459: Paper Data Structures with Sally Hall

Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at Thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joelle Kenville. And today, I'm joined with fellow Thoughtbotter, Sally Hall. Hello. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Sally, what's new in your world? This feels like a silly thing to be new for me, but I've been I read a lot and mostly in the form of audiobooks, which I will not hear any arguments that that's not reading. It is. It is absolutely reading. Yeah. Recently, I've just started reading, like, actual physical paper books again. I sort of stumbled into a bookstore, needed some time to kill, bought a couple books, and it's been nice to sort of go back to the original way that I was reading. And it's definitely a more focused way to read than the audiobooks where I'm often, you know, listening and knitting or listening and cleaning to just sit and, like, focus completely on what I'm reading and the smell of the book, you know, all the all the things that I've always loved about paper books, I'm sort of rediscovering. That's always the tough trade off. Right? Is the you get more volume if you're able to multitask. Mhmm. But maybe you get less focus? Yeah. And you tend to I don't know. I tend to get a little distracted and sometimes realize, like, oh, I just missed something. I guess I need to rewind and something important happened, which I mean, I certainly can get distracted while reading a physical book too. It just happens less. It's also nice to know how everything is spelled. It kinda drives me crazy. I read a lot of historical fiction, and there will be names that I've never heard before, and I have no idea how it's spelled. I'm sure. Any favorite books or series that you would recommend in that genre? I really like Ken Follett. He wrote Pillars of the Earth, but has written a lot of other historical fiction. He does, like, epic trilogies. The audiobooks are, like, forty hours long, but they're really good and really interesting. I never liked history when I was in school. But now reading historical fiction, I'm like, oh, there's more to history than just politics and war. Like, learning how people lived and Right. Right. Things like that is really fascinating. It's more than just names and dates. Yeah. Yeah. It's human stories. I feel like sometimes historical fiction and fantasy authors do this as well. They just have massive cast of characters, and you end up having to you don't have to memorize dates as much, but you do have to memorize an awful lot of names. Yeah. How has that been in in some of his work? Oh, that's interesting because definitely there's one book that and I I get the names of the books mixed up, …