The Weekly Iteration
Learn to write better code in less than 30 minutes a week.
The Weekly Iteration is our video series where we explore new frameworks and languages, dig in to advanced coding patterns, and share the techniques we use on projects to build robust and maintainable applications. We're currently on a break from recording new episodes, but be sure to check out the many videos we've released previously.
Videos
Paul Smith and German Velasco
Crystal is a programming language with syntax unabashedly inspired by Ruby. It’s incredibly fast, statically typed, and an absolute pleasure to write. Join Paul and German as they take a quick look at Crystal!
Joel Quenneville and German Velasco
Mutation-related bugs are some of the most common in the Ruby world. Joël and German explore many of the gotchas related to mutation, how to avoid them, and discuss when mutation might not be necessary at all.
Joel Quenneville and Stephanie Viccari
Compilers are powerful helpers but they can only do so much with primitives. Joël and Stephanie fix a bug by introducing domain-specific types. Learn about how these encode real-world context, what are the downsides, and how some functional...
Joel Quenneville and Derek Prior
We've been writing Ruby for years on lots of different projects and in many different environments. This has led to thoughtbot's Ruby style to be somewhat different to the rest of the community's. In particular, we tend to focus on a sub-set of...
German Velasco and Stephanie Viccari
Elixir shines when it comes to concurrency. On this episode, German and Stephanie look at the foundations of concurrency in Elixir as they build an abstraction to handle asynchronous tasks.
Joel Quenneville and Derek Prior
Our languages give us great tools in the form of primitives: things like integers, strings, and arrays. However, over-relying on these leads to problems. This practice even has it's own fancy code smell name: Primitive Obsession. In this video,...
Derek Prior and Joel Quenneville
The Rails console is a Rails developer’s best friend. On this week’s episode we take a look at some little-known tips and tricks for increasing your efficiency in the console.
German Velasco and Joel Quenneville
German & Joël talk about creating higher level data abstractions in Elixir.
Joel Quenneville and Ben Orenstein
Joël Quenneville presents the why, what, and how of testing in isolation!
Paul Smith and Chris Toomey
Elixir & Phoenix, so hot right now! On this week’s episode we’ll take a look at some of the great features of both Elixir and Phoenix through the lens of Bamboo, a library for sending emails in Phoenix apps, recently released by thoughtbot...
George Brocklehurst and Chris Toomey
What is a line editor, and how can you use it in your workflow? In this Weekly Iteration, George Brocklehurst and Chris Toomey explore Readline, the most common line editor. Learn how to use it in the shell, your REPLs, and even in your GUI.
Chris Toomey and Connie Chan
Historically, developers and designers have reached for JavaScript to build certain presentational features such as animations and transitions. With modern CSS features, some of these capabilities can now be achieved with little to no JavaScript....
Chris Toomey and George Brocklehurst
On this episode of The Weekly Iteration, George Brocklehurst, development director from thoughtbot's NYC office, joins us to take a tour of a handful of design patterns through the lens of the Django web framework. Specifically, we'll take a look...
Joel Quenneville and Chris Toomey
If your application uses third-party APIs, it can be complicated to write good, flexible tests that don't depend on the service being present (or don't touch production data). In this Weekly Iteration, Joël Quenneville and Chris Toomey examine...
Joshua Clayton and Chris Toomey
Blocks are a core concept in Ruby, and while they make frequent appearances in Ruby code, developers may not be aware of exactly how they work or all the things they can do. In this video, Boston Development Director Josh Clayton walks through...
Chris Toomey and Joe Ferris
Often when talking about optimizing data SQL in web applications we focus on the application layer concerns like n+1 queries and the like, but occasionally we'll need to dive down into the database layer itself to optimize our queries. In this...