind of seek out external communities on social networks, or Slack groups, or whatever. I've also really been interested in the idea of developers kind of being able to be rotated with some kind of frequency where you don't end up being the one person who knows everything about a system and kind of becomes this dependency, right? But how can we make projects so, like, well functioning that, like, anyone can step in to do some work and then move on? If that's just for a couple of weeks, for a couple of months. Do you have any thoughts about working solo in that kind of situation where you're just stepping into something, maybe even to help someone out who's, you know, on vacation, or kind of had to take an unexpected leave? JOËL: Yeah, that can be challenging. And I think, ideally, as a team, if you want to make that easier, you have to set up some things both on a, like, social level and on a tactical level, so all the classic code quality things that you want in place, well structured, encapsulated code, good documentation, things like that. To a certain extent, even breaking down tasks into smaller sort of self-sufficient stories. I talk a lot about working incrementally. But it's a lot easier to say, "Hey, we've got this larger story. It was broken down into 20 smaller pieces that can all be shipped independently, and a colleague got three of them done and then had to go on leave for some reason. Can you step in and do stories 4 through 20?" As opposed to, "Hey, we have this big, amorphous story, and your colleague did some work, and it kind of is done. There's a branch with some code on it. They left a few notes or maybe sent us an email. But they had to go on leave unexpectedly. Can you figure it out and get it done?" The second scenario is going to be much more challenging. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I was just thinking about basically what you described, right? Where you might be working on your own, and you're like, well, I have this one ticket, and it's capturing everything, and I know all that's going on [laughs], even though it's not quite documented in the ticket. But it's, you know, maybe on my branch, or in my head, or, worst of all, on my local machine [laughs] without being pushed up. JOËL: I think maybe that's an anti-pattern of working solo, right? A lot of these disciplines that you build when you're working in a team, such as breaking up tickets into smaller pieces, it's easy to kind of get a little bit lazy with them when you're working solo and let your tickets inflate a little bit, or just have stuff thrown together in branches on your local machine, which then makes it harder if somebody does need to come in to either collaborate with you or take over from you if you ever need to step aside. STEPHANIE: Right. I have definitely seen some people, even just for their personal projects, use, like, a Trello board or some other project management tool. And I think that's really neat because then, you know, obviously, it's maybe just for their own, like, self-organization needs, but it's, like, that recognition that it's still a complicated project. And just because they're working by themselves doesn't mean that they can't utilize a tool for project management that is meant for teams or not even teams [laughs], you know, people use them for their own personal stuff all the time. But I really like that you can choose different levels of how much you're documenting for your future self or for anyone else. You had mentioned earlier kind of the difference between opening up a PR for you...you have to merge your branch into main or whatever versus just committing to main. And that distinction might seem, like, if you were just working on a personal project, like, oh, you know, why go through the extra step? But that can be really valuable in terms of just seeing, like, that history, right? JOËL: I think on solo projects, it can really depend on the way you tend to treat your commit history. I'm very careful with the history on the main branch where I want it to tell a sort of, like, cohesive story. Each commit is kind of, like, crafted a little bit. So, even when I'm working solo and I'm committing directly to master or to the main branch, I'm not just, like, throwing random things there. Ideally, every commit is green and builds and is, like, self-contained. If you don't have that discipline, then it might be particularly valuable to go through the, like, a branching system or a PR system. Or if you just want, like, a place to experiment, just throw a bunch of code together, a bunch of things break; nothing is cohesive, that's fine. It's all a work in progress until you finally get to your endpoint, and then you squash it down, or you merge it, or whatever your workflow is, and then it goes back into the main branch. So, I think that for myself, I have found that, oftentimes, I get not really a whole lot of extra value by going through a branching and PR system when it's, like, a truly solo project, you know, I'm building a side project, something like that. But that's not necessarily true for everyone. STEPHANIE: I think one thing I've seen in other people's solo projects is using a PR description and, you know, having the branching strategy, even just to jot down future improvements or future ideas that they might take with the work, especially if you haven't kind of, like, taken the next step of having that project management system that we talked about. But there is, like, a little more room for some extra context or to, like, leave yourself little notes that you might not want necessarily in your commit history but is maybe more related to this project being, like, a work in progress where it could go in a lot of different directions, and you're figuring that out by yourself. JOËL: Yeah, I mean, definitely something like a draft PR can be a great place to have work in progress and experiment and things like that. Something you were saying got me wondering what distinction you typically have between what you would put in a commit message versus something that you would put in a PR description, particularly given that if you've got, like, a single commit PR, GitHub will automatically make the commit message your PR message as well. STEPHANIE: This has actually evolved for me over time, where I used to be a lot more reliant on PR descriptions holding a lot of the context in terms of the decision-making. I think that was because I thought that, like, that was the most accessible place of information for reviewers to find out, you know, like, why certain decisions were made. And we were using, you know, PR templates and stuff like that. But now the team that I'm working on uses commit message templates that kind of contain the information I would have put in a PR, including, like, motivation for the change, any risks, even deployment steps. So, I have enjoyed that because I think it kind of shortens the feedback loop, too, right? You know, you might be committing more frequently but not, you know, opening a PR until later. And then you have to revisit your commits to figure out, like, okay, what did I do here? But if you are putting that thought as soon as you have to commit, that can save you a little bit of work down the line. What you said about GitHub just pulling your commit message into the PR description has been really nice because then I could just, like, open a thing [laughs]. And that has been nice. I think one aspect that I really like about the PR is leaving myself or reviewers, like, notes via comments, like, annotating things that should not necessarily live in a more permanent form. But maybe I will link to documentation for a method that I'm using that's a little less common or just add some more information about why I made this decision over another at a more granular level. JOËL: Yeah, I think that's probably one of the main things that I tend to put in a PR message rather than the commit message is any sort of extra information that will be helpful at review time. So, maybe it's a comment that says, "Hey, there is a lot of churn in this PR. You will probably have a better experience if you review this in split view versus unified view," things like that. So, kind of, like, meta comments about how you might want to approach reviewing this PR, as opposed to something that, let's say somebody is reviewing the history or is, like, browsing the code later, that wouldn't be relevant to them because they're not in a code review mindset. They're in a, like, code reading, code understanding mindset or looking at the message to say, "Why did you make the changes? I saw this weird method. Why did you introduce that?" So, hopefully, all of that context is in the commit message. STEPHANIE: Yeah, you reminded me of something else that I do, which is leave notes to my future self to revisit something if I'm like, oh, like, this was the first idea I had for the, you know, the way to solve this problem but, you know, note to self to look at this again tomorrow, just in case I have another idea or even to, like, you know, do some more research or ask someone about it and see if they have any other ideas for how to implement what I was aiming for. And I think that is the editor mode that we were talking about earlier that can be really valuable when you're working by yourself to spend a little extra time doing. You know, you are essentially optimizing for autonomy by being your own reviewer or your own critic in a healthy and positive way [laughs], hopefully. JOËL: Exactly. STEPHANIE: So, at the beginning of this episode, I mentioned that this is a new experience for me, and I'm not sure that I would love to do it all of the time. But I'm wondering, Joël, if there are any, you know, benefits or positives to working solo that you enjoy and find that you like to do just at least for a short or temporary amount of time. JOËL: I think one that I appreciate that's maybe a classic developer response is the heads downtime, the focus, being able to just sit down with a problem and a code editor and trying to figure it out. There are times where you really need to break out of that. You need somebody else to challenge you to get through a problem. But there are also just amazing times where you're in that flow state, and you're getting things done. And that can be really nice when you're solo. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I agree. I have been enjoying that, too. But I also definitely am looking forward to working with others on a team, so it's kind of fun having to get to experience both ways of operating. On that note, shall we wrap up? JOËL: Let's wrap up. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!! AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.

Summary

Joël got to do some pretty fancy single sign-on work. And when it came time to commit, he documented the ridiculous number of redirects to give people a sense of what was happening. Stephanie has been exploring Rails callbacks and Ruby debugging tools, using methods like save_callbacks and Kernel.caller, and creating a function call graph to better understand and manage complex code dependencies.

Stephanie is also engaged in an independent project and seeking strategies to navigate the challenges of solo work. She and Joël explore how to find external support and combat isolation, consider ways to stimulate creativity, and obtain feedback on her work without a direct team. Additionally, they ponder succession planning to ensure project continuity after her involvement ends. They also reflect on the unique benefits of solo work, such as personal growth and flexibility. Stephanie's focus is on balancing the demands of working independently while maintaining a connected and sustainable professional approach.


ASCII Sequence Diagram Creator
Callback debugging methods
Kernel.caller
Method.source_location
Building web apps by your lonesome by Jeremy Smith


Transcript:

STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn.

JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way.

STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world?

JOËL: I got to do something really fun this week, where I was doing some pretty fancy single sign-on work. And when it came time to commit, I wanted to document the kind of ridiculous number of redirects that happen and give people a sense of what was going on.

And for my own self, what I had been doing is, I had done a sequence diagram that sort of shows, like, three different services that are all talking to each other and where they redirect to each other as they all go through the sequence to sign someone in. And I was like, how could I embed that in the commit message? Because I think it would be really useful context for someone trying to get an overview of what this commit is doing.

And the answer, for me, was, can I get this sequence diagram in ASCII form somewhere? And I found a website that allows me to do this in ASCII art. It's the textart.io/sequence. And that allows me to create a sequence diagram that gets generated as ASCII art. I can copy-paste that into a commit message. And now anybody else who is like, "What is it that Joël is trying to do here?" can look at that and be like, "Oh, oh okay, so, we got these, like, four different places that are all talking to each other in this order. Now I see what's happening."

STEPHANIE: That's super neat. I love the idea of having it directly in your commit message just because, you know, you don't have to go and find a graph elsewhere if you want to understand what's going on. It's right there for you, for future commit explorers [laughs] trying to understand what was going on in this snippet of time.

JOËL: I try as much as possible to include those sorts of things directly in the commit message because you never know who's reading the commit. They might not have access to some sort of linked resource. So, if I were like, "Hey, go to our wiki and see this link," like, sure, that would be helpful, but maybe the person reading it doesn't have access to the wiki. Maybe they do have access, but they're not on the internet right now, and so they don't have access to the wiki. Maybe the wiki no longer exists, and that's a dead link. So, as much as possible, I try to embed context directly in my commit messages.

STEPHANIE: That's really cool. And just another shout out to ASCII art, you know [laughs], persevering through all the times with our fancy tools. It's still going strong [laughs].

JOËL: Something about text, right?

STEPHANIE: Exactly. I actually also have a diagram graph thing to share about what's new in my world that is kind of in a similar vein. Another thoughtboter and former guest on the show, Sara Jackson, shared in our dev channel about this really cool mural graph that she made to figure out what was going on with callbacks because she was working on, you know, understanding the lifecycle of this model and was running into, like, a lot of complex behavior.

And she linked to a really neat blog post by Andy Croll, too, that included a little snippet sharing a few callback debugging methods that are provided by ActiveRecord. So, basically, you can have your model and just call double underscore callbacks. And it returns a list of all the callbacks that are defined for that model, and I thought that was really neat. So, I played around with it and copypastad [laughs] the snippet into my Rails console to figure out what's going on with basically, like, the god object of that that I work in.

And the first issue I ran into was that it was undefined because it turns out that my application was on an older [laughs] version of Rails than that method was provided on. But, there are more specific methods for the types of callbacks. So, if you are looking specifically for all the callbacks related to a save or a destroy, I think it's save underscore callbacks, right? And that was available on the Rails version I was on, which was, I think, 4. But that was a lot of fun to play around with.

And then, I ended up chatting with Sara afterwards about her process for creating the diagram after, you know, getting a list of all these methods. And I actually really liked this hybrid approach she took where, you know, she automated some parts but then also manually, like, went through and stepped through the code and, like, annotated notes for the methods as she was traversing them.

And, you know, sometimes I think about, like, wow, like, it would be so cool if this graph just generated automatically, but I also think there is some value to actually creating it yourself. And there's some amount of, like, mental processing that happens when you do that, as opposed to, like, looking at a thing that was just, you know, generated afterwards, I think.

JOËL: Do you know what kind of graph Sara generated? Was it some kind of, like, function call graph, or was it some other way of visualizing the callbacks?

STEPHANIE: I think it was a function call graph, essentially. It even kind of showed a lot of the dependencies, too, because some of the callback functions were quite complicated and then would call other classes. So, there was a lot of, I think, hidden dependencies there that were unexpected, you know, when you think you're just going to create a regular old [laughs] record.

JOËL: Yeah, I've been burned by unexpected callbacks or callbacks that do things that you wouldn't want in a particular context and then creating bad data or firing off external services that you really didn't want, and that can be an unpleasant surprise. I appreciate it when the framework offers debugging tools and methods kind of built-in, so these helpers, which I was not aware of. It's really cool because they allow you to kind of introspect and understand the code that you're going through. Do you have any others like that from Rails or Ruby that you find yourself using from time to time to help better understand the code?

STEPHANIE: I think one I discovered recently was Kernel.caller, which gives you the stack trace wherever you are when executing. And that was really helpful when you're not raising an exception in certain places, and you need to figure out the flow of the code. I think that was definitely a later discovery. And I'm glad to have it in my back pocket now as something I can use in any kind of Ruby code.

JOËL: That can, yeah, definitely be a really useful context to have even just in, like, an interactive console. You're like, wait a minute, where's this coming from? What is the call stack right now?

STEPHANIE: Do you have any debugging tools or methods that you like to use that maybe are under the radar a little bit?

JOËL: One that I really appreciate that's built into Ruby is the source location method on the method object, so Ruby has a method object. And so, when you're dealing with some sort of method and, like, maybe it got generated programmatically through metaprogramming, or maybe it's coming from a gem or something like that, and you're just like, where is this define? I'm trying to find it.

If you're in your editor and you're doing stuff, maybe you could run some sort of search, or maybe it has some sort of keyword lookup where you can just find the definition of what's under your cursor. But if you're in an interactive console, you can create a method object for that method name and then call dot source location on it. And it will tell you, here's where it's defined. So, very handy in the right circumstances.

STEPHANIE: Awesome. That's a great tip.

JOËL: Of course, one of the most effective debugging tools is having a pair, having somebody else work with you, but that's not always something that you have. And you and I were talking recently about what it's like to work solo on a project. Because you're currently on a project, you're solo, at least from the thoughtbot side of things. You're embedding with a team, with a client. Are you working on kind of, like, a solo subtask within that, or are you still kind of embedding and interacting with the other teammates on a regular basis?

STEPHANIE: Yeah. So, the past couple of weeks, I am working on more of a solo initiative. The other members of my client team are kind of ramping up on some other projects for this next quarter. And since my engagement is ending soon, I'm kind of left working on some more residual tasks by myself. And this is new for me, actually. I've not really worked in a super siloed by-myself kind of way before. I usually have at least one other dev who I'm, like, kind of partnering up with on a project, or an epic, or something like that.

And so, I've had a very quiet week where no one is, you know, kind of, like, reaching out to me and asking me to review their code, or kind of checking in, or, you know, asking me to check in with them. And yeah, it's just a little bit different than how I think I like to normally work. I do like to work with other people. So, this week has been interesting in terms of just kind of being a more different experience where I'm not as actively collaborating with others.

JOËL: What do you think are some of the biggest challenges of being kind of a little bit out in your own world?

STEPHANIE: I think the challenges for me can definitely be the isolation [laughs], and also, what kind of goes hand in hand with that is when you need help, you know, who can you turn to? There's not as much of an obvious person on your team to reach out to, especially if they're, like, involved with other work, right? And that can be kind of tough.

Some of the other ones that I've been thinking about have been, you know, on one hand, like, I get to make all of the decisions that I want [laughs], but sometimes you kind of get, like, really in your own head about it. And you're not in that space of, like, evaluating different solutions that you maybe might not think of. And I've been trying to figure out how to, like, mitigate some of that risk.

JOËL: What are some of the strategies that you use to try to balance, like making good decisions when you're a bit more solo? Do you try to pull in someone from another team to talk ideas through? Do you have some sort of internal framework that you use to try to figure out things on your own? What does that look like?

STEPHANIE: Yeah, luckily, the feature I'm working on is not a huge project. Well, if it were, I think then I wouldn't be alone on it. But, you know, sometimes you find yourself kind of tasked with one big thing for a while, and you are responsible for from start to finish, like all of the architectural decisions to implementation. But, at least for me, the scope is a little more narrow. And so, I don't feel as much of a need to get a lot of heads together because I at least feel somewhat confident in what I'm doing [laughs].

But I have found myself being a bit more compelled to kind of just verbalize what I'm doing more frequently, even to, like, myself in Slack sometimes. It's just like, I don't know who's reading this, but I'm just going to put it out there because maybe someone will see this and jump in and say, "Oh, like, interesting. Here's some other context that I have that maybe might steer you away from that," or even validating what I have to say, right? Like, "That sounds like a good idea," or, you know, just giving me an emoji reaction [laughs] is sometimes all I need.

So, either in Slack or when we give our daily sync updates, I am, I think, offering a little more details than I might if I already was working with someone who I was more in touch with in an organic way.

JOËL: And I think that's really powerful because it benefits you. Sort of by having to verbalize that or type it out, you, you know, gain a little bit of self-awareness about what you're trying to do, what the struggles are. But also, it allows anybody else who has potentially helpful information to jump in. I think that's not my natural tendency. When I'm on something solo, I tend to kind of, like, zoom in and focus in on something and, like, ignore a little bit of the world around me. Like, that's almost the time when I should look at overcommunicating.

So, I think most times I've been on something solo, I sort of keep relearning this lesson of, like, you know, it's really important to constantly be talking out about the things that you're doing so that other people who are in a broader orbit around you can jump in where necessary.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think you actually kind of touched on one of the unexpected positives, at least for me. Something I wasn't expecting was how much time I would have to just be with my thoughts. You know, as I'm implementing or just in my head, I'm mulling over a problem. I have less frequent, not distractions necessarily, but interruptions. And sometimes, that has been a blessing because I am not in a spot where I have a lot of meetings right now. And so, I didn't realize how much generative thought happens when you are just kind of, like, doing your own thing for a little bit.

I'm curious, for you, is that, like, a space that you enjoy being when you're working by yourself? And I guess, you know, you were saying that it's not your natural state to kind of, like, share what's going on until maybe you've fully formed an idea.

JOËL: I think I often will regret not having shared out before everything is done. The times that I have done it, I've been like, that was a really positive experience; I should do that more. I think it's easy to sort of wait too long before sharing something out. And with so many things, it feels like there's only one more small task before it's done. Like, I just need to get this one test to go green, and then I can just put up a PR, and then we'll have a conversation about it. But then, oh, this other test broke, or this dependency isn't installing correctly.

And before you know it, you've spent a whole day chasing down these things and still haven't talked. And so, I think if some of those things were discussed earlier, it would help both to help me feel more plugged in, but also, I think everybody else feels like they're getting a chance to participate as well.

STEPHANIE: So, you mentioned, you know, obviously, there's, like, the time spent just arriving at the solution before sharing it out for feedback. But have you ever been in a position where there is no one to give you feedback and, like, not even a person to review your code?

JOËL: That's really challenging. So, occasionally, if I'm working on a project, maybe it would be, like, very early-stage startup that maybe just has, like, a founder, and then I'm, like, the only technical person on the team, generally, what I'll try to do is to have some kind of review buddy within thoughtbot, so some other developer who's not staffed on my project but who has access to the code such that I can ask them to say, "Hey, can you just take a look at this and give me a code review?" That's the ideal situation.

You know, some companies tend to lock things down a lot more if you're dealing with something like healthcare or something like that, where there might be some concerns around personal information, that kind of thing. But generally, in those cases, you can find somebody else within the company who will have some technical knowledge who can take a look at your code; at least, that's been my experience.

STEPHANIE: Nice. I don't think I've quite been in that position before; again, I've really mostly worked within a team. But there was a conference talk I watched a little bit ago from Jeremy Smith, and it was called Building Web Apps by Your Lonesome. And he is a, like, one-man agency. And he talked about, you know, what it's like to be in that position where you pretty much don't have other people to collaborate with, to review your code. And one thing that he said that I really liked was shifting between writer and editor mode.

If you are the person who has to kind of just decide when your code is good enough to merge, I like that transition between, like, okay, I just spent however many hours putting together the solution, and now I'm going to look at it with a critical eye. And sometimes I think that might require stepping away for a little bit or, like, revisiting it even the next day. That might be able to help see things that you weren't able to notice when you were in that writing mode. But I have found that distinction of roles really helpful because it does feel different when you're looking at it from those two lenses.

JOËL: I've definitely done that for some, like, personal solo projects, where I'm participating in a game jam or something, and then I am the only person to review my code. And so, I will definitely, at that point, do a sort of, like, personal code review where I'll look at it. Maybe I'm doing PRs on GitHub, and I'm just merging. Maybe I'm just doing a git diff and looking at a commit in the command line on my own machine.

But it is useful, even for myself, to sort of switch into that editor mode and just kind of look at everything there and say, "Is it in a good place?" Ideally, I think I do that before putting it out for a co-worker's review, so you kind of get both. But on a solo project, that has worked actually pretty well for me as well.

STEPHANIE: One thing that you and I have talked about before in a different context, I think, when we have chatted about writing conference talks, is you are really great about focusing on the audience. And I was thinking about this in relation to working solo because even when you are working by yourself on a project, you're not writing the code for yourself, even though you might feel like [laughs] it in the moment.

And I also kind of like the idea of asking, like, who are you building for? You know, can you ask the stakeholder or whoever has hired you, like, "Who will maintain this project in the future?" Because likely, it won't be you. Hopefully, it won't be you unless that's what you want to be doing.

There's also what my friend coined the circus factor as opposed to the bus factor, which is, like, if you ran away to the circus tomorrow [laughs], you know, what is the impact that would have? And yeah, I think working solo, you know, some people might think, like, oh, that gives me free rein to just write the code exactly how I want to, how I want to read it. But I think there is something to be said about thinking about the future of who will be [inaudible 18:10] what you just happen to be working on right now.

JOËL: And keep in mind that that person might be future you who might be coming back and be like, "What is going on here?" So, yeah, audience, I think, is a really important thing to keep in mind. I like to ask the question, if somebody else were looking at this code, and somebody else might be future me, what parts would they be confused by? If I was walking somebody else through the code for the first time, where would they kind of stop me through the walkthrough and be like, "Hey, why is this happening? What's the connection between these two things? I can see they're calling each other, but I don't know why."

And that's where maybe you put in a comment. Maybe you find a better method or a class name to better explain what happens. Maybe you need to put more context in a commit message. There's all sorts of tools that we can use to better increase documentation. But having that pause and asking, "What will confuse someone?" is, I think, one of the more powerful techniques I do when I'm doing self-review.

STEPHANIE: That's really cool. I'm glad you mentioned that, you know, it could also be future you. Because another thing that Jeremy says in this talk that I was just thinking about is the idea of optimizing for autonomy. And there's a lot to be said there because autonomy is like, yeah, like, you end up being the person who has to deal with problems [laughs], you know, if you run into something that you can't figure out, and, ideally, you'll have set yourself up for success.

But I think working solo doesn't mean that you are in your own universe by yourself completely. And thinking about future, you, too, is kind of, like, part of the idea that the person in this moment writing code will change [laughs]. You'll get new information. Maybe, like, you'll find out about, like, who might be working on this in the future. And it is kind of a fine balance between making sure that you're set up to handle problems, but at the same time, maybe it's that, like, you set anyone up to be able to take it away from where you left it.

JOËL: I want to take a few moments to sort of talk a little bit about what it means to be solo because I think there are sort of multiple different solo experiences that can be very different but also kind of converge on some similar themes. Maybe some of our listeners are listening to us talking and being like, "Well, I'm not at a consultancy, so this never happens to me." But you might find yourself in that position.

And I think one that we mentioned was maybe you are embedded on a team, but you're kind of on a bit of a larger project where you're staffed solo. So, even though you are part of a larger team, you do feel like the initiative that you're on is siloed to you a little bit. Are there any others that you'd like to highlight?

STEPHANIE: I think we also mentioned, you know, if you're a single developer working on an application because you might be the first technical hire, or a one-person agency, or something, that is different still, right? Because then your community is not even your company, but you have to kind of seek out external communities on social networks, or Slack groups, or whatever.

I've also really been interested in the idea of developers kind of being able to be rotated with some kind of frequency where you don't end up being the one person who knows everything about a system and kind of becomes this dependency, right? But how can we make projects so, like, well functioning that, like, anyone can step in to do some work and then move on? If that's just for a couple of weeks, for a couple of months. Do you have any thoughts about working solo in that kind of situation where you're just stepping into something, maybe even to help someone out who's, you know, on vacation, or kind of had to take an unexpected leave?

JOËL: Yeah, that can be challenging. And I think, ideally, as a team, if you want to make that easier, you have to set up some things both on a, like, social level and on a tactical level, so all the classic code quality things that you want in place, well structured, encapsulated code, good documentation, things like that. To a certain extent, even breaking down tasks into smaller sort of self-sufficient stories. I talk a lot about working incrementally.

But it's a lot easier to say, "Hey, we've got this larger story. It was broken down into 20 smaller pieces that can all be shipped independently, and a colleague got three of them done and then had to go on leave for some reason. Can you step in and do stories 4 through 20?" As opposed to, "Hey, we have this big, amorphous story, and your colleague did some work, and it kind of is done. There's a branch with some code on it. They left a few notes or maybe sent us an email. But they had to go on leave unexpectedly. Can you figure it out and get it done?" The second scenario is going to be much more challenging.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, I was just thinking about basically what you described, right? Where you might be working on your own, and you're like, well, I have this one ticket, and it's capturing everything, and I know all that's going on [laughs], even though it's not quite documented in the ticket. But it's, you know, maybe on my branch, or in my head, or, worst of all, on my local machine [laughs] without being pushed up.

JOËL: I think maybe that's an anti-pattern of working solo, right? A lot of these disciplines that you build when you're working in a team, such as breaking up tickets into smaller pieces, it's easy to kind of get a little bit lazy with them when you're working solo and let your tickets inflate a little bit, or just have stuff thrown together in branches on your local machine, which then makes it harder if somebody does need to come in to either collaborate with you or take over from you if you ever need to step aside.

STEPHANIE: Right. I have definitely seen some people, even just for their personal projects, use, like, a Trello board or some other project management tool. And I think that's really neat because then, you know, obviously, it's maybe just for their own, like, self-organization needs, but it's, like, that recognition that it's still a complicated project. And just because they're working by themselves doesn't mean that they can't utilize a tool for project management that is meant for teams or not even teams [laughs], you know, people use them for their own personal stuff all the time.

But I really like that you can choose different levels of how much you're documenting for your future self or for anyone else. You had mentioned earlier kind of the difference between opening up a PR for you...you have to merge your branch into main or whatever versus just committing to main. And that distinction might seem, like, if you were just working on a personal project, like, oh, you know, why go through the extra step? But that can be really valuable in terms of just seeing, like, that history, right?

JOËL: I think on solo projects, it can really depend on the way you tend to treat your commit history. I'm very careful with the history on the main branch where I want it to tell a sort of, like, cohesive story. Each commit is kind of, like, crafted a little bit. So, even when I'm working solo and I'm committing directly to master or to the main branch, I'm not just, like, throwing random things there. Ideally, every commit is green and builds and is, like, self-contained.

If you don't have that discipline, then it might be particularly valuable to go through the, like, a branching system or a PR system. Or if you just want, like, a place to experiment, just throw a bunch of code together, a bunch of things break; nothing is cohesive, that's fine. It's all a work in progress until you finally get to your endpoint, and then you squash it down, or you merge it, or whatever your workflow is, and then it goes back into the main branch.

So, I think that for myself, I have found that, oftentimes, I get not really a whole lot of extra value by going through a branching and PR system when it's, like, a truly solo project, you know, I'm building a side project, something like that. But that's not necessarily true for everyone.

STEPHANIE: I think one thing I've seen in other people's solo projects is using a PR description and, you know, having the branching strategy, even just to jot down future improvements or future ideas that they might take with the work, especially if you haven't kind of, like, taken the next step of having that project management system that we talked about. But there is, like, a little more room for some extra context or to, like, leave yourself little notes that you might not want necessarily in your commit history but is maybe more related to this project being, like, a work in progress where it could go in a lot of different directions, and you're figuring that out by yourself.

JOËL: Yeah, I mean, definitely something like a draft PR can be a great place to have work in progress and experiment and things like that. Something you were saying got me wondering what distinction you typically have between what you would put in a commit message versus something that you would put in a PR description, particularly given that if you've got, like, a single commit PR, GitHub will automatically make the commit message your PR message as well.

STEPHANIE: This has actually evolved for me over time, where I used to be a lot more reliant on PR descriptions holding a lot of the context in terms of the decision-making. I think that was because I thought that, like, that was the most accessible place of information for reviewers to find out, you know, like, why certain decisions were made. And we were using, you know, PR templates and stuff like that.

But now the team that I'm working on uses commit message templates that kind of contain the information I would have put in a PR, including, like, motivation for the change, any risks, even deployment steps. So, I have enjoyed that because I think it kind of shortens the feedback loop, too, right? You know, you might be committing more frequently but not, you know, opening a PR until later. And then you have to revisit your commits to figure out, like, okay, what did I do here? But if you are putting that thought as soon as you have to commit, that can save you a little bit of work down the line.

What you said about GitHub just pulling your commit message into the PR description has been really nice because then I could just, like, open a thing [laughs]. And that has been nice.

I think one aspect that I really like about the PR is leaving myself or reviewers, like, notes via comments, like, annotating things that should not necessarily live in a more permanent form. But maybe I will link to documentation for a method that I'm using that's a little less common or just add some more information about why I made this decision over another at a more granular level.

JOËL: Yeah, I think that's probably one of the main things that I tend to put in a PR message rather than the commit message is any sort of extra information that will be helpful at review time. So, maybe it's a comment that says, "Hey, there is a lot of churn in this PR. You will probably have a better experience if you review this in split view versus unified view," things like that.

So, kind of, like, meta comments about how you might want to approach reviewing this PR, as opposed to something that, let's say somebody is reviewing the history or is, like, browsing the code later, that wouldn't be relevant to them because they're not in a code review mindset. They're in a, like, code reading, code understanding mindset or looking at the message to say, "Why did you make the changes? I saw this weird method. Why did you introduce that?" So, hopefully, all of that context is in the commit message.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, you reminded me of something else that I do, which is leave notes to my future self to revisit something if I'm like, oh, like, this was the first idea I had for the, you know, the way to solve this problem but, you know, note to self to look at this again tomorrow, just in case I have another idea or even to, like, you know, do some more research or ask someone about it and see if they have any other ideas for how to implement what I was aiming for.

And I think that is the editor mode that we were talking about earlier that can be really valuable when you're working by yourself to spend a little extra time doing. You know, you are essentially optimizing for autonomy by being your own reviewer or your own critic in a healthy and positive way [laughs], hopefully.

JOËL: Exactly.

STEPHANIE: So, at the beginning of this episode, I mentioned that this is a new experience for me, and I'm not sure that I would love to do it all of the time. But I'm wondering, Joël, if there are any, you know, benefits or positives to working solo that you enjoy and find that you like to do just at least for a short or temporary amount of time.

JOËL: I think one that I appreciate that's maybe a classic developer response is the heads downtime, the focus, being able to just sit down with a problem and a code editor and trying to figure it out. There are times where you really need to break out of that. You need somebody else to challenge you to get through a problem. But there are also just amazing times where you're in that flow state, and you're getting things done. And that can be really nice when you're solo.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, I agree. I have been enjoying that, too. But I also definitely am looking forward to working with others on a team, so it's kind of fun having to get to experience both ways of operating.

On that note, shall we wrap up?

JOËL: Let's wrap up.

STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm.

JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore.

STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show.

JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter.

STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email.

JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week.

ALL: Byeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!

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Subtitle
Joël got to do some pretty fancy single sign-on work. And when it came time to commit, he documented the ridiculous number of redirects to give people a sense of what was happening. Stephanie has been exploring Rails callbacks and Ruby debugging tools,
Duration
32:27
Publishing date
2023-11-14 00:15
Link
https://www.bikeshed.fm/406
Contributors
  thoughtbot
author  
Enclosures
https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/167c01a1-0eb9-4640-b488-c2f6d6866650/d6b25191-e19d-4954-80b4-e21c63a40700.mp3
audio/mpeg

Shownotes

Joël got to do some pretty fancy single sign-on work. And when it came time to commit, he documented the ridiculous number of redirects to give people a sense of what was happening. Stephanie has been exploring Rails callbacks and Ruby debugging tools, using methods like save_callbacks and Kernel.caller, and creating a function call graph to better understand and manage complex code dependencies.

Stephanie is also engaged in an independent project and seeking strategies to navigate the challenges of solo work. She and Joël explore how to find external support and combat isolation, consider ways to stimulate creativity, and obtain feedback on her work without a direct team. Additionally, they ponder succession planning to ensure project continuity after her involvement ends. They also reflect on the unique benefits of solo work, such as personal growth and flexibility. Stephanie's focus is on balancing the demands of working independently while maintaining a connected and sustainable professional approach.


ASCII Sequence Diagram Creator
Callback debugging methods
Kernel.caller
Method.source_location
Building web apps by your lonesome by Jeremy Smith


Transcript:

STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn.

JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way.

STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world?

JOËL: I got to do something really fun this week, where I was doing some pretty fancy single sign-on work. And when it came time to commit, I wanted to document the kind of ridiculous number of redirects that happen and give people a sense of what was going on.

And for my own self, what I had been doing is, I had done a sequence diagram that sort of shows, like, three different services that are all talking to each other and where they redirect to each other as they all go through the sequence to sign someone in. And I was like, how could I embed that in the commit message? Because I think it would be really useful context for someone trying to get an overview of what this commit is doing.

And the answer, for me, was, can I get this sequence diagram in ASCII form somewhere? And I found a website that allows me to do this in ASCII art. It's the textart.io/sequence. And that allows me to create a sequence diagram that gets generated as ASCII art. I can copy-paste that into a commit message. And now anybody else who is like, "What is it that Joël is trying to do here?" can look at that and be like, "Oh, oh okay, so, we got these, like, four different places that are all talking to each other in this order. Now I see what's happening."

STEPHANIE: That's super neat. I love the idea of having it directly in your commit message just because, you know, you don't have to go and find a graph elsewhere if you want to understand what's going on. It's right there for you, for future commit explorers [laughs] trying to understand what was going on in this snippet of time.

JOËL: I try as much as possible to include those sorts of things directly in the commit message because you never know who's reading the commit. They might not have access to some sort of linked resource. So, if I were like, "Hey, go to our wiki and see this link," like, sure, that would be helpful, but maybe the person reading it doesn't have access to the wiki. Maybe they do have access, but they're not on the internet right now, and so they don't have access to the wiki. Maybe the wiki no longer exists, and that's a dead link. So, as much as possible, I try to embed context directly in my commit messages.

STEPHANIE: That's really cool. And just another shout out to ASCII art, you know [laughs], persevering through all the times with our fancy tools. It's still going strong [laughs].

JOËL: Something about text, right?

STEPHANIE: Exactly. I actually also have a diagram graph thing to share about what's new in my world that is kind of in a similar vein. Another thoughtboter and former guest on the show, Sara Jackson, shared in our dev channel about this really cool mural graph that she made to figure out what was going on with callbacks because she was working on, you know, understanding the lifecycle of this model and was running into, like, a lot of complex behavior.

And she linked to a really neat blog post by Andy Croll, too, that included a little snippet sharing a few callback debugging methods that are provided by ActiveRecord. So, basically, you can have your model and just call double underscore callbacks. And it returns a list of all the callbacks that are defined for that model, and I thought that was really neat. So, I played around with it and copypastad [laughs] the snippet into my Rails console to figure out what's going on with basically, like, the god object of that that I work in.

And the first issue I ran into was that it was undefined because it turns out that my application was on an older [laughs] version of Rails than that method was provided on. But, there are more specific methods for the types of callbacks. So, if you are looking specifically for all the callbacks related to a save or a destroy, I think it's save underscore callbacks, right? And that was available on the Rails version I was on, which was, I think, 4. But that was a lot of fun to play around with.

And then, I ended up chatting with Sara afterwards about her process for creating the diagram after, you know, getting a list of all these methods. And I actually really liked this hybrid approach she took where, you know, she automated some parts but then also manually, like, went through and stepped through the code and, like, annotated notes for the methods as she was traversing them.

And, you know, sometimes I think about, like, wow, like, it would be so cool if this graph just generated automatically, but I also think there is some value to actually creating it yourself. And there's some amount of, like, mental processing that happens when you do that, as opposed to, like, looking at a thing that was just, you know, generated afterwards, I think.

JOËL: Do you know what kind of graph Sara generated? Was it some kind of, like, function call graph, or was it some other way of visualizing the callbacks?

STEPHANIE: I think it was a function call graph, essentially. It even kind of showed a lot of the dependencies, too, because some of the callback functions were quite complicated and then would call other classes. So, there was a lot of, I think, hidden dependencies there that were unexpected, you know, when you think you're just going to create a regular old [laughs] record.

JOËL: Yeah, I've been burned by unexpected callbacks or callbacks that do things that you wouldn't want in a particular context and then creating bad data or firing off external services that you really didn't want, and that can be an unpleasant surprise. I appreciate it when the framework offers debugging tools and methods kind of built-in, so these helpers, which I was not aware of. It's really cool because they allow you to kind of introspect and understand the code that you're going through. Do you have any others like that from Rails or Ruby that you find yourself using from time to time to help better understand the code?

STEPHANIE: I think one I discovered recently was Kernel.caller, which gives you the stack trace wherever you are when executing. And that was really helpful when you're not raising an exception in certain places, and you need to figure out the flow of the code. I think that was definitely a later discovery. And I'm glad to have it in my back pocket now as something I can use in any kind of Ruby code.

JOËL: That can, yeah, definitely be a really useful context to have even just in, like, an interactive console. You're like, wait a minute, where's this coming from? What is the call stack right now?

STEPHANIE: Do you have any debugging tools or methods that you like to use that maybe are under the radar a little bit?

JOËL: One that I really appreciate that's built into Ruby is the source location method on the method object, so Ruby has a method object. And so, when you're dealing with some sort of method and, like, maybe it got generated programmatically through metaprogramming, or maybe it's coming from a gem or something like that, and you're just like, where is this define? I'm trying to find it.

If you're in your editor and you're doing stuff, maybe you could run some sort of search, or maybe it has some sort of keyword lookup where you can just find the definition of what's under your cursor. But if you're in an interactive console, you can create a method object for that method name and then call dot source location on it. And it will tell you, here's where it's defined. So, very handy in the right circumstances.

STEPHANIE: Awesome. That's a great tip.

JOËL: Of course, one of the most effective debugging tools is having a pair, having somebody else work with you, but that's not always something that you have. And you and I were talking recently about what it's like to work solo on a project. Because you're currently on a project, you're solo, at least from the thoughtbot side of things. You're embedding with a team, with a client. Are you working on kind of, like, a solo subtask within that, or are you still kind of embedding and interacting with the other teammates on a regular basis?

STEPHANIE: Yeah. So, the past couple of weeks, I am working on more of a solo initiative. The other members of my client team are kind of ramping up on some other projects for this next quarter. And since my engagement is ending soon, I'm kind of left working on some more residual tasks by myself. And this is new for me, actually. I've not really worked in a super siloed by-myself kind of way before. I usually have at least one other dev who I'm, like, kind of partnering up with on a project, or an epic, or something like that.

And so, I've had a very quiet week where no one is, you know, kind of, like, reaching out to me and asking me to review their code, or kind of checking in, or, you know, asking me to check in with them. And yeah, it's just a little bit different than how I think I like to normally work. I do like to work with other people. So, this week has been interesting in terms of just kind of being a more different experience where I'm not as actively collaborating with others.

JOËL: What do you think are some of the biggest challenges of being kind of a little bit out in your own world?

STEPHANIE: I think the challenges for me can definitely be the isolation [laughs], and also, what kind of goes hand in hand with that is when you need help, you know, who can you turn to? There's not as much of an obvious person on your team to reach out to, especially if they're, like, involved with other work, right? And that can be kind of tough.

Some of the other ones that I've been thinking about have been, you know, on one hand, like, I get to make all of the decisions that I want [laughs], but sometimes you kind of get, like, really in your own head about it. And you're not in that space of, like, evaluating different solutions that you maybe might not think of. And I've been trying to figure out how to, like, mitigate some of that risk.

JOËL: What are some of the strategies that you use to try to balance, like making good decisions when you're a bit more solo? Do you try to pull in someone from another team to talk ideas through? Do you have some sort of internal framework that you use to try to figure out things on your own? What does that look like?

STEPHANIE: Yeah, luckily, the feature I'm working on is not a huge project. Well, if it were, I think then I wouldn't be alone on it. But, you know, sometimes you find yourself kind of tasked with one big thing for a while, and you are responsible for from start to finish, like all of the architectural decisions to implementation. But, at least for me, the scope is a little more narrow. And so, I don't feel as much of a need to get a lot of heads together because I at least feel somewhat confident in what I'm doing [laughs].

But I have found myself being a bit more compelled to kind of just verbalize what I'm doing more frequently, even to, like, myself in Slack sometimes. It's just like, I don't know who's reading this, but I'm just going to put it out there because maybe someone will see this and jump in and say, "Oh, like, interesting. Here's some other context that I have that maybe might steer you away from that," or even validating what I have to say, right? Like, "That sounds like a good idea," or, you know, just giving me an emoji reaction [laughs] is sometimes all I need.

So, either in Slack or when we give our daily sync updates, I am, I think, offering a little more details than I might if I already was working with someone who I was more in touch with in an organic way.

JOËL: And I think that's really powerful because it benefits you. Sort of by having to verbalize that or type it out, you, you know, gain a little bit of self-awareness about what you're trying to do, what the struggles are. But also, it allows anybody else who has potentially helpful information to jump in. I think that's not my natural tendency. When I'm on something solo, I tend to kind of, like, zoom in and focus in on something and, like, ignore a little bit of the world around me. Like, that's almost the time when I should look at overcommunicating.

So, I think most times I've been on something solo, I sort of keep relearning this lesson of, like, you know, it's really important to constantly be talking out about the things that you're doing so that other people who are in a broader orbit around you can jump in where necessary.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think you actually kind of touched on one of the unexpected positives, at least for me. Something I wasn't expecting was how much time I would have to just be with my thoughts. You know, as I'm implementing or just in my head, I'm mulling over a problem. I have less frequent, not distractions necessarily, but interruptions. And sometimes, that has been a blessing because I am not in a spot where I have a lot of meetings right now. And so, I didn't realize how much generative thought happens when you are just kind of, like, doing your own thing for a little bit.

I'm curious, for you, is that, like, a space that you enjoy being when you're working by yourself? And I guess, you know, you were saying that it's not your natural state to kind of, like, share what's going on until maybe you've fully formed an idea.

JOËL: I think I often will regret not having shared out before everything is done. The times that I have done it, I've been like, that was a really positive experience; I should do that more. I think it's easy to sort of wait too long before sharing something out. And with so many things, it feels like there's only one more small task before it's done. Like, I just need to get this one test to go green, and then I can just put up a PR, and then we'll have a conversation about it. But then, oh, this other test broke, or this dependency isn't installing correctly.

And before you know it, you've spent a whole day chasing down these things and still haven't talked. And so, I think if some of those things were discussed earlier, it would help both to help me feel more plugged in, but also, I think everybody else feels like they're getting a chance to participate as well.

STEPHANIE: So, you mentioned, you know, obviously, there's, like, the time spent just arriving at the solution before sharing it out for feedback. But have you ever been in a position where there is no one to give you feedback and, like, not even a person to review your code?

JOËL: That's really challenging. So, occasionally, if I'm working on a project, maybe it would be, like, very early-stage startup that maybe just has, like, a founder, and then I'm, like, the only technical person on the team, generally, what I'll try to do is to have some kind of review buddy within thoughtbot, so some other developer who's not staffed on my project but who has access to the code such that I can ask them to say, "Hey, can you just take a look at this and give me a code review?" That's the ideal situation.

You know, some companies tend to lock things down a lot more if you're dealing with something like healthcare or something like that, where there might be some concerns around personal information, that kind of thing. But generally, in those cases, you can find somebody else within the company who will have some technical knowledge who can take a look at your code; at least, that's been my experience.

STEPHANIE: Nice. I don't think I've quite been in that position before; again, I've really mostly worked within a team. But there was a conference talk I watched a little bit ago from Jeremy Smith, and it was called Building Web Apps by Your Lonesome. And he is a, like, one-man agency. And he talked about, you know, what it's like to be in that position where you pretty much don't have other people to collaborate with, to review your code. And one thing that he said that I really liked was shifting between writer and editor mode.

If you are the person who has to kind of just decide when your code is good enough to merge, I like that transition between, like, okay, I just spent however many hours putting together the solution, and now I'm going to look at it with a critical eye. And sometimes I think that might require stepping away for a little bit or, like, revisiting it even the next day. That might be able to help see things that you weren't able to notice when you were in that writing mode. But I have found that distinction of roles really helpful because it does feel different when you're looking at it from those two lenses.

JOËL: I've definitely done that for some, like, personal solo projects, where I'm participating in a game jam or something, and then I am the only person to review my code. And so, I will definitely, at that point, do a sort of, like, personal code review where I'll look at it. Maybe I'm doing PRs on GitHub, and I'm just merging. Maybe I'm just doing a git diff and looking at a commit in the command line on my own machine.

But it is useful, even for myself, to sort of switch into that editor mode and just kind of look at everything there and say, "Is it in a good place?" Ideally, I think I do that before putting it out for a co-worker's review, so you kind of get both. But on a solo project, that has worked actually pretty well for me as well.

STEPHANIE: One thing that you and I have talked about before in a different context, I think, when we have chatted about writing conference talks, is you are really great about focusing on the audience. And I was thinking about this in relation to working solo because even when you are working by yourself on a project, you're not writing the code for yourself, even though you might feel like [laughs] it in the moment.

And I also kind of like the idea of asking, like, who are you building for? You know, can you ask the stakeholder or whoever has hired you, like, "Who will maintain this project in the future?" Because likely, it won't be you. Hopefully, it won't be you unless that's what you want to be doing.

There's also what my friend coined the circus factor as opposed to the bus factor, which is, like, if you ran away to the circus tomorrow [laughs], you know, what is the impact that would have? And yeah, I think working solo, you know, some people might think, like, oh, that gives me free rein to just write the code exactly how I want to, how I want to read it. But I think there is something to be said about thinking about the future of who will be [inaudible 18:10] what you just happen to be working on right now.

JOËL: And keep in mind that that person might be future you who might be coming back and be like, "What is going on here?" So, yeah, audience, I think, is a really important thing to keep in mind. I like to ask the question, if somebody else were looking at this code, and somebody else might be future me, what parts would they be confused by? If I was walking somebody else through the code for the first time, where would they kind of stop me through the walkthrough and be like, "Hey, why is this happening? What's the connection between these two things? I can see they're calling each other, but I don't know why."

And that's where maybe you put in a comment. Maybe you find a better method or a class name to better explain what happens. Maybe you need to put more context in a commit message. There's all sorts of tools that we can use to better increase documentation. But having that pause and asking, "What will confuse someone?" is, I think, one of the more powerful techniques I do when I'm doing self-review.

STEPHANIE: That's really cool. I'm glad you mentioned that, you know, it could also be future you. Because another thing that Jeremy says in this talk that I was just thinking about is the idea of optimizing for autonomy. And there's a lot to be said there because autonomy is like, yeah, like, you end up being the person who has to deal with problems [laughs], you know, if you run into something that you can't figure out, and, ideally, you'll have set yourself up for success.

But I think working solo doesn't mean that you are in your own universe by yourself completely. And thinking about future, you, too, is kind of, like, part of the idea that the person in this moment writing code will change [laughs]. You'll get new information. Maybe, like, you'll find out about, like, who might be working on this in the future. And it is kind of a fine balance between making sure that you're set up to handle problems, but at the same time, maybe it's that, like, you set anyone up to be able to take it away from where you left it.

JOËL: I want to take a few moments to sort of talk a little bit about what it means to be solo because I think there are sort of multiple different solo experiences that can be very different but also kind of converge on some similar themes. Maybe some of our listeners are listening to us talking and being like, "Well, I'm not at a consultancy, so this never happens to me." But you might find yourself in that position.

And I think one that we mentioned was maybe you are embedded on a team, but you're kind of on a bit of a larger project where you're staffed solo. So, even though you are part of a larger team, you do feel like the initiative that you're on is siloed to you a little bit. Are there any others that you'd like to highlight?

STEPHANIE: I think we also mentioned, you know, if you're a single developer working on an application because you might be the first technical hire, or a one-person agency, or something, that is different still, right? Because then your community is not even your company, but you have to kind of seek out external communities on social networks, or Slack groups, or whatever.

I've also really been interested in the idea of developers kind of being able to be rotated with some kind of frequency where you don't end up being the one person who knows everything about a system and kind of becomes this dependency, right? But how can we make projects so, like, well functioning that, like, anyone can step in to do some work and then move on? If that's just for a couple of weeks, for a couple of months. Do you have any thoughts about working solo in that kind of situation where you're just stepping into something, maybe even to help someone out who's, you know, on vacation, or kind of had to take an unexpected leave?

JOËL: Yeah, that can be challenging. And I think, ideally, as a team, if you want to make that easier, you have to set up some things both on a, like, social level and on a tactical level, so all the classic code quality things that you want in place, well structured, encapsulated code, good documentation, things like that. To a certain extent, even breaking down tasks into smaller sort of self-sufficient stories. I talk a lot about working incrementally.

But it's a lot easier to say, "Hey, we've got this larger story. It was broken down into 20 smaller pieces that can all be shipped independently, and a colleague got three of them done and then had to go on leave for some reason. Can you step in and do stories 4 through 20?" As opposed to, "Hey, we have this big, amorphous story, and your colleague did some work, and it kind of is done. There's a branch with some code on it. They left a few notes or maybe sent us an email. But they had to go on leave unexpectedly. Can you figure it out and get it done?" The second scenario is going to be much more challenging.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, I was just thinking about basically what you described, right? Where you might be working on your own, and you're like, well, I have this one ticket, and it's capturing everything, and I know all that's going on [laughs], even though it's not quite documented in the ticket. But it's, you know, maybe on my branch, or in my head, or, worst of all, on my local machine [laughs] without being pushed up.

JOËL: I think maybe that's an anti-pattern of working solo, right? A lot of these disciplines that you build when you're working in a team, such as breaking up tickets into smaller pieces, it's easy to kind of get a little bit lazy with them when you're working solo and let your tickets inflate a little bit, or just have stuff thrown together in branches on your local machine, which then makes it harder if somebody does need to come in to either collaborate with you or take over from you if you ever need to step aside.

STEPHANIE: Right. I have definitely seen some people, even just for their personal projects, use, like, a Trello board or some other project management tool. And I think that's really neat because then, you know, obviously, it's maybe just for their own, like, self-organization needs, but it's, like, that recognition that it's still a complicated project. And just because they're working by themselves doesn't mean that they can't utilize a tool for project management that is meant for teams or not even teams [laughs], you know, people use them for their own personal stuff all the time.

But I really like that you can choose different levels of how much you're documenting for your future self or for anyone else. You had mentioned earlier kind of the difference between opening up a PR for you...you have to merge your branch into main or whatever versus just committing to main. And that distinction might seem, like, if you were just working on a personal project, like, oh, you know, why go through the extra step? But that can be really valuable in terms of just seeing, like, that history, right?

JOËL: I think on solo projects, it can really depend on the way you tend to treat your commit history. I'm very careful with the history on the main branch where I want it to tell a sort of, like, cohesive story. Each commit is kind of, like, crafted a little bit. So, even when I'm working solo and I'm committing directly to master or to the main branch, I'm not just, like, throwing random things there. Ideally, every commit is green and builds and is, like, self-contained.

If you don't have that discipline, then it might be particularly valuable to go through the, like, a branching system or a PR system. Or if you just want, like, a place to experiment, just throw a bunch of code together, a bunch of things break; nothing is cohesive, that's fine. It's all a work in progress until you finally get to your endpoint, and then you squash it down, or you merge it, or whatever your workflow is, and then it goes back into the main branch.

So, I think that for myself, I have found that, oftentimes, I get not really a whole lot of extra value by going through a branching and PR system when it's, like, a truly solo project, you know, I'm building a side project, something like that. But that's not necessarily true for everyone.

STEPHANIE: I think one thing I've seen in other people's solo projects is using a PR description and, you know, having the branching strategy, even just to jot down future improvements or future ideas that they might take with the work, especially if you haven't kind of, like, taken the next step of having that project management system that we talked about. But there is, like, a little more room for some extra context or to, like, leave yourself little notes that you might not want necessarily in your commit history but is maybe more related to this project being, like, a work in progress where it could go in a lot of different directions, and you're figuring that out by yourself.

JOËL: Yeah, I mean, definitely something like a draft PR can be a great place to have work in progress and experiment and things like that. Something you were saying got me wondering what distinction you typically have between what you would put in a commit message versus something that you would put in a PR description, particularly given that if you've got, like, a single commit PR, GitHub will automatically make the commit message your PR message as well.

STEPHANIE: This has actually evolved for me over time, where I used to be a lot more reliant on PR descriptions holding a lot of the context in terms of the decision-making. I think that was because I thought that, like, that was the most accessible place of information for reviewers to find out, you know, like, why certain decisions were made. And we were using, you know, PR templates and stuff like that.

But now the team that I'm working on uses commit message templates that kind of contain the information I would have put in a PR, including, like, motivation for the change, any risks, even deployment steps. So, I have enjoyed that because I think it kind of shortens the feedback loop, too, right? You know, you might be committing more frequently but not, you know, opening a PR until later. And then you have to revisit your commits to figure out, like, okay, what did I do here? But if you are putting that thought as soon as you have to commit, that can save you a little bit of work down the line.

What you said about GitHub just pulling your commit message into the PR description has been really nice because then I could just, like, open a thing [laughs]. And that has been nice.

I think one aspect that I really like about the PR is leaving myself or reviewers, like, notes via comments, like, annotating things that should not necessarily live in a more permanent form. But maybe I will link to documentation for a method that I'm using that's a little less common or just add some more information about why I made this decision over another at a more granular level.

JOËL: Yeah, I think that's probably one of the main things that I tend to put in a PR message rather than the commit message is any sort of extra information that will be helpful at review time. So, maybe it's a comment that says, "Hey, there is a lot of churn in this PR. You will probably have a better experience if you review this in split view versus unified view," things like that.

So, kind of, like, meta comments about how you might want to approach reviewing this PR, as opposed to something that, let's say somebody is reviewing the history or is, like, browsing the code later, that wouldn't be relevant to them because they're not in a code review mindset. They're in a, like, code reading, code understanding mindset or looking at the message to say, "Why did you make the changes? I saw this weird method. Why did you introduce that?" So, hopefully, all of that context is in the commit message.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, you reminded me of something else that I do, which is leave notes to my future self to revisit something if I'm like, oh, like, this was the first idea I had for the, you know, the way to solve this problem but, you know, note to self to look at this again tomorrow, just in case I have another idea or even to, like, you know, do some more research or ask someone about it and see if they have any other ideas for how to implement what I was aiming for.

And I think that is the editor mode that we were talking about earlier that can be really valuable when you're working by yourself to spend a little extra time doing. You know, you are essentially optimizing for autonomy by being your own reviewer or your own critic in a healthy and positive way [laughs], hopefully.

JOËL: Exactly.

STEPHANIE: So, at the beginning of this episode, I mentioned that this is a new experience for me, and I'm not sure that I would love to do it all of the time. But I'm wondering, Joël, if there are any, you know, benefits or positives to working solo that you enjoy and find that you like to do just at least for a short or temporary amount of time.

JOËL: I think one that I appreciate that's maybe a classic developer response is the heads downtime, the focus, being able to just sit down with a problem and a code editor and trying to figure it out. There are times where you really need to break out of that. You need somebody else to challenge you to get through a problem. But there are also just amazing times where you're in that flow state, and you're getting things done. And that can be really nice when you're solo.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, I agree. I have been enjoying that, too. But I also definitely am looking forward to working with others on a team, so it's kind of fun having to get to experience both ways of operating.

On that note, shall we wrap up?

JOËL: Let's wrap up.

STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm.

JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore.

STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show.

JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter.

STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email.

JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week.

ALL: Byeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!

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