Episode Details

Joël submitted a last-minute submission to RailsConf discreet math, which got picked up! 🎉 He'll be speaking at RailsConf 2023 in Atlanta at the end of April about why it's relevant to developers and all the different practical ways he uses it daily.

Stephanie recommends headlamps for in-bed reading sessions and sets up the feature flags topic for today based on a project that must be released to the public in one go.

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

• Joël's Railsconf talk
• Episode on Discrete Math
• Episode on the Fundamentals
• Strangler fig pattern
• Flipper gem

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: So a few episodes ago, we had a guest, Sara Jackson, on and she was talking about some cool elements of discrete math and how those can be really practically useful to us as developers in our day-to-day work. I was really inspired by that conversation. And the day we recorded that, I think, was the last day that the RailsConf CFP was open.

So I went and submitted a last-minute submission to RailsConf for this idea, and it got picked up. So I'm going to be speaking at RailsConf 2023 in Atlanta at the end of April about discrete math and why it's relevant to us as developers, and all the different practical ways that I use it on a daily basis.

STEPHANIE: That's awesome. Congrats, Joël. I'm so excited for this talk.

JOËL: Thanks.

STEPHANIE: Was this an 11:59 p.m. submission?

JOËL: Aaah, very close to that, yes. I don't recommend people to do this. But if inspiration hits you on the last day of the CFP, do it; go for it. I'd actually submitted two talk proposals. And I think maybe a little bit of the excitement in the energy for this last-minute one came through because that's the one that the committee picked.

STEPHANIE: How did you know that you would want to turn this topic into a talk?

JOËL: I think because I was excited to share about this to other people, and we'd kind of already done that on the show. But this is the sort of thing that's like, you know what? I'm kind of feeling a little bit of fire of this idea. I think more people should know about this. I think there's value in sharing this idea more broadly. What are some areas that I could do? I could maybe write a blog post. Oh, RailsConf, that's open until tonight. Let me put together a proposal because I'm excited about sharing this idea.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think we chatted a little bit about discrete math as potentially a fundamental pillar of information or a skill set for developers back in our episode on just the fundamentals of what developers need to know. And I was just thinking as you were talking about it that that was an audio medium, but it's obviously kind of an academic topic. And so to have slides for it and almost make it kind of like a little mini-lecture but more fun [laughs] than sitting in a classroom, I think, could be a really cool application of this topic.

JOËL: Yeah