Episode Details

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
• Episode on heuristics
• Episode on specialized vocabulary
• Episode on discrete math
• Joël’s discrete math talk at RailsConf
• Dash
• Alfred
• Indiana Jones and the Crypt of Cryptic Error Messages
• Browser History confessional by Kevin Murphy

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 kin