Joël conducted a thoughtbot mini-workshop on query plans, which Stephanie found highly effective due to its interactive format. They then discuss the broader value of interactive workshops over traditional talks for deeper learning.
Addressing listener questions, Stephanie and Joël explore the strategic use of if and else in programming for clearer code, the importance of thorough documentation in identifying bugs, and the use of Postgres' EXPLAIN ANALYZE, highlighting the need for environment-specific considerations in query optimization.
Episode mentioning query plans (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/418)
Query plan visualizer (https://explain.dalibo.com/)
RailsConf 2024 (https://railsconf.org/)
Episode 349: Unpopular Opinions (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/349)
Squint test (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE)
Episode 405: Retro on Sandi Metz rules (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/405)
Structuring conditionals in a wizard (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/structuring-conditionals-in-a-wizard)
Episode 417: Module docs (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/417)
Episode 416: Multidimensional numbers (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/416)
ruby-units gem (https://github.com/olbrich/ruby-units)
Solargraph (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=castwide.solargraph)
parity (https://github.com/thoughtbot/parity)
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: Just recently, I ran a sort of mini workshop for some colleagues here at thoughtbot to dig into the idea of query plans and, how to read them, how to use them. And, initially, this was going to be more of a kind of presentation style. And a colleague and I who were sharing this decided to go for a more interactive format where, you know, this is a, like, 45-minute slot.
And so, we set it up so that we did a sort of intro to query plans in about 10 minutes then 15 minutes of breakout rooms, where people got a chance to have a query plan. And they had some sort of comprehension questions to answer about it. And then, 15 minutes together to have each group share a little bit about what they had discovered in their query plan back with the rest of the group, so trying to balance some understanding, some application, some group discussion, trying to keep it engaging. It was a pretty fun approach to sharing information like that.
STEPHANIE: Yeah. I wholeheartedly agree. I got to attend that workshop, and it was really great. Now that I'm hearing you kind of talk about the three different components and what you wanted people attending to get out of it, I am impressed because [laughs] there is, like, a lot more thought, I think, that went into just participant engagement that reflecting on it now I'm like, oh yeah, like, I think that was really effective as opposed to just a presentation. Because you had, you know, sent us out into breakout rooms, and each group had a different query that they were analyzing. You had kind of set up links that had the query set up in the query analyzer. I forget what the tool was called that you used.
JOËL: I forget the name of it, but we will link it in the show notes.
STEPHANIE: Yeah. It was helpful for me, though, because, you know, I think if I were just to have learned about it in a presentation or even just looked at, you know, screenshots of it on a slide, that's different still from interacting with it and feeling more confident to use it next time I find myself in a situation where it might be helpful.
JOËL: It's really interesting because that was sort of the goal of it was to make it a bit more interactive and then, hopefully, helping people to retain more information than just a straight up, like, presentation would be. I don't know how