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The Bike Shed

475: Invisible Mentorship

38 min episode · 2 min read
·

Episode

38 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Productivity, Leadership, Software Development

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • Code Review Timing: Avoid in-depth technical discussions during urgent bug fixes or late Friday afternoons when developers lack mental capacity to learn. Save larger conversations about testing philosophy or architecture patterns for dedicated team discussions instead.
  • Draft PR Strategy: Use draft pull requests to solicit early feedback on uncertain implementations rather than presenting finished work. This approach helps reluctant collaborators engage more readily by framing requests as seeking input rather than demanding help with decisions.
  • Feedback Calibration: Match feedback intensity to developer confidence levels by monitoring PR comment volume. When multiple review rounds have already occurred, skip non-blocking nitpicks to let developers complete tasks successfully rather than eroding confidence through endless revision cycles.
  • Assumption Management: Prefix technical terms with links or spell out acronyms on first use to accommodate varying knowledge levels. Use phrases like "you probably already know this" before explanations to respect expertise while ensuring shared understanding across experience gaps.

What It Covers

Sally Hall and Adji Slater explore effective mentorship techniques for developers with different experience levels, focusing on code review feedback, balancing consistency with team morale, and adapting communication styles to individual needs.

Key Questions Answered

  • Code Review Timing: Avoid in-depth technical discussions during urgent bug fixes or late Friday afternoons when developers lack mental capacity to learn. Save larger conversations about testing philosophy or architecture patterns for dedicated team discussions instead.
  • Draft PR Strategy: Use draft pull requests to solicit early feedback on uncertain implementations rather than presenting finished work. This approach helps reluctant collaborators engage more readily by framing requests as seeking input rather than demanding help with decisions.
  • Feedback Calibration: Match feedback intensity to developer confidence levels by monitoring PR comment volume. When multiple review rounds have already occurred, skip non-blocking nitpicks to let developers complete tasks successfully rather than eroding confidence through endless revision cycles.
  • Assumption Management: Prefix technical terms with links or spell out acronyms on first use to accommodate varying knowledge levels. Use phrases like "you probably already know this" before explanations to respect expertise while ensuring shared understanding across experience gaps.

Notable Moment

One developer recalled receiving only the comment "why did you do this?" on a pull request before their manager went on vacation, creating days of anxiety about whether the code was acceptable or fundamentally flawed.

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Episode Transcript

Auto scaling is a simple concept. Automatically add resources when needed and automatically shut them down to avoid paying for excess capacity. How hard could that be? If you've set up auto scaling yourself, you know it's not that easy, especially using the native auto scalers on platforms like AWS and Heroku. That's why you need Judo Scale. Judo Scale is auto scaling as a service, and they make auto scaling simple and easy, as it should be. You can use Judo Scale on AWS, Heroku, Render, fly.io, and more. It's free for low traffic apps and unlimited plans start at $25 per month. Autoscale on easy mode at judoscale.com. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at Thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Sally Hall. And I'm Adji Slater. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Adji, what's new in your world? What is new in my world? I think the most interesting thing to me, at least, is my continual mission to try and get something like processing to work with Ruby. Are you familiar with processing the I guess it's a library. No. As the the concept? Yes. I do know that word. It is interestingly named, but it is a, Java library for doing computer art. And so basically rendering imagery to a screen, and it has a lot of different tools. And it's basically, as far as I know, it's one of the most powerful kind of easy to pick up versions of this sort of thing. But it's in Java, and there is a JavaScript version, which is p five JS. And those are just not the language that I prefer to work in. Of course, I prefer working in Ruby. But there isn't a Ruby version of something like this, not really, or at least not something that's very well maintained. So I've tried a couple of different ways to use the processing or the p five runtime, essentially, with Ruby. And none of those attempts have been as successful as I would hope. I tried a little bit today to use Wasm. Could you spell that for me? What is that? Yeah. W a s m. It's WebAssembly. As soon as I said it, I was like, do I need to say WebAssembly? Because Wasm just sounds weird to say. But, yeah, trying to interrupt with JavaScript through Ruby using WebAssembly and ran into some hurdles that I didn't really expect, like just defining a function through j s dot eval was not as straightforward as I had expected. So that kind of I'm not gonna say yet that it fell through, but it certainly ran into a few more roadblocks than I was expecting, and I was expecting a few. So the best library for doing this sort of thing that I found is DragonRuby, which is a a game making toolkit. And …

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