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Songwriting For Songwriters

The Muse Production Company

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Welcome to the 'Songwriters For Songwriting' podcast with your host and songwriter Elijah. If you love songwriting or you are a music fan this podcast is for you. Each episode Elijah speaks with a fantastic songwriter about their songs, their songwriting process, their career, the stories behind their songs, the muse, influences, what it's like to be a songwriter, life, love the universe and more. Each episode is a relaxed deep dive into the art of songwriting, music, life and everything in- ...
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On The Bike Shed, hosts Joël Quenneville and Stephanie Minn discuss development experiences and challenges at thoughtbot with Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and whatever else is drawing their attention, admiration, or ire this week.
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Surrealist Pictures is a production company and video content producer. We have production experience on everything from films and concerts to social media promotional video. Join us on our podcast Lost in Hyperspace where we talk about all things media and film related. Also be sure and check us out on our website as well as Facebook and Twitter for more information about the company.
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Jamie Catto - Episode 5 Jamie is a British musician, video director, photographer, author and creativity coach. He was a founding member of Faithless and co-created some of their most loved material including No.2 global smash 'Insomnia'. He then went onto form 1 Giant Leap collaborating with a diverse range of artists from Robbie Williams, Michael…
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Have you ever wondered how improvisation can revolutionize coding? In today’s episode, Stephanie sits down with Kasper Timm Hansen to discuss his innovative “riffing” approach to code development. Kasper is a long-time Ruby developer and former member of the Rails core team. He focuses on Ruby and domain modeling, developing various Ruby gems, and …
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Brave Rival - Episode 4 - Season 2 Elijah is joined today by Chloe and Lindsey from Brave Rival a multi-award nominated fast-rising, rip-roaring, classic rock juggernaut ready to take their place in the upper echelons of British Rock hierarchy. "They’re a great band. I love the music. I love what they are doing...one of my favourite new discoveries…
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The term ‘nil’ refers to the absence of value, but we often imbue it with much more meaning than just that. Today, hosts Joël and Stephanie discuss the various ways we tend to project extra semantics onto nil and the implications of this before unpacking potential alternatives and trade-offs. Joël and Stephanie highlight some of the key ways progra…
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Stephanie shares her newfound interest in naming conventions, highlighting a resource called "Classnames" that provides valuable names for programming and design. Joël, in turn, talks about using AI to generate names for D&D characters, emphasizing how AI can help provide inspiration and reasoning behind name suggestions. Then, they shift to Joël's…
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Elles Bailey - Episode 3 - Season 2 Elijah speaks to Elles about her upcoming new record, life as a songwriter, her career and journey so far, her influences, her Planet Rock radio show and more. Elles Bailey is an English blues roots, rock singer, songwriter, and pianist. She has recorded three studio albums including her debut album Wildfire in 2…
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Stephanie and Joël discuss the recent announcement of the call for proposals for RubyConf in November. Joël is working on his proposals and encouraging his colleagues at thoughtbot to participate, while Stephanie is excited about the conference being held in her hometown of Chicago! The conversation shifts to Stephanie's recent work, including comp…
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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 professio…
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Clive Stafford Smith OBE - Episode 2 - Season 2 This weeks podcast is in 3 parts with different guests. 1 -Clive Stafford - Smith OBE British attorney who specializes in the areas of civil rights and working against the death penalty in the United States of America. He worked to overturn death sentences for convicts, and helped found the not-for-pr…
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Joël explains his note-taking system, which he uses to capture his beliefs and thoughts about software development. Stephanie recalls feedback from her recent RailsConf talk, where her confidence stemmed from deeply believing in her material despite limited rehearsal. This leads to a conversation about the value of mental models in building a compr…
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David Joseph (Held By Trees) - Episode 1 - Season 2 Held By Trees is the collaborative vehicle for David Joseph, a recording artist, producer and multi-instrumentalist. Held By Trees arrived with debut album Solace in spring 2022 to global critical acclaim and a unique story. Not many artists can claim direct DNA from their chief influences, but on…
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Joël and Stephanie talk RailsConf!. Joël shares how he performed as a D&D character, Glittersense the gnome, to make his Turbo features talk entertaining and interactive. Stephanie's talk focused on addressing test pain by connecting it to code coupling, offering practical insights and solutions. They agree on the importance of continuous improveme…
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Joël shares his preparations for his RailsConf talk, which is D&D-themed and centered around a gnome character named Glittersense. Stephanie expresses her delight in creating pod-related puns within thoughtbot's internal team structure, like "cross-podination" for inter-pod meetings and the adorable observation that her pod resembles "three peas in…
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Stephanie shares an intriguing discovery about the origins of design patterns in software, tracing them back to architect Christopher Alexander's ideas in architecture. Joël is an official member of the Boston bike share system, and he loves it. He even got a notification on the app this week: "Congratulations. You have now visited 10% of all docki…
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Joël shares his experience with the dry-rb suite of gems, focusing on how he's been using contracts to validate input data. Stephanie relates to Joël's insights with her preparation for RailsConf, discussing her methods for presenting code in slides and weighing the aesthetics and functionality of different tools like VS Code and Carbon.sh. She als…
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Stephanie is back with a book recommendation: "Thinking in Systems" by Donella Meadows. This book has helped to bolster her understanding of complex systems in environmental, organizational, and software contexts, particularly through user interactions and system changes. Joël describes his transformative experience watching last week's total solar…
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Joël conducted a thoughtbot mini-workshop on query plans, which Stephanie found highly effective due to its interactive format. They then discuss the broader value of interactive workshops over traditional talks for deeper learning. Addressing listener questions, Stephanie and Joël explore the strategic use of if and else in programming for clearer…
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Stephanie revisits the concept of "spiking"—a phase of exploration to determine the feasibility of a technical implementation or to address unknowns in feature requests—sharing her recent experiences with a legacy Rails application. Joël brings a different perspective by discussing his involvement with a client project that heavily utilizes the dry…
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Joël shares his recent project challenge with Tailwind CSS, where classes weren't generating as expected due to the dynamic nature of Tailwind's CSS generation and pruning. Stephanie introduces a personal productivity tool, a "thinking cap," to signal her thought process during meetings, which also serves as a physical boundary to separate work fro…
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Stephanie introduces her ideal setup for enjoying coffee on a bike ride. Joël describes his afternoon tea ritual. Exciting news from the hosts: both have been accepted to speak at RailsConf! Stephanie's presentation, titled "So, Writing Tests Feels Painful. What now?" aims to tackle the issues developers encounter with testing while offering action…
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Joël talks about his difficulties optimizing queries in ActiveRecord, especially with complex scopes and unions, resulting in slow queries. He emphasizes the importance of optimizing subqueries in unions to boost performance despite challenges such as query duplication and difficulty reusing scopes. Stephanie discusses upgrading a client's app to R…
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Stephanie shares about her vacation at Disney World, particularly emphasizing the technological advancements in the park's mobile app that made her visit remarkably frictionless. Joël had a conversation about a topic he loves: units of measure, and he got to go deep into the idea of dimensional analysis with someone this week. Together, Joël and St…
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Joël discusses the challenges he encountered while optimizing slow SQL queries in a non-Rails application. Stephanie shares her experience with canary deploys in a Rails upgrade. Together, Stephanie and Joël address a listener's question about replacing the wkhtml2pdf tool, which is no longer maintained. The episode's main topic revolves around the…
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Stephanie has a delightful and cute Ruby thing to share: Honeybadger, the error monitoring service, has created exceptionalcreatures.com, where they've illustrated and characterized various common Ruby errors into little monsters, and they're adorable. Meanwhile, Joël encourages folks to submit proposals for RailsConf. Together, Stephanie and Joël …
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Joël shares his recent experience with Turbo, a JavaScript framework that simplifies adding interactivity to websites without extensive JavaScript coding. Stephanie gives an update on her quest to work from her office more, and the birds have arrived—most notably, chickadees. Stephanie and Joël address a listener question from Edward about the conc…
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Stephanie shares her task of retiring a small, internally-used link-shortening app. She describes the process as both celebratory and a bit mournful. Meanwhile, Joël discusses his deep dive into ActiveRecord, particularly in the context of debugging. He explores the complexities of ActiveRecord querying schemas and the additional latency this intro…
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Joël shares a unique, time-specific bug he encountered, which causes a page to crash only in January. This bug has been fixed in previous years, only to reemerge due to subsequent changes. Stephanie talks about her efforts to bring more structure to her work-from-home environment. She describes how setting up a bird feeder near her desk and keeping…
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Stephanie is hosting a holiday cookie swap. Joël talks about participating in thoughtbot's end-of-the-year hackathon, Ralphapalooza. We had a great year on the show! The hosts wrap up the year and discuss their favorite episodes, the articles, books, and blog posts they’ve read and loved, and other highlights of 2023 (projects, conferences, etc). O…
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Joël shares his experiences with handling JSON in a Postgres database. He talks about his challenges with ActiveRecord and JSONB columns, particularly the unexpected behavior of storing and retrieving JSON data. Stephanie shares her recent discovery of bookmarklets and highlights a bookmarklet named "Check This Out," which streamlines searching for…
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Stephanie recommends "Blue Eye Samurai" and a new ceramic pot (donabe) for cooking. Joël talks about the joy of holding a warm beverage in a unique mug. Stephanie discusses her shift to a part-time support and maintenance role at thoughtbot, contrasting it with her full-time development work. She highlights the importance of communication, document…
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Mark Tucker is a producer, composer and recording engineer. With over 20 years in the music industry working with artists such as Portishead, PJ Harvey, Jethro Tull, Fairport Convention, Frank Turner, Ian Gillan and many many more. Mark is also Creative Director & in house producer at ARC Studios. Having built a number of successful professional re…
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The Songwriters Handbook by Elijah Wolfe, host of the podcast 'Songwriting For Songwriters' is out now on Amazon. The book is an interactive book packed with 52 themes and subjects for you songwriters and creative writers to muse over and find a seed or a spark of an idea for a new song, lyric or piece of creative writing. It's engaging and easy re…
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Joël recaps his time at RubyConf! He shares insights from his talk about different aspects of time in software development, emphasizing the interaction with the audience and the importance of post-talk discussions. Stephanie talks about wrapping up a long-term client project, the benefits of change and variety in consulting, and maintaining a balan…
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Jinder is is best known for his extensive catalogue of dark folk- and country-influenced solo work, including his 2019 Top 40 single, 'Keep Me in Your Heart', which features in the 2019 film Fisherman's Friends and has been successfully covered by many other artists. He is also known for his brief tenure as the frontman of the Mercurymen. In this e…
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Stephanie interviews Edward Loveall, a former thoughtbotter, now software developer at Relevant Healthcare. Part of their discussion centers around Edward's blog post on the tech industry's over-reliance on GitHub. He argues for the importance of exploring alternatives to avoid dependency on a single platform and encourages readers to make informed…
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With emotive soul, woozy synths, warm harmonies, lo-fi electronics, and softly strummed guitars, British multi-hyphenate artist James Alexander Bright dreams of open spaces, warm surroundings, and a place to find comfort and peace both inside and out. Based in the Hampshire countryside and an illustrator by day, James’ creative duality lends a visu…
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Joël got to do some pretty fancy single sign-on work. And when it came time to commit, he documented the ridiculous number of redirects to give people a sense of what was happening. Stephanie has been exploring Rails callbacks and Ruby debugging tools, using methods like save_callbacks and Kernel.caller, and creating a function call graph to better…
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Mark Davidson is a songwriter, musician, musicologist and lead archivist of The Bob Dylan Centre in Tulsa. He has just written and curated with co-writer Parker Fishel, a new book BOB DYLAN: MIXING UP THE MEDICINE an unprecedented glimpse into the creative life of one of America's most groundbreaking, influential and enduring artists. This monument…
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Stephanie discovered a new book: The Staff Engineer's Path! Joël's got some D&D goodness. Together, they revisit a decade-old blog post initially published in 2013, which discussed the application of Sandi Metz's coding guidelines and whether these rules remain relevant and practiced among developers today. The Manager’s Path The Staff Engineer’s P…
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Thea Gilmore has been making intensely personal, socially aware music to considerable acclaim in her homeland since she was a teenager. London’s Independent regards her as “the best wordsmith of her generation.” Uncut labeled Gilmore “the best British singer/songwriter of the last ten years - and then some.” Thea is about to release a self-titled n…
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When an artist’s resume boasts of a pedigree like that of Yolanda’s – from Top 40 Pop, soul, rock, jazz, studio recordings, film soundtracks, TV shows, and from stadium tours to intimate jazz club engagements, it’s obvious that we are talking about one of the most well respected, in demand, creative and eclectic, multi-genre talents working in musi…
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The Scribes are an award-winning Alternative Hip Hop group that have been making music for over a decade now. There unique off the cuff freestyling, and genre-spanning sound has formed a fan base and musical chemistry like no other; with their appeal spanning far beyond the confines of traditional Hip Hop. Known for critically acclaimed live perfor…
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Joël was selected to speak at RubyConf in San Diego! After spending a month testing out living in Upstate New York, Stephanie is back in Chicago. Stephanie reflects on a recent experience where she had to provide an estimate for a project, even though she didn't have enough information to do so accurately. In this episode, Stephanie and Joël explor…
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Episode 29 - Mutter Slater Mutter Slater played harmonica, flute and sang as a member of the influential British band Stackridge beginning in 1970s. Stackridge were the first band to play and headline the world famous Glastonbury Festival. Although often categorized as a progressive rock band, their sound included themes of folk, the blues and psyc…
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Episode 28 - Chris Potter Chris Potter is a BRIT Award winning and Grammy nominated producer and mixer, best known for his work on The Verve's #1 seminal album 'Urban Hymns', which features the classic singles 'Bittersweet Symphony' (2 billion streams), 'Lucky Man' (300 million streams), 'Sonnet' (100 million) and the #1 single 'The Drugs Don't Wor…
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Episode 27 - Danny McNamara (Embrace) Danny McNamara is frontman and songwriter in Embrace. Their debut album ‘The Good Will Out’ went to Number 1 on the UK albums chart and since then Danny and Embrace have had an amazing career with the original line-up still in place. Danny and Elijah speak about his songwriting, the pressure he put on himself a…
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Stephanie is engrossed in Kent Beck's Substack newsletter, which she appreciates for its "working thoughts" format. Unlike traditional media that undergo rigorous editing, Kent's content is more of a work-in-progress, focusing on thought processes and evolving ideas. Joël has been putting a lot of thought into various tools and techniques and reali…
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Episode 26 - Youth Born Martin Glover, Youth is a multi award winning, legendary music producer, fine artist, songwriter, remixer and bass player of the seminal post-punk band Killing Joke. With a staggering 20 million records sold worldwide, Youth’s career spans over three decades and shows no sign of slowing down. The music he makes has inspired …
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Joël describes an old-school object orientation exercise that involves circling nouns in a business problem description. The purpose is determining which nouns could become entities or objects in a system. Stephanie shares she's working from the Hudson Valley in New York as a trial run for potentially relocating there. She enjoys the rail trails fo…
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