Mental models are metaphors that help us understand complex problems we work on. They can be a simplified roadmap over an infinite area of complexity.
How does one come up with mental models? How are they useful? Are they primarily a solo thing, or can they be used to communicate with the team? What happens when your model is inaccurate? Today, Joël is joined by Eebs Kobeissi, a Developer and Dev Manager at You Need a Budget, to discuss.
This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack.
Eebs on Twitter (https://twitter.com/EebsKobeissi)
You Need a Budget (https://www.youneedabudget.com/)
Skill floors and skill ceilings (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/who-is-empowered-by-your-design)
Transcript:
JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. And today, I'm joined by Eebs Kobeissi, a Developer and Dev Manager at You Need a Budget.
EEBS: Hi, Joël. It's really good to be here.
JOËL: And together, we're here to share a little bit about what we've learned along the way. So, Eebs, what's new in your world?
EEBS: Oh, a whole lot. I'm a new dad, so I'm getting to experience all those things. But in the developer world, I've recently picked up programming on an ESP32, which controls LED lights. And so I'm having fun lighting up my office.
JOËL: Is that like one of those little microboards, kind of like a Raspberry Pi?
EEBS: Yeah, exactly. It's a little board that's compatible with the Arduino IDE. And I literally only played with it last weekend, so it's still very new to me.
JOËL: Nice. Have you done any Arduino development or Raspberry Pi or anything like that before?
EEBS: No, I have a Raspberry Pi that I run like a DNS server on, but I haven't done any actual programming. I did make an LED blink, which is pretty cool.
JOËL: What kind of programming is required for a board like that?
EEBS: From my understanding, it's either in Python or C. Those are, I think, the two languages that you can program on it. I definitely do not know C. And so I'm just going through a bunch of tutorials and reading some sample code. But I think if I ever end up trying to implement something more complex, I'll probably switch over to Python because that's a little more familiar.
JOËL: So the coding feels fairly high level even though you're writing controller code for LEDs.
EEBS: I hope so. I'd love to be able to take advantage of whatever abstractions I can.
JOËL: Do you have any fun goals you're trying to do with this? Or is this just for the fun of trying a completely different environment than web development?
EEBS: No, it's actually rooted in something visual. So I have these shelves behind me that are in my webcam when I'm in meetings or whatever. And so I want to be able to put a light strip across these shelves and have some sort of visual thing in the background.
JOËL: Like LED mood ring?
EEBS: Yeah, kind of. My eventual goal would be that as I'm talking, a little equalizer display pops up behind me. I thought that would be pretty neat.
JOËL: That is amazing. That will give you all of the cred in the meetings.
EEBS: Right? I thought that'd be pretty cool. What have you been thinking about recently, Joël?
JOËL: I've been submitting to the RubyConf call for proposals which, as of the recording of this episode, has just closed this week. And like many people, I submitted on the last day.
EEBS: [laughs]
JOËL: And it was really fun trying to take some ideas that I'm excited about and then turn them into a proposal that is accessible to other people.
EEBS: Nice. Do you want to share a little bit about what the talk is, or is it under wraps for now?
JOËL: I don't know if anyone on the committee will listen to this before the review goes out. This might