388: Empowering Other Departments Within a Company

Joël has a bike shorts update; Stephanie has a garden one. Often, power is centralized within the dev team. This is usually because they are the only ones able to execute. Sometimes this ends up interfering with team processes and workload. Joël is a fan of empowering other teams to do things themselves. Strangler Fig Pattern What Being a Staff Developer Means at Shopify by Rose Wiegley End-User Programming 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: So, in a recent episode, I had mentioned that I was going to go on vacation on a bike trip and that I had purchased a pair of bike shorts to try out on that trip to see if that would help. And, wow, that was a great purchase. It literally saved my butt. STEPHANIE: That's awesome. I'm really glad that they worked out for you. JOËL: Still sore. This was a five-day biking trip. And I think day two was the worst, but after that, things got better. But the shorts definitely helped. STEPHANIE: I think my favorite part about us talking about biking and bike shorts is that we're finally living up to the name of our podcast. [laughs] Turns out that bikeshedding is actually even more, bikeshedding when it's about actual bike stuff. And a listener named James even wrote in with some pro tips about, you know, how to care for your bike shorts and, you know, have a comfortable biking experience. And gave some good tips for me on some longer rides to check out near me in Chicago. JOËL: So it sounds like there's some crossover between the software developer community and bike enthusiasts community who also tune into this podcast. STEPHANIE: I do think that we have gotten tweets before from, I think, like, the motorcycle Twitter tagging us @_bikeshed, perhaps maybe trying to tag a different account but, yeah, ended up in our Twitter inbox instead. JOËL: Now we just need some sweet, sweet bicycle sponsorships. So, Stephanie, what's been new in your world? STEPHANIE: I have a garden update. Last year, we purchased a small fig tree from the internet. It turns out that you can get little fruit trees delivered to your door. And this was, I think, around the fall, so it was getting a little cooler. And here in Chicago, we have to bring some of our plants inside to overwinter. And so we brought the fig indoors, and it's maybe, like, two or three feet tall. And, you know, over the few months, we were just, like, caring for it. And I was really excited to see that it had started fruiting several months ago. And I got to show it to all of my co-workers in a call. I, like, picked up this kind of large pot with our little fig tree, and I, like, held it really close to my camera and tried to point out the fruit to the other people on the call, which I realized was perhaps not a very effective way to show off my plants. Like, you could just take a picture and send it in Slack. And I was like, yes, I could have done that. But yesterday (Now our fig tree has been outside for a little while since it's warmer.) I noticed that they were ripe, and I got to harvest our figs and eat them, and they were delicious. And I got to update the team on my little fig adventure. And this time I did take pictures of the fruits and sent them in Slack instead of trying to bring this tree in