429: Transforming Experience Into Growth

Stephanie has a newfound interest in urban foraging for serviceberries in Chicago. Joël discusses how he uses AI tools like ChatGPT to generate creative Dungeons & Dragons character concepts and backstories, which sparks a broader conversation with Stephanie about AI's role in enhancing the creative process.

Together, the hosts delve into professional growth and experience, specifically how to leverage everyday work to foster growth as a software developer. They discuss the importance of self-reflection, note-taking, and synthesizing information to enhance learning and professional development. Stephanie shares her strategies for capturing weekly learnings, while Joël talks about his experiences using tools like Obsidian's mind maps to process and synthesize new information. This leads to a broader conversation on the value of active learning and how structured reflection can turn routine work experiences into meaningful professional growth.

• Obsidian
• Zettelkasten
• Mindmaps in Mermaid.js
• Module Docs episode
• Writing Quality Method docs blog post
• Notetaking for Developers episode
• Learning by Helping blog post

Transcript:

JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville.

STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way.

JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world?

STEPHANIE: So, as of today, while we record this, it's early June, and I have started foraging a little bit for what's called serviceberries, which is a type of tree/shrub that is native to North America. And I feel like it's just one of those, like, things that more people should know about because it makes these little, tiny, you know, delicious fruit that you can just pick off of the tree and have a little snack. And what's really cool about this tree is that, like I said, it's native, at least to where I'm from, and it's a pretty common, like, landscaping tree.

So, it has, like, really pretty white flowers in the spring and really beautiful, like, orange kind of foliage in the fall. So, they're everywhere, like, you can, at least where I'm at in Chicago, I see them a lot just out on the sidewalks. And whenever I'm taking a walk, I can just, yeah, like, grab a little fruit and have a little snack on them. It's such a delight. They are a really cool tree. They're great for birds. Birds love to eat the berries, too.

And yeah, a lot of people ask my partner, who's an arborist, like, if they're kind of thinking about doing something new with the landscaping at their house, they're like, "Oh, like, what are some things that I should plant?" And serviceberry is his recommendation. And now I'm sharing it with all of our Bike Shed listeners. If you've ever wondered about [laughs] a cool and environmentally beneficial tree [laughs] to add to your front yard, highly recommend, yeah, looking out for them, looking up what they look like, and maybe you also can enjoy some June foraging.

JOËL: That's interesting because it sounds like you're foraging in an urban environment, which is typically not what I associate with the idea of foraging.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a great point because I live in a city. I don't know, I take what I can get [laughs]. And I forget that you can actually forage for real out in, you know, nature and where there's not raccoons and garbage [laughs]. But yeah, I think I should have prefaced by kind of sharing that this is a way if you do live in a city, to practice some urban foraging, but I'm sure that these trees are also out in the world, but yeah, have proved useful in an urban environment as well.

JOËL: It's really fun that you don't have to, like, go out into the countryside to do this activity. It's a thing you can do in the environment that you live in.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, that was one of the really cool things that I got into the past couple of years is seeing, even though I live in a city, there's little pieces of nature around me that I can engage with and picking fruit off of people's [inaudible 03:18] [laughs], like, not people's, but, like, parkway trees. Yeah, the serviceberry is also a pretty popular one here that's planted in the Chicago parks. So, yeah, it's just been like, I don'...