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
Chris Toomey, Joe Ferris, and Ian C. Anderson
Retrospectives are a core part of our process for keeping projects running smoothly, encouraging open communication, and hitting our goals. In this video, Joe Ferris, thoughtbot CTO, leads Chris and Ian through a typical retro while describing the...
Gabe Berke-Williams and Melissa Xie
Meetups are a great way to involve yourself in your local programming communities, as well as find other people with similar interests. Join Melissa Xie and Gabe Berke-Williams to learn how to organize and run your own meetups.
Gabe Berke-Williams and Ian C. Anderson
In this video we'll show you the range and power of type systems of various languages, and explain why you might be interested in checking out a more strongly typed language.
Gabe Berke-Williams
Managing your dotfiles can be a real pain. rcm lets you organize related configuration files with tags, safely install your dotfiles, and share your dotfiles with others so that they can try out pieces of your configuration.
Gabe Berke-Williams and Ian C. Anderson
A metaprogram is a program that writes other programs, and metaprogramming is the process of writing these metaprograms. A common use of metaprogramming Here's an example of metaprogramming in Ruby: class Post def initialize(status) ...
Chris Toomey and Giles Van Gruisen
React Native is a project from Facebook that allows developers to use React to build native mobile applications. This presents an amazing opportunity as now we can use the same tools, workflows, and approach to build for both web and mobile,...
Chris Toomey
Take a peek behind the scenes at some of features and workflows we've built up to help support Upcase as a production application and manage it across the varied environments of development, staging, and production.
Tute Costa and Chris Toomey
Join Tute Costa, the maintainer of thoughtbot's Paperclip gem, as he talks about how to be the best maintainer you can be, including how to quickly respond to issues and how to version your code.
Derek Prior and Chris Toomey
Join Chris and Derek Prior (Development Director in thoughtbot's Boston office) to talk about Clearance, a great solution for email and password authentication. Just like Rails, Clearance is opinionated, and those opinions help make it more secure...
Derek Prior and Chris Toomey
Rails 5 is on the horizon and now's the perfect time to take a look at the features and changes coming with this major release. Derek Prior takes us on a tour of the changes, as well as showing us how to upgrade to the current Rails 5 beta.
Tute Costa and Chris Toomey
Join Tute Costa and Chris Toomey to learn about contributing to open source projects. Let's dispel some of the myths, learn how to be a better contributor, and start giving back to the projects we use every day.
Chris Toomey and Harry Schwartz
Computer science can seem scary, but with the right mental framework it's actually quite approachable. Follow along with Harry Schwartz, thoughtbot developer in Boston, as he walks you through his favorite parts of computer science and why it even...
Ian C. Anderson and Chris Toomey
As developers, naming is our most powerful tool to make our code understandable. It's an essential part of refactoring. Learning what to pull out, and what to name it, makes our code more maintainable. In this episode, you'll learn how to apply...
Chris Toomey
Vim's true power lies in its command language. Learning that language can exponentially increase your knowledge because we can combine new operators with what we already know to create powerful new operators and mappings. In this episode, you'll...
Chris Toomey and Ian C. Anderson
Keyword arguments allow us to write code that is both more expressive, and more flexible. Tune in as Ian and Chris dive into some of the more subtle aspects and demonstrate how we can use keyword args to produce clear, reliable code.
Matthew Sumner and Chris Toomey
Promises are an abstraction that makes working with asynchronous code more manageable and consistent. Rather than passing a callback function to an asynchronous operation (and possibly falling into the dreaded callback pyramid of doom), the...