Joël has been pondering another tool for thought from Maggie Appleton: diagramming. What does drawing complex things reveal? Stephanie has updates on how Soup Group went, plus a clarification from last week's episode re: hexagons and tessellation.
They also share the top most impactful articles they read in 2022.
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.
Maggie Appleton tools for thought (https://maggieappleton.com/tools-for-thought)
Squint test (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE&themeRefresh=1)
Cardinality of types (https://guide.elm-lang.org/appendix/types_as_sets.html)
Honeycomb hexagon construction (https://www.nature.com/articles/srep28341)
Coachability (https://cate.blog/2021/02/22/coachability/)
Strangler Fig Pattern (https://shopify.engineering/refactoring-legacy-code-strangler-fig-pattern)
Finding time to refactor (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/finding-the-time-to-refactor)
Parse don't validate (https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-validate/)
Errors cluster around boundaries (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/debugging-at-the-boundaries)
Transcript:
STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot that has basically become a two-person book club between me and Joël. [laughter]
JOËL: I love that.
STEPHANIE: I'm so sorry, I had to. I think we've been sharing so many things we've been reading in the past couple of episodes, and I've been loving it. I think it's a lot of the conversations we have off-air too, and now we're just bringing it on on-air. And I am going to lean into it. [laughs]
JOËL: I like it.
STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world?
JOËL: So, in a recent episode, I think it was two episodes ago, you shared an article by Maggie Appleton about tools for thought. And I've kind of been going back to that article a few times in the past few weeks. And I feel like I always see something new.
And one tool for thought that Maggie explicitly mentions in the article is diagramming, and that's something that we've used as an industry for a long time to deal with conditional logic is just writing a flow diagram. And I feel like that's such a useful tool sometimes to move away from code and text into visuals and draw your problem rather than write your problem.
It's often useful either when I'm trying to figure out how to structure some of my own code or when I'm reviewing a PR for somebody else, and something just feels not quite right, but I'm not quite sure what I want to say. And so drawing the problem all of a sudden might give me some insights, might help me identify why does something feel off about this code that I can't quite put into words?
STEPHANIE: What does drawing complex things reveal for you? Is there a time where you were able to see something that you hadn't seen before?
JOËL: One thing I think it can make more obvious is the shape of the problem. When we describe a problem in words, sometimes there's a sense of like, okay, there are two main paths through this problem or something. And then when we do our code, we try to make it DRY, and we try all these things. And it's really hard to see the flow of logic. And we might actually have way more paths through our code than are actually needed by the initial problem definition.
I think we talked about this in a past episode as well, structuring a multi-step form or a wizard. And oftentimes, that is structured way more complex than it needs to be. And you can really see that difference when you draw out a flow diagram, the difference between forcing everything down a single linear flow with a bunch of little independent conditions versus branching up front three or four or five ways, however many steps you have. And then, from there, it's just executing code.
STEPH