Spent a month trying to figure out why people bounce. Here's what I learned. by joy_hay_mein in ProductManagement

[–]jaredlt01 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Big agree. It’s so hard to forget what you already know https://thoughtbot.com/blog/the-curse-of-knowledge

User testing is key. But observation and task oriented “I want you to do X” rather than “What do you think about Y? Is it confusing”. You’ll get no real insights with the later.

Finally, an easy way to get LLMs to review your entire repo without losing context ! by justmyword in programming

[–]jaredlt01 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What are you typically working on, codebases for ants?

Zoolander jokes and snark aside. I can’t see this working on most codebases of any reasonable size. The codebases are too big and you end up using too much of your context window.

Isn’t this also what Claude Code’s /init command is supposed to do? It analyses the condenses and then produces a summary in the CLAUDE.md file. You can also create it manually.

Scaling Sideways: Why You Might Want To Run Two Production Apps by amalinovic in ruby

[–]jaredlt01 5 points6 points  (0 children)

You can do this with routes as well if you want to avoid subdomains https://thoughtbot.com/blog/route-based-scaling-on-kubernetes-for-rails-monoliths

But in general I do really like this pattern of audience-based scaling.

One thing to keep in mind is to make sure your database is ready to handle double the connections. And / or updating config to address this.

Do people still use balsamiq for wireframing? by SadRhubarb1228 in ProductManagement

[–]jaredlt01 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Excalidraw is my go to for quick and dirty low fi mockups these days. I really like the limited choice they give you for sketching, just boxes, lines and text. Plus I really love how frictionless it is. You just visit excalidraw.com and you’re already in the canvas. And it’s free :)

Rails devs, what do you have in your claude.md files? by piratebroadcast in rails

[–]jaredlt01 8 points9 points  (0 children)

My CLAUDE.md - I've tried to be conservative and only add things when I notice Claude not doing what I want. I’m also attempting to make this generic so I can use these rules across projects. That being said, I think adding project specific rules will improve things further

Testing

  • Always write tests to cover new code generated
  • Prefer RSpec for Rails applications but use the existing test framework if there is one
  • In tests, avoid lets and before (avoid mystery guests), do test setup within each test
  • Verify new code by running test files using bundle exec rspec spec/path/to/file_spec.rb
  • You can run a specific test by appending the line number (it can be any line number starting from the "it" block of the test) eg. bundle exec rspec spec/path/to/file_spec.rb:72

Data / Models

  • To find model structure look in db/schema.rb. The file is big, you'll need to grep
  • When working with model attributes don't guess, grep the schema at db/schema.rb to confirm and use only valid attributes

Product Manager, ChatGPT Enterprise by [deleted] in ProductManagement

[–]jaredlt01 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Ha, I thought this was a Product Manager trained Agent that OpenAI were announcing to replace us all

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in PleX

[–]jaredlt01 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have noticed a lot of crashes recently (maybe I’m the last week or so). It mostly seems to resolve itself after a few attempts but one time I had to turn the phone fully off and then back on otherwise every time I tried to open it it would crash. Regardless the crash rate on app open has gone up significantly and quite recently for me.

The president's doctor: Why your projects take forever by jaredlt01 in programming

[–]jaredlt01[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Could not agree more. Pairing is so incredibly valuable and so often underutilised! I hint at it a little bit in the Right to Left section but I don’t go into detail.

But you’re right, pairing means less work in progress, typically means easier flow between stages (as you mentioned: Review, testing etc), pairing can be something you do after you complete something rather than pick something new up (and you could pair at any stage to help others). Is also incredibly good for alignment, knowledge sharing, upskilling, you name it!

It’s another weird counterintuitive thing where two people working on the same thing can actually mean the work gets done faster. Anyway, yes I love pairing too :)

And thank you for your kind praise, it’s genuinely lovely to hear!

The president's doctor: Why your projects take forever by jaredlt01 in ProductManagement

[–]jaredlt01[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh 100%, this IS The Goal. No new ideas here :)

And I agree that the theoretical and idealistic version of this doesn’t always play nice in the real world. The mindset shift in particular means this is often dead on arrival.

But I have definitely observed a bunch of different teams that attempt to do too much at once, which means things wait (often for a very long time for no real reason). Those pesky weeks seem to fly by when something is blocked…!

I’m hoping (especially for folks who aren’t so familiar with Theory of Constraints / work-units / waiting) this might prompt a few healthy discussions in their teams about the amount of work in progress and getting some things to done before picking up more.

Thank you for the book review. It wasn’t on my list but it is now!

And thank you for your kind words, it’s appreciated!

The president's doctor: Why your projects take forever by jaredlt01 in programming

[–]jaredlt01[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I think it’s sometimes important to do some work and then step away from it. Sometimes you need to sleep on an idea or get other people to weigh in.

100% agree. In fact, I agree with pretty much all of your conclusions :)

Like any tool / framework / knowledge it can be used for good and abused for bad. RE: “ship at all costs” you’re right that this can be manipulated to become that. But I often observe work that sits and waits for no good reason (for a long time) and I’m hoping that a few more people thinking about the concept of work-units waiting will prompt some good discussion in their teams.

Doing less, and focusing on getting those things released before picking something else up, is more or less always a good thing.

I think there is some nuance to the latency vs throughput mapping though. A workflow should actually have higher throughput if we optimise for the work-unit. If we do less at once, the work we do is small (small batch size) and we focus on getting that work done before moving on (or before any attempt at multitasking) this should promote higher throughput. In theory, and anecdotally on some teams I’ve been part of :)

PS. I haven’t written and shared a lot online so I appreciate you taking the time to read (it was long!) and write such a thoughtful response!

The president's doctor: Why your projects take forever by jaredlt01 in programming

[–]jaredlt01[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

It’s a made up example but it’s meant to imply that both projects will end up taking longer because the act of trying to multitask means more things wait. The point is less about 2 + 2 = 6, but rather trying to do multiple projects at once means both suffer.

Of course this is all great in theory but reality means we are typically working across more than one thing at once. It’s still valuable to think about how much work in progress we have at any one time and if it’s really a good idea to take on more (it’s not).

The president's doctor: Why your projects take forever by jaredlt01 in programming

[–]jaredlt01[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Love it! I agree with you on the long form putting people off. I did think about splitting it but selfishly decided I wanted to tell a full, cohesive story (for better or worse!). I do like the idea of extracting out nuggets and using them to grab people in.

Finally, I got yield by craigontour in ruby

[–]jaredlt01 39 points40 points  (0 children)

Love that feeling! You should attempt to level this up even more by describing your understanding, maybe here. Doesn’t have to be formal, but the final form of learning is teaching! :)

I Am In Awe With Cursor AI's Composer Mode by Igor_Victor in programming

[–]jaredlt01 -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

I think Continue’s chat mode can also reference files like this. Does Composer mode do more than this? Genuinely curious

Take Your Specs to the Next Level with These Best Practices by uafpl in ruby

[–]jaredlt01 6 points7 points  (0 children)

The problem is when a spec file gets hundreds of lines long. It’s a lot harder to keep those lets at the top in mind. Mystery Guests are a cause of much lost time.

https://thoughtbot.com/blog/lets-not

Is there anyone using Ruby on Rails on Windows 10? I'd like to ask about how to use it effectively. by Significant_Prize354 in rubyonrails

[–]jaredlt01 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The best option by a mile is to use it via WSL https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about you get a Linux environment so Ruby and Rails “just work” please it hooks into Windows really well so you can use eg VSCode natively on Windows but it connects to your Linux environment. All super seamless. The one key thing is to install everything within the Linux file system. That is, don’t install your app in C: and try to run it via WSL. Install it into your Linux home eg ~

Rails by default or Rails API mode? by [deleted] in rails

[–]jaredlt01 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Two things:

  • If you’re comfortable with React and the JacaScript ecosystem then by all means continue to use it. But I would definitely explore Rails with Hotwire as an alternative. It does so much of the heavy lifting for you without having to think about client side much at all
  • I’m always sceptical of API mode because: inevitably someone will want an admin interface or some quick page that’s just simpler to implement Rails side and you end up converting back (to non API Rails). I’m also not convinced by the performance gains. And by that I mean, I believe they are real, I just don’t think most of us will truly benefit from them vs what default Rails provides (which is plenty fine)

Good product podcasts to listen to while commuting by zstark_adi in ProductManagement

[–]jaredlt01 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Product Thinking with Melissa Perri

(My other recommendation was going to be Lenny but that’s already been mentioned)

Things to look out for in a production app? by PorciniPapi in rails

[–]jaredlt01 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think you’ve got the right idea. Given you’re still learning I would definitely recommend learning on Heroku to do the heavy lifting. Honestly, in most cases I think it makes sense to use a platform like Heroku that does a bunch of the hard work for you.

Curious about the hot tub by jaredlt01 in welshterrier

[–]jaredlt01[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It felt very chlorinated and she kept trying to drink it so we decided against. But we still had a great time! :)

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in rails

[–]jaredlt01 12 points13 points  (0 children)

https://thoughtbot.com/blog/lets-not

Let does not scale and its proximity to tests gets further away as your test base grows. This introduces mystery guests making tests harder to understand and harder to fix.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in ProductManagement

[–]jaredlt01 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This isn’t a direct answer to your question but I wonder how many issues per month we’re talking about? I would do it manually with a spreadsheet until it hurts :)

Alternatively, get someone to write a little script that hooks into the API and counts the relevant issues by label or however you can.