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 ...

We just released @thoughtbot/react-native-social-auth; a modern Google Sign-In library for React Native built on top of Android’s Credential Manager and the current GoogleSignIn-iOS SDK. It ships with a Google-branding-compliant button component, a first-party Expo config plugin, and a TypeScript-fi...

One of the perks of being in the thoughtbot universe is that we meet a ton of people building cool things, and many of them are startup founders, mentors or advisors. Lately, we’ve chatted with them about how they’re using AI tools for startups, both where AI adds value and where they’re seeing risk...

IT and software leaders at healthcare organizations are feeling the pressure to deliver software faster while maintaining compliance and reliability. Our recent healthcare software delivery research (coming soon!) found that 68% of organizations struggle to increase software delivery velocity withou...

For more than a decade, Upcase was where thoughtbot taught Ruby on Rails. You’d work through a trail, get stuck, watch one of us solve the same problem, and come out a little sharper. Thousands of developers used it to take “junior” out of their title. We don’t say that lightly. In 2018, we transiti...

This week’s episode is a radical one, let’s Muppet-cast a software development team!

I have been working on an app that still sits on React Native 0.77 and the old architecture. Slowly, as I was getting a grip on the new architecture, one of the first big refactors was related to the navigation. We were using JavaScript stack navigators, so the plan was to move everything over to na...

The London Ruby User Group’s July meetup is this Monday, 13 July at 6:00pm at GoCardless’s offices near Farringdon and Barbican tube stations. Former-thoughtbotter Ismael Celis will talk about reactive command-oriented apps in Ruby, followed by me (Fritz Meissner) on fixing long-standing flakiness i...

Sally and Joël join forces to discuss the different ways to interpret the role of a ‘principle’ or ‘staff’ engineer, and the handwaving around what those titles mean in terms of the gradation.

We wanted to illustrate the difference between a vibe coded website and what a thoughtbot designer can produce. We also wanted to highlight the risk vibe coding poses to your business. So to demonstrate these points, we redesigned a vibe coded professional services website. Below are the before and ...

Roux is thoughtbot’s new CSS framework, created by Elaina Natario. Roux is being used by thoughtbotters and non-thoughtbot contributors. It’s simple and modern and we love it. But we still had an itch Roux didn’t scratch. thoughtbot developers and designers are looking for a component library we can...

With our 23rd anniversary happening this year, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what should happen to thoughtbot after I’m gone, and what the next generation of thoughtbot ownership and governance looks like. The most common path for companies like ours is to be sold to another consulting com...

Aji and Joël discuss graph and tree structures, their connection to the emergent properties, attributes and qualities found from a largely connected group of data.

You know the drill if you’ve validated the same rule on a few attributes. One presence validation is one matcher, and five of them turn into five nearly identical lines that don’t tell the next reader much: it { is_expected.to validate_presence_of(:first_name) } it { is_expected.to validate_presence...

Recently I stopped a group of flaky tests from running in CI. 60% of CI runs were failing because of this group, which was unsustainable. Three weeks later I was able to restore that group to CI, with 0% failures on main1 resulting. Our “non-flaky” tests now give more false positives than the (previ...

Playwright ships with a black-box recorder that records every detail of every test, giving you a treasure trove of information for debugging flaky tests. Most Rails apps I’ve worked on don’t use it. It’s called the Trace Viewer, and if you’re running Capybara with Playwright via playwright-ruby-clie...

Brighton Ruby 2026 will take place in a few days and the thoughtbot team will be there to meet you all in real life, learn from all the great talks, and enjoy a day by the English coast. We love Brighton Ruby and enjoyed it for many years. It is a single-day, single-track conference packed with grea...