Steph and Chris are recording together! Like, in the same room, physically together.
Chris talks about slowly evolving the architecture in an app they're working on and settling on directory structure. Steph's still working on migrating unit tests over to RSpec.
They answer a listener question: "As senior-level developers, how do you set goals to ensure that you keep growing?"
This episode is brought to you by BuildPulse (https://buildpulse.io/bikeshed). Start your 14-day free trial of BuildPulse today.
Faking External Services In Tests With Adapters (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/faking-external-services-in-tests-with-adapters)
Testing Third-Party Interactions (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/testing-third-party-interactions)
Jen Dary - On Future Goals (https://www.beplucky.com/on-future-goals/)
Charity Majors - The Engineer Manager Pedulum (https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/)
Charity Majors Bike Shed Episode (https://www.bikeshed.fm/302)
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 is new in my world? Actually, this episode feels different. There's something different about it. I can't quite put my finger on it. I think it may be that we're actually physically in the same room recording for the first time in two years and a little bit more, which is wild.
STEPH: I can't believe it's been that long. I feel like it wasn't that long ago that we were in The Bike Shed...oh, I said The Bike Shed studio. I'm being very biased. Our recording studio [laughs] is the more proper description for it. Yeah, two and a half years. And we tried to make this happen a couple of months ago when I was visiting Boston, and then it just didn't work out. But today, we made it.
CHRIS: Today, we made it. Here we are. So hopefully, the audio sounds great, and we get all that more richness in conversation because of the physical in-person manner. We're trying it out. It'll be fun. But let's see, to the normal tech talk and nonsense, what's new in my world? So we've been slowly evolving the architecture in the app that we're working on. And we settled on something that I kind of like, so I wanted to talk about it, directory structure, probably the most interesting topic in the world. I think there's some good stuff in here.
So we have the normal stuff. There are app models, app controllers, all those; those make sense. We have app jobs which right now, I would say, is in a state of flux. We're in the sad place where some things are application records, and some things are Sidekiq workers. We have made the decision to consolidate everything onto Sidekiq workers, which is just strictly more powerful as to the direction we're going to go. But for right now, I'm not super happy with the state of app jobs, but whatever, we have that.
But the things that I like so we have app commands; I've talked about app commands before. Those are command objects. They use dry-rb do notation, and they allow us to sequence a bunch of things that all may fail, and we can process them all in a much more reasonable way. It's been really interesting exploring that, building on it, introducing it to new developers who haven't worked in that mode before. And everyone who's come into the project has both picked it up very quickly and enjoyed it, and found it to be a nice expressive mode. So app commands very happy with that.
App queries is another one that we have. We've talked about this before, query objects. I know we're a big fan. [laughs] I got a golf clap across the room here, which I could see live in person. It was amazing. I could feel the wind wafting across the room from the golf clap. [