Episode Details

Joël has been working on his RailsConf talk about various aspects of discrete math useful in day-to-day work as a developer and going deep on some concepts from propositional logic and Boolean algebra, particularly DeMorgan's Laws, which explain how to negate a compound condition. Stephanie attended a meeting with a fun "Spicy Takes" topic. She gave a short talk on how frictionless technology may not be the best path forward and tried to argue in favor of more friction in our software.

Together, they talk about ways they've made remote work work for them and things they'd like to try/do differently.

This episode is brought to you by Airbrake. Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack.

• Taskmaster - Do Not Avoid Not Making the Bell Not Ring
• The Dark Side of Frictionless Technology
• Is Tech Too Easy to Use?
• How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
• Rubber duck Debugging
• Schedule Shutdown, Complete Bike Shed episode

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: I've recently got accepted to speak at RailsConf. And I've been working on my talk about various aspects of discrete math that are useful in day-to-day work as a developer and going really deep on some concepts from propositional logic and Boolean algebra, particularly the DeMorgan's Laws, which explain how to negate a compound condition.

So if condition one or condition two, if you want to negate that thing as a whole, you can't just negate both of the conditions individually. You will get a totally different result, and that's a really easy mistake to make. I don't always memorize exactly what to do. But I know enough in the back of my head when it comes up on a pull request to check it out and be like, oh, there's a negating of a compound condition here. Pay closer attention. There might be a bug.

STEPHANIE: So are you saying that when you negate each condition individually, you get the opposite result that you want?

JOËL: It's not opposite, just different.

STEPHANIE: Just different, okay.

JOËL: So De Morgan's Laws tell us that if you want to negate the compound condition as a whole, you negate the individual clauses but then also have to flip the sign in the middle. So if you're trying to negate condition one and condition two, it becomes not condition one or not condition two.

STEPHANIE: I see. Wow, that's confusing because you'd think that there are just two outcomes, but really there are a lot more.

JOËL: Yes.

STEPHANIE: And that reminds me of when we've talked about on the show combinatorial explosions, which I know is a favorite topic of yours.

JOËL: Combinatorics will definitely come up in the talk as well. It's sometimes hard to hold all the possibilities in your mind. And so I'm a big fan of truth tables to visualize what's happening and to be like, oh,