Development Posts

We recently had a roundtable discussion in a company meeting about our developers writing content for our blog and outside sites. It's something we all agreed we want to do more of, but for a variety of reasons, hadn't been able to do as much as we'd like. There were certain reasons I expected – time, for example. It's been a busy summer for Planet Argon! But one reason surprised me: fear.

There's an inherent vulnerability that comes with documenting your thoughts and putting them out into the wild on the internet. In an era of relative anonymity, it's easy to tear down someone's viewpoint that you don't agree with.

Since this was a recent topic we had discussed, I enjoyed reading Flavio Copes' article for freeCodeCamp about "filling a developer bucket". What does that mean? It means contributing something positive to the community that expresses gratitude or makes someone feel good. The idea is that we all start out the day with an empty bucket. When we wrap up for the day, we want that bucket to be filled – with satisfaction that we've done meaningful work.

Flavio discusses some ways to "fill" buckets:

• Send a thank you to someone who has helped you out
• Provide constructive feedback on a Github project
• Send a PR to fix a little thing in a library

There are a million ways to add a drop in someone else's bucket. Internally on our team, we've made an effort to make gratitude a part of our culture. There are always ways to improve this, and making an effort to do this for people outside of our team is definitely something we could always do better.

Check out Flavio's article above for a bit of inspiration on filling someone else's bucket. As he mentions, "It's always harder to fill a bucket than to empty it," but the end result of a little bit of effort is always worth it.

It's been a busy couple of months for Robby on the podcast front. This week, he talks with Chad Pytel, the CEO of Thoughtbot and host of Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast. Thoughtbot is in the same realm of Planet Argon as a development consultancy – but as you'll find out during the interview, we're quite different than we seem on the surface. In this episode, Robby also discusses how his role has shifted within Planet Argon over the last 14 years, what has changed (and not changed) over 10 years of Rails survey results, and how Rails fits into the ever-shifting ecosystem of web development frameworks.

We hope you enjoy the episode!