Thoughtbot

This weeks article is going to be about a blog that I consider to be a mentor. That blog is Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots [https://robots.thoughtbot.com]. It is written by different people at the company thoughtbot [https://thoughtbot.com/].

I really like this blog. Out of all of the resources that I have on the internet for programming, I turn to it first. They develop mainly in Ruby on Rails which is what I mainly use too. They also share pretty much every step of their development process.

They write books documenting their best practices as well as new techniques. I am actually reading through their new employee handbook because I find it interesting to see how they develop new software. Obviously since I program as a team of one, a lot of their team processes don’t make sense for me. But I still read them because I think they will come in handy when I start looking for a job as a programmer.

They don’t just write books and blogs though. They also write and release code on github [https://github.com/thoughtbot]. High quality code that is used by a lot of people. I actually started using one of their projects before I realized it was a project of theirs. I started using factory girl [https://github.com/thoughtbot/factory_girl_rails] in my tests because I find it easier to use in rails than fixtures.

So tl;dr for this post is that Thoughtbot rocks!