Episode Details

Steph joins Chris in trying new things! For her, it's a new email client – the Newton email client – because she really wants to love her inbox. She also talks about implementing a suggestion from Chris on improving CI speed.

Chris continues his search for the perfect to-do list app. (It's not going great.) But he has made hiring progress and is excited to move on to the next step: onboarding.

Together they answer a listener question who asked for advice on crafting project estimates for clients.

This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy.

Services down? New Relic offers full stack visibility with 16 different monitoring products in a single platform.

• Newton
• Subscribe to Email Newsletters in Feedbin
• GitHub - Shopify/packwerk
• Sunsama
• TickTick: To-do List, Tasks, Calendar, Reminder

Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

Transcript:

CHRIS: I am now recording.

STEPH: Me too.

CHRIS: [laughs] That's my recording voice.

STEPH: [laughs]

CHRIS: That's how you can tell.

STEPH: I just like how it sounds suspicious where we're like; I'm now recording, so be careful. [laughs]

CHRIS: This is now on the record.

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey.

STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari.

CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, what's new in your world?

STEPH: Hello. Happy, happy Friday. Oh, I have something that I'm excited or intrigued about. I don't know. Okay, I'm hyping it up. [laughs] But I'm realizing I'm also very skeptical of it.

CHRIS: This is the best sales pitch I've ever heard. I'm so excited to hear what this is. [laughs]

STEPH: I am trying a new email client; it is the Newton email client. And I so want to love my inbox. I want to check on it. I want to help it grow. Okay, that's the opposite. I want to help get through all the emails that come through, but I just want to love it. I want it to be a good space that I want to go to. And I just hate email so much. And it always feels like this chore that it's really hard for me to bring myself to do, but yet it's really important because a lot of good things come through email.

So this is my rambly way of saying I'm trying the Newton email client because I saw on Twitter from Andrew Mason, who has very similar feelings that I do about email, where we are just not fans of it. And we rarely check it and have declared email bankruptcy at several points in our life. And he's also one of the co-hosts for Remote Ruby. But I saw on Twitter that Andrew was talking about the Newton email client and how it actually made him feel that he enjoyed writing and looking through his inbox. And I was like, yeah, that's the sales pitch I need. So I'm giving it a go. It's been only a couple of days.

But one of the nice things I have noticed about it is it's very focused, and there's not much noise, and it actually feels like very minimal design where if you open up like a new email, so you're opening up a new draft, there's no much noise. You get to just focus, almost like you're writing a lit