On this episode of Ruby for All, Andrew and Julie are joined by guest, Josh Goldberg, who’s an Open Source Developer and former mentor of Julie. In today’s conversation, Andrew, Julie, and Josh discuss the benefits of having a good manager and how to establish trust in a manager-employee relationship. There’s also a conversation on the importance of feedback and the different ways people like to receive it, as well as the importance of personal connections in the workplace, and tips for keeping track of people’s preferences and goals.  Hit download to learn more now! [00:02:49] We start with Josh telling us a story about a former manager and the importance of a manager helping employees understand their strengths and weaknesses.[00:03:47] We hear some advice that Josh received that benefited him such as focusing on areas of growth that will benefit both the employee and the company. [00:04:28] What is a dependency injection and what are some benefits with it?[00:06:52] Julie, Andrew, Josh have a conversation about establishing trust as a manager with the people that you manage. They mention the value of a manger being authentic, advocating for employees, and adapting their communication style to fit individual employees’ preferences. [00:10:01] If you’re establishing a new relationship with a new manager, Josh gives us some steps on what to do.  He mentions a great book, Checklist Manifesto, and being a big checklist person. [00:11:58] Andrew discusses the importance of feedback from managers and the different ways people like to receive it. [00:12:32] Are you familiar with the concept of the “double down sandwich” or “feedback sandwich?” Josh explains and there’s a conversation on being praised and recognized by managers, and Andrew touches on using Slackbot, and Know Your Team at Podia.[00:16:19] Some other good practices for manager managing relationships are discussed and Josh talks about using a Notion database table of everyone he talks to and to keep track of different things, and Andrew uses Obsidian for his database.[00:20:17] Julie shares that her manager writes notes and keeps track of their conversations for their one-on-ones, and she writes quarterly goals. She also mentions the acronym SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound) in relation to setting goals.[00:21:39] The topic of how to handle disagreements or problems with team members and managers in the workplace is discussed. [00:24:49] Julie, Andrew, and Josh talk about the importance of communication and advocating for oneself, and the need for managers to provide resources and support for employees to improve and learn new skills.Panelists:Andrew MasonJulie J.Guest:Josh GoldbergSponsors:HoneybadgerAvo Admin for RailsLinks:Andrew Mason TwitterAndrew Mason WebsiteJulie J. TwitterJulie J. WebsiteJosh Goldberg WebsiteJosh Goldberg TwitterLearning TypeScript: Enhance Your Web Development Skills Using Type-Safe JavaScript by Josh GoldbergDependency injectionThe Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul GawandeKnow Your TeamNotionObsidian (00:00) - Intro (02:49) - The importance of understanding strengths and weaknesses (03:47) - Focusing on areas of growth that benefit both employee and company (04:28) - Benefits of dependency injection (06:52) - Establishing trust as a manager (10:01) - Steps to establishing a new relationship with a new manager (11:58) - The importance of feedback and different ways people like to receive it (12:32) - The "double down sandwich" or "feedback sandwich" (16:19) - Good practices for manager-managing relationships (20:17) - Setting goals and keeping track of conversations (21:39) - Handling disagreements or problems with team members and managers (24:49) - Communication and advocating for oneself

On this episode of Ruby for All, Andrew and Julie are excited to have as their guest, Adrian Valenzuela, who’s a Ruby Developer, open source contributor, and maintains a tutorial blog called, Mugen Ruby.  Today, Adrian talks about how he got into web development and picking up contract gigs, which he was hired for based on his involvement in the community rather than just his skills.  He also dives into his experience and struggles with various corporate job interviews, and the different type of tests he’s taken in interviews. Adrian shares advice how finding a community of people and sharing knowledge is important to overcome struggles, and how he’s going to continue to write tutorials, contribute, help others, and build while waiting for a corporate job to arise. Press download to hear more! [00:00:53] Adrian talks about his background as a barber and how he got into full-time web development in 2020 due to the pandemic. [00:04:38] We find out when he started picking up contract gigs but found interviewing for corporate jobs to be a beast, his struggles with the interviews, and how he found it easier to get contract jobs through referrals or another way.[00:07:47] Julie wonders what the process was like for his contract job, how he connected with a person at RailsDevs, and explains he was hired based on his involvement in the community rather than just his skills. [00:11:35] Adrian gives us some details on how interviews are structured currently, including types of questions and assessments that are used.  He tells us about technical tests, some ghosting after taking tests, and how there’s a lot of competition out there.[00:15:15] Adrian is currently working on a project implementing an MVP from scratch, and he’s planning to continue writing tutorials, contributing, and building while waiting for corporate opportunities to arise.[00:17:36] If you’re in the same position as Adrian and experiencing the same kind of struggles, he shares some advice on what’s helped him the most.[00:21:03] Find out where you can find Adrian and his blog online. Panelists:Andrew MasonJulie J.Guest:Adrian ValenzuelaSponsors:GoRailsHoneybadgerLinks:Andrew Mason TwitterAndrew Mason WebsiteJulie J. TwitterJulie J. WebsiteAdrian Valenzuela TwitterAdrian Valenzuela WebsiteMugen Ruby RailsDevs (00:00) - Background as a barber turned developer (04:38) - Struggles with corporate job interviews (07:47) - Hired based on community involvement (11:35) - Interviews structure and types of tests (15:15) - Building and contributing while waiting for corporate opportunities (17:36) - Advice for overcoming job search struggles (21:03) - Where to find Adrian and Mugen Ruby online

Dave Paola, Founder of Sierra Rails, talks about coaching Junior Developers and the success of Pivotal Labs. The importance of hiring Early Career Developers in pairs is discussed, along with Dave's Junior Developer Bootcamp. Retro meetings and improving team culture and processes are explored. The Agency of Learning program, focused on helping Early Career Developers, is introduced.

Mike Munroe, Co-founder of OBLSK, discusses their Junior Developer Apprentice Program and the importance of mentorship. Topics include remote vs in-person mentorship, strategies for asking for help, and the importance of passion for success. Plus, Mike shares his background in programming and the challenges of hiring and mentoring junior developers.

In this episode, Celso De Sá, Developer for PostPilot, shares his experiences in job hunting, transferring to a new company, and managing ADHD. He discusses the challenges he faced during interviews and offers tips on personal marketing and networking. Celso also talks about his time management system and how the Basecamp Shape Up methodology helps him. The episode covers topics like mentorship, legacy projects, and the struggle of staying focused. Overall, it's an insightful conversation about career growth and ADHD management.

Julie, a Junior Developer, shares her transition from Pharmacist to coder after attending a Bootcamp. She discusses challenges faced at her first job, struggles with programming, and the importance of networking. Highlights include falling in love with programming, joining the Ruby community, and advice for newcomers in the tech industry.

Join Andrew and Julie as they discuss the world of development gems like Faker, Annotate, Bullet, and more. Learn about optimizing performance, N+1 detection, and error monitoring. Discover the importance of selective gem usage and avoiding unnecessary additions to projects.

Ruby For All – Episode 32On this episode of Ruby for All, it’s raining a lot by Julie, chilly outside by Andrew, and  Andrew’s birthday is this week! Happy Birthday, Andrew!  Since it’s a new month, Andrew and Julie decided to talk about debugging. So today, they’ll be discussing various debugging tools for troubleshooting Rails applications such as binding.irb, binding.pry, puts debugging, the new debug gem, web console, RubyMine, and VS Code debugger. Also, they talk about when to bring in help when a problem has taken too long, and they share advice on the importance of not assuming the cause of the problem, isolating the issue, and taking breaks. Debugging can be difficult and hard to figure out what happened, but always remember, practice makes perfect! We hope you enjoyed this episode!  Hit the download button now! [00:01:23] Andrew is ready to go and asks Julie what she does when she gets that red Rails error screen, and he tells us he reads in chunks.[00:02:11] What debugging tools does Julie use? She explains using binding.irb or binding.pry. Andrew tells us he uses pry a lot, and some others are puts debugging, a new debug gem that’s in Ruby 3, and Web Console.[00:06:15] We hear about the debugger, RubyMine and the new debug gem that Andrew likes. He tells us he’s huge binding.pry user since it comes naturally to him, and there’s a video by Justin Searls you should check out. [00:07:37] Has Julie ever run into a bug that fixes itself when you restart the server? What did Julie do? Andrew brings up the spring gem that he’s used, but it didn’t work the way he wanted it to.   [00:09:12] Julie shares an instance where she worked for hours on a bug, finally give up, walked away, went to bed, came back, and it was fixed.  [00:12:32] Andrew has one more thing to tell us relating to doing puts debugging, and he tells us what he likes to do using ActiveSupport Deprecation.[00:14:11] Using Sandbox mode is brought up which is a great way if you’re debugging in production, and Andrew tells us one of the hardest parts of debugging is recreating a certain thing and brings up a problem a customer who had with a bug and asked Julie where she would start. Andrew shares a third party service nightmare story with a debugging adventure. [00:17:48] Julie brings up a great question and wonders at what point do you bring another team member on to help you debug. [00:21:20] Julie and Andrew discuss using different browsers to figure out things.[00:24:28] As a junior, Julie doesn’t look at the network tab and the log and wonders if Andrew looks at them. He explains he uses the debugging tools in the browser and the network tab all the time. Panelists:Andrew MasonJulie J.Sponsors:GoRailsHoneybadgerLinks:Andrew Mason TwitterAndrew Mason WebsiteJulie J. TwitterJulie J. Websiteputs_debuggerer 0.13.1debug.rbWeb ConsoleRubyMineSetup ruby/debug with VSCode by Stan LoDebugging Ruby on Rails with Visual Studio Code by Justin SearlsSpring 1.7.2ActiveSupport DeprecationRuby for All Podcast-Episode 4: Getting Unblocked

On this episode of Ruby for All, Julie tells us she’s fostering a seven week old puppy and having lots of fun, and Andrew reveals he would love to get a dog in the future. Also, it’s the end of the month and you know what that means?  Andrew and Julie are wrapping up their February series on Ruby Methods, so first up, they’ll be discussing the module Enumerable since Andrew learned more about it, we’ll find out about polymorphic record, and then on to the object methods tally, partition, sort by, send, is_a, itself, respond_to, .methods, .tap, strftime, and integer.digits. Thanks for joining us on this journey and we hope you enjoyed this series as much as we did! Download this episode now to hear more! [00:01:15] Julie and Andrew share how they both felt about this series, and how they love all the support they’ve been getting from the listeners. [00:03:10] Andrew kicks things off with explaining module Enumerable since he couldn’t explain what it was the other week, he has since learned about it, and now you can too. [00:05:00] Aside from array and hash, Julie wonders if there are other objects that might pull the enumerable in, like set?[00:07:32] Julie explains the object method tally, which returns a hash containing the counts of equal elements, and we hear some examples.[00:08:52] What is a polymorphic record?[00:10:37] Andrew tells us why he likes flat map, and Julie shares it’s very readable and when she learned to use it[00:13:01] Our next object method is partition, which Julie explains she hasn’t had a chance to use it in practice, and we hear what it does. [00:15:30] The next object method is sort by, with a block given, returns an array of elements of self, sorted according to the value returned by the block for each element. The ordering of equal elements is indeterminate and may be unstable.[00:17:29] Andrew likes the next object method send, which invokes the method identified by symbol, passing it any arguments specified. When the method is identified by a string, the string is converted to a symbol. Andrew explains this one in depth. [00:22:33] The next object method is called is_ a, also an alias for kind of, which returns true if class is the class of object. [00:24:45] Julie put the next object method on the list and Andrew didn’t even know about it! The next object method is itself, which returns the receiver. If anyone knows how to use itself in practice, please let Julie and Andrew know. [00:25:52] The next object method is respond_to, and when you should use this.[00:27:43] The next object method is .methods, that returns a list of all the methods that are available to that object, and Andrew uses this for debugging.[00:29:28] Coming up now is the object method .tap, which yields self to the block, and then returns self. The primary purpose of this method is to “tap into” a method chain in order to perform operations on intermediate results within the chain. Julie asks Andrew to explain what strong parameters are and what tap does.[00:33:05] Julie’s been using this next object method called strftime, which formats time according to the directives in the given format string. She shares a great resource she used to build, Andrew tells us that Rails has formatted strings, and a website made by Andy Croll. [00:36:45] We made it to the last object method which is integer.digits, and this returns an array of integers representing that number. Panelists:Andrew MasonJulie J.Sponsors:AvoHoneybadgerLinks:Andrew Mason TwitterAndrew Mason WebsiteJulie J. TwitterJulie J. Websitemodule Enumerabletallyflat mappartitionsort bysendis_aitselfrespond to.methods.tapstrftimeinteger digitsFOR A GOOD STRFTIMERails DateTime Formats

On this episode of Ruby for All, Andrew and Julie are having an ADHD day since Andrew’s had a lot going on with work stuff and Julie’s been hyperfocused learning about the mobile app. But that won’t stop them from discussing their favorite Ruby Methods. Today, they’re excited to talk about the basics of Strings in programming because Andrew loves a good string. They’ll be discussing the Ruby Methods chomp, strip, split, valid_encoding, sub, gsub, slice, delete_prefix, and swapcase. Although some of these may seem pretty hard to understand, they hope after listening you’ll have a little better understanding of the fundamentals of a String. Go ahead and download this episode now! [00:01:50] We start with the String method chomp, which returns a new String with the given record separator removed from the end of string. This is one of the first methods Julie learned when she was learning Ruby. [00:03:37] When does Andrew use chomp? Also, he tells us how strip is different from chomp, and Julie shares an annoying thing about space after the email.[00:06:26] The next method is split, which divides the string into substrings based on a delimiter, returning an array of these substrings. Andrew shares an example.[00:10:21] On to method valid encoding, where Andrew explains why the valid encoding we want in Ruby is UTF-8, and he tells us how they were getting errors in their error monitoring service in Honeybadger. [00:13:21] Moving on to the next method sub, which returns a copy of self with only the first occurrence (not all occurrences) of the given pattern replaced. Julie gives us a great example. [00:14:22] The next method is gsub, which Andrew uses more than sub, and we find out how gsub is different from sub and the main difference being it replaces all occurrences. Andrew mentions a great article to read (link below) that talks about gsub with a block. [00:15:49] Our next method is slice, which returns the substring of self, specified by the arguments, and Julie mentions that string slice is an alias for string brackets and Andrew did not know that! Does Andrew use slice or bracket?[00:18:39] Delete_prefix is the next method and a little easier to understand. It returns a copy of string with leading prefix deleted. Andrew gives an example. [00:20:38] Julie really likes the last method which is swapcase. Why does she like it? Andrew thinks it’s one of those fun Ruby methods. Panelists:Andrew MasonJulie J.Sponsors:GoRailsHoneybadgerLinks:Andrew Mason TwitterAndrew Mason WebsiteJulie J. TwitterJulie J. Websitechompstripsplitvalid_encodingsubgsubUsing Ruby’s gsub with a block-Bozhidar Batsovslicedelete_prefixswapcase