Joël shares he has been getting more into long-form reading. Stephanie talks about the challenges she faced in a new project that required integrating with another company's system.
Together, they delve into the importance of search techniques for developers, covering various approaches to finding information online.
Domain Modeling Made Functional (https://pragprog.com/titles/swdddf/domain-modeling-made-functional/)
Episode on heuristics (https://www.bikeshed.fm/398)
Episode on specialized vocabulary (https://www.bikeshed.fm/356)
Episode on discrete math (https://www.bikeshed.fm/374)
Joël’s discrete math talk at RailsConf (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzYYT40T8G8)
Dash (https://kapeli.com/dash)
Alfred (https://www.alfredapp.com/)
Indiana Jones and the Crypt of Cryptic Error Messages (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/indiana-jones-and-the-crypt-of-cryptic-error-messages)
Browser History confessional by Kevin Murphy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7LkHjJdH9o)
Transcript:
STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn.
JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way.
STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world?
JOËL: Something I've been trying to do recently is get more into long-form reading. I read quite a bit of technical content, but most of it are short articles, blog posts, that kind of thing. And I've not read, like, an actual software-related book in a few years, or at least not completed a software-related book. I've started a few chapters in a few. So, something I've been trying to do recently is set aside some time. It's on my calendar. Every week, I've got an hour sit down, read a long-form book, and take notes.
STEPHANIE: That's really cool. I actually really enjoy reading technical stuff in a long-form format. In fact, I was similarly kind of trying to do it, you know, once a week, spend a little bit of time in the mornings. And what was really nice about that is, especially if I had, like, a physical copy of the book, I could close my computer and just be completely focused on the content itself.
I also love blog posts and articles. We are always talking on the show about, you know, stuff we've read on the internet. But I think there's something very comprehensive, and you can dig really deep and get a very deeper understanding of a topic through a book that kind of has that continuity.
JOËL: Right. You can build up a larger idea have more depth. A larger idea can also cover more breadth. A good blog post, typically, is very focused on a single thing, the kind of thing that would really probably only be a single chapter in a book.
STEPHANIE: Has your note-taking system differed when you're applying it to something longer than just an article?
JOËL: So, what I try to do when I'm reading is I have just one giant note for the whole book. And I'm not trying to capture elements or, like, summarize a chapter necessarily. Instead, I'm trying to capture connections that I make. So, if there's a concept or an argument that reminds me of something perhaps similar in a different domain or a similar argument that I saw made by someone else in a different place, I'll capture notes on that. Or maybe it reminds me of a diagram that I drew the other day or of some work I did on a client six months ago.
And so, it's capturing all those connections is what I'm trying to do in my notes. And then, later on, I can kind of go back and synthesize those and say, okay, is there anything interesting here that I might want to pull out as an actual kind of idea note in my larger note-taking system?
STEPHANIE: Cool, yeah. I also do a similar thing where I have one big note for the whole book. And when I was doing this, I was even trying to summarize each chapter if I could or at least like jot down some takeaways or some insights or lines that I like felt were rea