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The Bike Shed

482: Labels for our job

43 min episode · 2 min read
·

Episode

43 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Investing, Fundraising & VC, Design & UX

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • Coding versus thinking ratio: Writing code represents minimal time compared to thinking, researching, and discussing solutions. The mechanical act of typing code is like calling a surgeon a cutter—it misses where true expertise lies in problem-solving and design decisions.
  • Waterfall versus iterative development: Separating design from implementation through upfront planning or AI tools breaks valuable feedback loops. Realizations about what needs building often emerge during coding itself, making tight cycles between designing and implementing essential for discovering the right solution.
  • Consulting as teaching: Successful client engagements end when clients no longer need consultants. This requires sharing process knowledge, teaching evaluation skills, and enabling teams to continue independently—whether learning Rails, testing practices, or running software organizations for the first time.
  • Question-asking as core skill: The most transferable consulting ability is asking why tasks matter, exploring alternatives, and finding minimal viable solutions. This questioning approach—done skillfully to avoid annoyance—prevents building wrong things and surfaces better paths forward throughout development.

What It Covers

Joelle and Sally examine software job titles like engineer, developer, and architect, exploring how these borrowed metaphors fail to capture the full scope of consulting work that blends coding, planning, mentoring, and business strategy.

Key Questions Answered

  • Coding versus thinking ratio: Writing code represents minimal time compared to thinking, researching, and discussing solutions. The mechanical act of typing code is like calling a surgeon a cutter—it misses where true expertise lies in problem-solving and design decisions.
  • Waterfall versus iterative development: Separating design from implementation through upfront planning or AI tools breaks valuable feedback loops. Realizations about what needs building often emerge during coding itself, making tight cycles between designing and implementing essential for discovering the right solution.
  • Consulting as teaching: Successful client engagements end when clients no longer need consultants. This requires sharing process knowledge, teaching evaluation skills, and enabling teams to continue independently—whether learning Rails, testing practices, or running software organizations for the first time.
  • Question-asking as core skill: The most transferable consulting ability is asking why tasks matter, exploring alternatives, and finding minimal viable solutions. This questioning approach—done skillfully to avoid annoyance—prevents building wrong things and surfaces better paths forward throughout development.

Notable Moment

Sally discovered her grandmother's hand-pieced quilt contained sewing mistakes from the original maker, which released her anxiety about perfection. Recognizing the previous quilter as human struggling with the same frustrations transformed her approach to both the project and legacy code.

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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 Joelle Kinville. And I'm Sally Hall. 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? Well, I may have mentioned this before, but I have gotten involved with this organization called the Loose Ends Project that connects people who have unfinished crafts left behind by loved ones to people who can finish those crafts. So I got connected, really nice woman who lives just like an hour away from here and has a hand pieced quilt that her grandmother started. Her grandmother, I think, passed away in the sixties. So it's been sitting on a shelf waiting to be finished for my entire life plus several decades. So I've been working on that, and it's been slow. And I sort of had a revelation this weekend when I was working on it, which is that I've been I've been really nervous about it because it's like this family heirloom made out of, like, old clothes from people who lived forever ago. And it's, you know, very special to this family, so I wanna do it justice and, you know, take good care of it and finish it as well as I can. But I've been getting a little frustrated because it was all done by hand, and it was it's made out of all old clothes. So the fabrics are all different types and textures and weights, and the pieces are not really precisely cut. So they're not all the same size exactly. They're very close to the same size, but not exactly, which is made I mean, it's impossible to sew them together perfectly. Is the thing that I finally accepted. But it's also, just difficult to it's not like a mindless project. It involves a lot of problem solving on every seam, and each seam is about an inch long, and there are thousands of them. This is gonna end up being bigger than a king-size quilt. Wow. And so I had been struggling a lot with, like, some anxiety over whether I was doing a good enough job on it and whether somebody else should do better. And this weekend, I …

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