AI fatigue is hitting some development teams hard. In our original research study, engineering, product and technology leaders from US healthcare companies told us they’re feeling pressured to evaluate a firehose of new AI trends and tools while struggling to navigate AI-generated code alongside leg...

The next North West Ruby User Group in Manchester, UK is in a fortnight on 15 October at Colony, One Silk Street. Rob Whittaker will take us through one of his hot-takes: VCR does more damage than good, and there are imperfectly better ways to stub your external requests. Rob Whittaker is Director o...

For the past several months, we’ve been exploring a question: Can we put some of our product expertise into an AI tool that helps people figure out the right thing to build? ReadySetGo is now open for anyone to try (fine print: within a daily new user limit). ReadySetGo helps you turn a rough idea i...

On 29 October, thoughtbot Product Leader Bethan Ashley will be hosting two roundtables at the London Chief Product Officer Conference, bringing product leaders together to explore some of the biggest questions shaping the future of the product function. The topics are different, but they both come b...

People today have a spectrum of opinions on AI: we range from all-in, overly enthusiastic vibe-lifers to luddite curmudgeons. I personally have been from one side to the other and back over the course of this week. Us AI skeptics have good reasons for our fear/hatred/disgust even as we use LLMs dail...

We just published a bunch of our agent skills! We’ve been creating these ad hoc as we work on projects, but we finally pulled them all together into a single consolidated list. Check out our thoughtbot/skills GitHub repo for details about using them. It’s pretty cool to see these skills downloaded f...

I was a PM. I became a PM at a consultancy. Sounds like the same job. Spoiler: it is not. 😅 Before consulting, I spent around 10 years as an in-house PM. I was used to being inside the organization. I could talk directly to Marketing or Finance, check a contract myself, or find the right person in l...

Client success is established long before kickoff, during the work happening in business development and even before the contract is signed. By the time a project begins, there have already been meetings, follow-ups, internal conversations, and decisions about what the engagement should actually loo...

We’re still thinking about some of the finer points of our recent panel about Building Secure Healthcare Systems. You may have seen our big picture thoughts in some recent blog posts, but we know it’s also nice to have some actionable tips you can fold into your workflow right now. Here are five qui...

Dependabot helps you keep your gems updated, and it also supports other package managers such as NPM. However, it doesn’t know anything about the JavaScript packages in a Rails app that uses importmap-rails, and the feature request for that has been open since February 2023. That means that when you...

I think you should vibe code your app. At least at first. LLMs have made it incredibly cheap to turn an idea into something you can use. That’s especially exciting for ideas that would have never survived the old cost of software development. Every company has things that might be useful to build so...

Let’s talk about PMS, premenstrual syndrome and why it’s utterly important for you, as a leader, to know about it. You can’t choose who you lead! We call them Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Directors, and so on. And while these folks sometimes lead people who do a similar job, like for exam...

I am an AI skeptic/hater/slow adopter, due to a combination of concerns about the ethics and environmental impact of AI and the fact that I like doing things myself. I knit my own socks, I built a swing for my porch this summer, and every Thanksgiving I make pies from scratch — even the crust (do yo...

For the first time, we’re bringing our Tech Leaders Meetup to Edinburgh, Scotland. On October 21, we’ll be gathering at Badger & Co for an informal evening with fellow technology leaders from across Edinburgh and the wider Scottish tech community. If you’re leading or building technology teams, work...

I got curious about implementation because of padding. Specifically the fourth message in a thread about whether a card’s inner spacing was 16px or 20px. I have had some version of that conversation on every project I have worked on, along with the ones about type scale, and border radius, and which...

This autumn, we’re bringing the Tech Leaders community together for a new series of meetups in London. Our meetups are informal evenings for engineering, product, and technology leaders to network, exchange ideas, and have useful conversations over drinks and snacks. No panels, no presentations, and...

While on vacation in Europe I came across a coat of arms I didn’t recognize on the back of a statue. I pulled out my phone, snapped a picture, and asked ChatGPT to identify it for me. It gave me a hilariously wrong answer: “this isn’t a coat of arms, it’s a statue of a dog in Spain”. Unsatisfied, I ...

In Modeling State Transitions in Postgres, we replaced a status column on users with an append-only user_statuses table. That design gives us full history that can be queried efficiently for the most common cases. But it introduces an edge case worth addressing: what happens when two transactions tr...

If your primary goal is to buy the largest number of development hours at the lowest possible rate, you probably shouldn’t hire thoughtbot. That has probably always been true, but AI makes it a lot more obvious. Code is ridiculously easy to produce today. Good code is not, and good decisions definit...

For healthcare, fintech, pharma, insurance, and other regulated companies, implementation has gotten so much faster. What’s becoming even more valuable is judgment, knowing what to build, how fast to move, and where you can’t afford to be wrong. For a long time, one of the most common reactions to a...

We’re excited to bring the thoughtbot Tech Leaders Meetup back to Amsterdam this October. On October 6 at 6 pm CEST, we’ll be getting together at STACH café inside The Social Hub Amsterdam West for an informal evening of conversation, networking, drinks, and snacks. Our Tech Leaders Meetups are desi...

One sentence I’ve heard many times is: “Product Managers don’t need to be technical.” I agreed with it for years. I still do - I don’t think PMs need to code. But over the last couple of years, I’ve changed my mind about something else: I do think PMs need to build technical literacy. Not because de...

Healthcare can be a tough space for innovation. You want to move fast enough to stay competitive but not so fast that you compromise sensitive data, break compliance or build something you can’t maintain. It’s a tension that was highlighted in our recently commissioned industry research polled engin...

Using third-party component libraries like MUI, Ant Design, React Bootstrap, AG Grid, or Bryntum is a great way to move fast, especially for complex interactive elements like date pickers or interactive tables. There is a trade off though. It can be difficult to add custom styles or handle unique us...

Consulting leaves a lot of room for the expectation that you’ll have an answer on the spot. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, and sometimes I disagree with what I’m hearing. I’m not necessarily successful or famous for this. I’m not a maestro here trying to give you the truth about consulting. I am...

Fall is shaping up to be a busy season for thoughtbot. Over the next two months, thoughtbotters are speaking, attending, and hosting events across six cities on two continents. If you’re nearby, come find us. XO Ruby Vancouver, August 15, Vancouver, Canada XO Ruby Vancouver kicks things off. Fernand...

On most projects I’ve consulted on, status starts as a column. It works, until someone asks “who was denied last Tuesday?” and the schema can’t answer. At that point, you can’t retrofit history you never recorded. There’s a better way: model each status change as its own row from the start. You get ...

I want React server-side rendering to be easy. There aren’t a lot of React server-side rendering tools in the Rails world: React on Rails has the largest presence, but it has many bells and whistles that I’m not ready for. I could sidecar Node.js but I really don’t want another piece of infrastructu...

I think most organizations have a prototype problem. By the time they decide to build one, they’ve already aligned on the problem, secured funding, debated priorities, and maybe even started planning delivery. At that point, the prototype is only serving engineering. I think the most valuable protot...

We surveyed engineering, product, and technology leaders across US healthcare organizations to learn how teams are balancing speed, innovation, and risk. Move fast and break things may have been a popular mantra for startups, but the nature of healthcare software demands no room for breaking things ...