We continuously learn new things, and share those things with you
Purpose-built
Actionable advice for entrepreneurs who want to build products that people love.
Feeling stuck on something? It can be frustrating to feel like you don’t know how to de-risk your business, move faster, or validate your idea. You’re not alone. Running a startup is hard! We’re here to help.
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Podcast
The Bike Shed
On The Bike Shed, hosts Joël Quenneville and Stephanie Minn discuss their development experience and challenges at thoughtbot with Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and whatever else is drawing their attention, admiration, or ire this week.
Podcast
Giant Robots Smashing into Other Giant Robots
A podcast about the design, development, and business of great software. Each week, Chad Pytel (COO) is joined by people who build and nurture the products we love.
OPEN SOURCE
Build Better, Faster with thoughtbot's Open Source Libraries
Spend more time on your app’s unique functionality and leave the repeatable features to thoughtbot. With over a billion downloads, our open source projects power many of the world’s most visited websites.
Design resources
Learn from our Design team
Answer your critical early business questions with our Product Design Sprint Guide through the design and prototyping process.
Development resources
Learn from our Development team
Since 2012, one way we’ve shared thoughtbot expertise is through the learning platform Upcase. With Upcase, we’ve helped thousands of developers level up their skills through workshops, videos, flash cards, and coding exercises.
Our Approach
Customer Discovery Playbook
In our many years of experience designing and building products, we’ve learned how important it is to regularly ask, “Is this the right thing for us to be building right now?” A key ingredient in building that right thing is knowing who you're building it for and why they need it right now. This collection of customer discovery exercises will help your team find (or regain) customer, product, and strategic focus.
ONLINE WORKSHOPS AND EVENTS
We host events and facilitate discussions on a variety of product strategy, design & development topics
Past event recordings can be found on our Events page and we encourage you to sign up for our newsletter and follow us on socials to learn about new events where you can join us.
Chat with us
Mentoring & Office Hours
Office hours are free, remote drop-in sessions where our experienced designers and developers devote their time towards mentoring, answering your questions or discussing your goals for your products and product teams.
Books
Take one off the thoughtbot bookshelf
Ruby Science
The canonical reference for writing fantastic Rails applications from authors who have created hundreds.
Testing Rails
Learn to test Ruby on Rails web applications from the ground up in this comprehensive guide to modern testing practices.
Maintaining Open Source Projects
Learn the many facets of creating, growing and maintaining a successful open source project.
Domain Name Sanity
Learn to make domains and TLS certificates predictable and debuggable, while grasping their core concepts with plenty of examples.
Maybe Haskell
See what it’s like to program in a language without null. You might even learn some Haskell along the way.
Goal-Oriented Git (Beta)
Learn to accomplish your Git goals without getting distracted by internals or confusing terminology.