Fellow thoughtboter Sarah Lima joins Joël to discuss an issue Sarah had when she was doing a code review recently: making HTTP requests in an ActiveRecord model. Her concern with that approach was that a class was having too many responsibilities that would break the single-responsibility principle, and that it would make the class hard to maintain. Because the ActiveRecord layer is a layer that's meant to encapsulate business roles and data, her issue was that adding another responsibility on top of it would be too much. Her solution was to extract a class that would handle the whole HTTP request process.
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.
SQL TRIM() (https://popsql.com/learn-sql/postgresql/how-to-trim-strings-in-postgresql)
Iteration as an anti-pattern (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/iteration-as-an-anti-pattern)
WET tests (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/the-case-for-wet-tests)
thoughtbot code review guidelines (https://github.com/thoughtbot/guides/tree/main/code-review)
Side effects in tests (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/simplify-tests-by-extracting-side-effects)
Active Resource (https://github.com/rails/activeresource)
Different strategies for 3rd party requests (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/testing-third-party-interactions)
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 fellow thoughtboter Sarah Lima.
SARAH: Happy to be here.
JOËL: And together, we're here to share a little bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Sarah, what's new in your world?
SARAH: Well, after a year and a half working on the same thoughtbot client, I have rolled off, and I have joined a new team. And I am learning a lot about not only a new codebase but learning to work with a new team. So that's always challenging, and this time it's not different.
JOËL: What is something that you like to do when joining a new team to help smooth the onboarding process?
SARAH: Well, I think especially getting to know people with one on ones. This time, I didn't do that right away because I had a bunch of time off scheduled right at the beginning of the project. But I did it right after I came back. And I'm learning a lot about my new colleagues, how they like to work, how they learn best. So, for instance, there are some people that like to learn and grow by reading blog posts, reading books, and there are other people that don't like that as much.
JOËL: So when you joined the new project, you just reached out to all of these people and set up a few meetings just to get to know them.
SARAH: Yeah, exactly.
JOËL: That's really good. I've never done that on a project. And now that you've said it, it kind of seems obvious. Maybe I should do that moving forward to get to know new teammates.
SARAH: Yeah. And I think it's easier on my project because it's a very small team. There are four of us thoughtboters, and there are just two client developers. So it was easier.
JOËL: What about on the code side of things? Are there any tricks you like to do when you're first getting started in a new codebase?
SARAH: Well, I think I really enjoy diving in right away, working on something small, and asking questions. I have also found it helpful in the past, especially on larger codebases, that someone that's experienced on a project gives me an overview showing me the quirks. And, of course, a good README is always a good thing to have, and during the process, always be updating the README. In this recent project, it was not different. I opened a lot of PRs to update the README. So that was good to have a PR right on your first day.
JOËL: I love that. I think that's usually my goal when I start on a new project is to have a PR the