On this week's episode, Chris and Steph share a speedy step to restart your rails server and chat about accessibility improvements and favorite a11y tools. They also dive into a tale of database switching and delight in a new Rails query method that returns orphaned records.
Restart Rails server via tmp/restart.txt (https://twitter.com/christoomey/status/1387799863929212931?s=20)
WebAIM: Constrast Checker (https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/)
IBM Equal Access Accessibility Checker (https://www.ibm.com/able/toolkit)
axe™ DevTools (https://www.deque.com/axe/browser-extensions/)
AccessLint (https://accesslint.com/)
Assistiv Labs (https://assistivlabs.com/)
An introduction to macOS Head Pointer (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/an-introduction-to-macos-head-pointer)
Rails date_select (https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/DateHelper.html#method-i-date_select)
Rails strong_migrations (https://github.com/ankane/strong_migrations)
Ruby RBS (https://github.com/ruby/rbs)
Sorbet - Ruby Type Checker (https://sorbet.org/)
Scout APM (https://scoutapm.com/)
Rails 6.1 adds query method missing to find orphan records (https://blog.saeloun.com/2020/01/21/rails-6-1-adds-query-method-missing-to-find-orphan-records.html)
Transcript:
STEPH: People put microphones in front of us. That is their fault, not ours. We just show up. Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari.
CHRIS: I'm Chris Toomey.
STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. Hey Chris, happy Friday.
CHRIS: Happy Friday.
STEPH: How's your week been?
CHRIS: It's been great. I did something that is wildly overdue, but I got a new chair and one day in. But it's also a very familiar chair because it's basically the same -- I think it's the same model as we had at the thoughtbot office. And it's nice to have a chair that is reasonable. And I think my old chair was maybe ten years old or something, deeply embarrassing and absurd like that for such a critical piece of infrastructure in my house.
STEPH: I mean, I guess depending on if it's a good chair. I don't know what the lifespan is of a good chair. [laughs]
CHRIS: I would not describe it as such.
STEPH: [laughs]
CHRIS: I think it was like $100 at Staples. It was a fine chair. It served me well for many years. I'm very slow and cautious with what I consider to be large-scale purchases. I hate the idea of having a thing that I've spent a bunch of money on, but I don't actually like. And these are very solvable problems. But I just tend to drag my feet and over-research and do all those sorts of things. And so finally I was just like, nope, we're going to get a chair, got a chair. Cool. Now I have a chair, and it's good. It's got all of the adjustments, which is what makes it very nice. I'd say Steelcase Leap is the model for anyone that's interested.
STEPH: That's funny. I tend to do the same thing. I tend to drag my feet until I get desperate enough that then I'm forced to make a decision and buy something. I do have an oddly specific question. Do you like chairs with or without the arms?
CHRIS: Oh, with the arms.
STEPH: Really?
CHRIS: Yeah.
STEPH: I am team, no arms.
CHRIS: Where do your arms go if there are no arms to put on the chair?
STEPH: They're always on my lap or on my keyboard. So I just don't rest them on the armrest.
CHRIS: Interesting. I feel like that would put -- I've definitely had small bouts of RSI strain fatigue in my forearms. And so I'm very purposeful with how I'm bracing my wrists. I have a little wrist rest that I put my hands on when I'm using my keyboard because the keyboard is slightly raised up because I have a nonsense mechanical keyboard, of course.
STEPH: Delightful, not nonsense.
CHRIS: Yeah, I love it. I would never trade that in, but I have to make it work and not actually sacrifice my body for a clackety keyboard. [chuckles] But yeah, I think I need some more support for my arms; otherwise, there's too much pressure on my wrists, and things are breaking at weird angles, and that's been my experience. I'm intrigued by the free-flying no arms on the chair approach that you're talking about. This particular model has nine degrees of freedom on the armrest. So I'm able to bring them in and forward and at the exact right height so that they perfectly meet my arm where it would naturally be, and that seems good. That seems like the thing that I want.
STEPH: That makes a lot of sense. But yeah, I'm team no arms. Every time I have them, I can't get them at the right comfortable spot. And I like the freedom of where I can quickly get up and out of my chair and not have arms in the way, which sounds like a very small improvement in my life, but yet it's what I want.
CHRIS: I just like the idea of you sitting there and being like, I need to be able to make a quick escape at any moment; who know