Happy New Year (for real)! Chris and Steph both took some end-of-year time off to rest and recharge.
Steph talks about some books she enjoyed, recipes she tried, and trail-walking adventures with her dog, Utah. Chris' company is now in a good position to actually start hiring within the engineering team. He's excited about that and will probably delve into more around the hiring process in the coming weeks.
Since they aren't really big on New Year's Eve resolutions, Steph and Chris answer a listener question regarding toxic traits inspired by the listener question related to large pull requests and reflect on their own.
This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM (https://scoutapm.com/bikeshed). Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (http://www.matthaig.com/books/midnight-library/)
Tim Urban on Twitter (https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy/status/1367871165319049221)
How to Stop Time by Matt Haig (http://www.matthaig.com/how-to-stop-time/)
Do the Next Right Thing (https://daverupert.com/2020/09/do-the-next-right-thing/)
Debugging Why Your Specs Have Slowed Down (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/debugging-why-your-specs-have-slowed-down)
test-prof (https://github.com/test-prof/test-prof)
Tests Oddly Slow Might Be Bcrypt (https://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2012/11/12/tests-oddly-slow-might-be-bcrypt)
Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed!
Transcript:
STEPH: 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: And I'm Chris Toomey.
STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, hey, Chris, what's new in your world?
CHRIS: What's new in my world? Well, spoiler, we actually may have lied in a previous episode when we said, "Hey, happy New Year," because, for us, it was not actually the new year. But this, in fact, is the first episode of the new year that we're recording, that you're hearing. Anyway, this is enough breaking the fourth wall. Sorry, listener.
STEPH: [laughs]
CHRIS: Inside baseball, yadda, yadda. I'm doing great. First week back. I took some amount of vacation over the holidays, which was great, recharging, all those sorts of things. But now we're hitting the ground running.
And I'm actually really enjoying just getting back into the flow of things and, frankly, trying to ramp everything up, which we can probably talk about more in a moment. But how about you? How's your new year kicking off?
STEPH: I like how much we plan the episodes around when it's going to release, and we're very thoughtful about this is going to be released for the new year or around Christmas time, and happy holidays to everybody. And then we get back, and we're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we can totally drop the facade. [laughs] We're finally back from vacation. And this is us, and this is real.
CHRIS: Date math is so hard. It just drains me entirely to even try and figure out when episodes are going to actually land. And then when we get here, also, you know, I want to talk about the fact that there was vacation and things, and the realities of the work, and the ebb and flow of life. So here we are.
STEPH: Same. Yeah, I love it. Because I'm in a similar spot where I took two weeks off, which was phenomenal. That's actually sticking to one of the things we talked about, for one of the things I'm looking to do is where I take just more time off. And so having the two weeks was wonderful.
It was also really helpful because the client team that I'm working with also shut down around the end of the year. So they took ten days off as well. So I was like, well, that's a really good sign of encouragement that I should also just shut down since I can. So it's been delightful.
And I have very little tech stuff to share because I've just been doing lots of other fun things