Stephanie is engrossed in Kent Beck's Substack newsletter, which she appreciates for its "working thoughts" format. Unlike traditional media that undergo rigorous editing, Kent's content is more of a work-in-progress, focusing on thought processes and evolving ideas. Joël has been putting a lot of thought into various tools and techniques and realized that they all fall under one umbrella term: analysis.
From there, Stephanie and Joël discuss all the productivity tricks they like to use in their daily workflows. Do you have some keyboard shortcuts you like? Are you an Alfred wizard? What are some tools or mindsets around productivity that make YOUR life better?
Kent Beck’s Substack Tidy First? (https://tidyfirst.substack.com/)
Debugging: Listing Your Assumptions (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/debugging-listing-your-assumptions)
Dash (https://kapeli.com/dash)
Alfred (https://www.alfredapp.com/)
Rectangle (https://rectangleapp.com/)
Meeter (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/meeter-for-zoom-teams-co/id1510445899)
Vim plugins (https://github.com/thoughtbot/dotfiles/blob/main/vimrc.bundles#L32-L50) from thoughtbot’s dotfiles, including vim-projectionist () for alternate files
Go To Spec VS Code plugin (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Lourenci.go-to-spec)
Feedbin (https://feedbin.com/)
Energy Makes Time by Mandy Brown (https://everythingchanges.us/blog/energy-makes-time/)
Transcript:
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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.
STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way.
JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world?
STEPHANIE: So, I have a new piece of content that I'm consuming lately. That is Kent Beck's Substack [chuckles], Kent Beck of Agile Manifesto and Extreme Programming notoriety. I have been really enjoying this trend of independent content creation in the newsletter format lately, and I subscribe to a lot of newsletters for things outside of work as well. I've been using an RSS feed to like, keep track of all of the dispatches I'm following in that way so that it also kind of keeps out of my inbox. And it's purely just for when I'm in an internet-reading kind of mood.
But I subscribed to Kent's Substack. Most of his content is behind a subscription. And I've been really enjoying it because he treats it as a place for a lot of his working thoughts, kind of a space that he uses to explore topics that could be whole books. But he is still in the phase of kind of, like, thinking them through and, like, integrating, you know, different things he's learning, and acknowledging that, like, yeah, like, not all of these ideas are fully fleshed, but they are still worth publishing for people who might be interested in kind of his thought process or where his head is at.
And I think that is really cool and very different from just, like, other types of content I consume, where there has been, like, a lot of, especially more traditional media, where there has been, like, more editing involved and a lot of tim