384: Not All Numbers Are Numbers The Bike Shed

Joël gives a recap after attending RailsConf 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia (and yes, there was karaoke! 🎤 🎶). Stephanie plugs the The Tightly Coupled Book Club Podcast from friends and fellow thoughtboters Aji and Mina Slater where they're reading The Rails Guides from cover to cover and treating it like a book club and having a discussions about the documentation as they read it together.


Stemming from a Twitter thread by Joël, their main topic focuses on not all numbers being numbers. So: if someone is submitting a phone number through a form:



How would you store that in the database?
Would you store it as a string? Because sometimes it comes with some extra formatting.
Would you normalize it and try to store it as an integer because it's a number?


Thoughts, Dear Listener?




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How to Decline by Anne Helen Petersen
The Tightly Coupled Book Club podcast
Rails Guides
Michael Hartl Rails Tutorial
Why the GOV.UK Design System team changed the input type for numbers
Google’s libphonenumber
GOV.UK design system’s open GitHub issue on phone numbers
HTML numeric input mode


Transcript:


STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn.


JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way.


STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world?


JOËL: I've just returned from attending RailsConf 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia, and it was so much fun. I got a chance to attend some really good talks. I got a chance to connect with other people in the community. I always love the hallway track or any of the events that happen in the evenings after the conferences. It's a lot of fun.


STEPHANIE: Nice. I found it funny that you emphasized just returned because you literally walked through the door of your home and then got online to record this podcast with me. [laughs]


JOËL: Productivity.


STEPHANIE: What were some of your highlights from the conference?


JOËL: I really appreciated a talk by Elle Meredith about how to say no. And she gave...I think it was nine sort of different ways that you might want to have a conversation about saying no to a request. They're almost like design patterns but for interpersonal conversations. And so she covered situations where you might want to say no to maybe someone who's higher up in a hierarchy than you, so a manager.


But also, what it's like sometimes when it's the other way around if you're a manager and you have to say no to someone who reports to you, and how to handle some of those conversations. So I really appreciated the nuance that she had to share. And I think the strategies were just really practical.


STEPHANIE: That's awesome. Yeah, I know we, as developers, love some good patterns and frameworks. That actually reminds me of something else that I'd read recently, a newsletter called Culture Study by this journalist Anne Helen Petersen. She recently sent out a dispatch about how to say no or decline requests through email. And I was just thinking that it's such a challenging thing to do. But having a script or seeing examples of how other people do it is really helpful to just make it easier the next time that you want to say no, but then you're not sure how.


JOËL: It's not easy to say no. I think most people want to please, and it's much easier to say yes. And maybe even you want to believe that you can say yes, that you can do everything with limited resources and not have to prioritize. And then, of course, reality hits you, and you're in a worse situation than if you'd said no upfront or had at least an honest conversation about the limitations that we have and the prioritization that needs to happen.


STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. So, over in the tho