On this week's episode, Chris and Steph share a speedy step to restart your rails server and chat about accessibility improvements and favorite a11y tools. They also dive into a tale of database switching and delight in a new Rails query method that returns orphaned records.
Restart Rails server via tmp/restart.txt (https://twitter.com/christoomey/status/1387799863929212931?s=20)
WebAIM: Constrast Checker (https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/)
IBM Equal Access Accessibility Checker (https://www.ibm.com/able/toolkit)
axe™ DevTools (https://www.deque.com/axe/browser-extensions/)
AccessLint (https://accesslint.com/)
Assistiv Labs (https://assistivlabs.com/)
An introduction to macOS Head Pointer (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/an-introduction-to-macos-head-pointer)
Rails date_select (https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/DateHelper.html#method-i-date_select)
Rails strong_migrations (https://github.com/ankane/strong_migrations)
Ruby RBS (https://github.com/ruby/rbs)
Sorbet - Ruby Type Checker (https://sorbet.org/)
Scout APM (https://scoutapm.com/)
Rails 6.1 adds query method missing to find orphan records (https://blog.saeloun.com/2020/01/21/rails-6-1-adds-query-method-missing-to-find-orphan-records.html)
Transcript:
STEPH: People put microphones in front of us. That is their fault, not ours. We just show up. Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari.
CHRIS: I'm Chris Toomey.
STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. Hey Chris, happy Friday.
CHRIS: Happy Friday.
STEPH: How's your week been?
CHRIS: It's been great. I did something that is wildly overdue, but I got a new chair and one day in. But it's also a very familiar chair because it's basically the same -- I think it's the same model as we had at the thoughtbot office. And it's nice to have a chair that is reasonable. And I think my old chair was maybe ten years old or something, deeply embarrassing and absurd like that for such a critical piece of infrastructure in my house.
STEPH: I mean, I guess depending on if it's a good chair. I don't know what the lifespan is of a good chair. [laughs]
CHRIS: I would not describe it as such.
STEPH: [laughs]
CHRIS: I think it was like $100 at Staples. It was a fine chair. It served me well for many years. I'm very slow and cautious with what I consider to be large-scale purchases. I hate the idea of having a thing that I've spent a bunch of money on, but I don't actually like. And these are very solvable problems. But I just tend to drag my feet and over-research and do all those sorts of things. And so finally I was just like, nope, we're going to get a chair, got a chair. Cool. Now I have a chair, and it's good. It's got all of the adjustments, which is what makes it very nice. I'd say Steelcase Leap is the model for anyone that's interested.
STEPH: That's funny. I tend to do the same thing. I tend to drag my feet until I get desperate enough that then I'm forced to make a decision and buy something. I do have an oddly specific question. Do you like chairs with or without the arms?
CHRIS: Oh, with the arms.
STEPH: Really?
CHRIS: Yeah.
STEPH: I am team, no arms.
CHRIS: Where do your arms go if there are no arms to put on the chair?
STEPH: They're always on my lap or on my keyboard. So I just don't rest them on the armrest.
CHRIS: Interesting. I feel like that would put -- I've definitely had small bouts of RSI strain fatigue in my forearms. And so I'm very purposeful with how I'm bracing my wrists. I have a little wrist rest that I put my hands on when I'm using my keyboard because the keyboard is slightly raised up because I have a nonsense mechanical keyboard, of course.
STEPH: Delightful, not nonsense.
CHRIS: Yeah, I love it. I would never trade that in, but I have to make it work and not actually sacrifice my body for a clackety keyboard. [chuckles] But yeah,