The Bike Shed

273: Revisiting 2019, A Top 10 Review

thoughtbot — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 00:15:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris begin wrapping up 2020 with a review of their 2019 top 10 list. They share what's changed, what's stayed the same, and what they'd like to see more of in the coming year.

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272: Hacking the Gibson

thoughtbot — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:15:00 -0500

In this week's episode, Chris undertakes long-running background jobs that are performing duplicate work and adding significant load on the database. Steph shares her initial take of the book "Soul of a New Machine", a non-fiction account that chronicles the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s.

They also dive into the question "how can teams turn a slow, hard to maintain test suite from a liability into an asset?" and touch on how to identify highly-functioning teams.

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271: Is That Your Final Answer?

thoughtbot — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 00:15:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Chris describes his continued explorations with Svelte specifically bringing TypeScript into the mix. Steph discusses the first cohort for the RSpec training and some related testing questions around third party APIs. They round things out with a listener question about managing permissions and roles, with a brief detour around single table inheritance vs polymorphic associations. Oh, and Steph rented goats to mow her lawn. 🐐

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270: Both Nothing and Deeply Special

thoughtbot — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 00:15:00 -0500

In this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss redirecting requests for various hostnames to one canonical host, creating student personas to improve educational content, and walking away from failing tests. They also embark on a Hollywood themed tour of RSpec mocks, stubs, and spies, when to use each approach, and discuss the types of tests they do (or do not) write.

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269: Things are Knowable (Gary Bernhardt)

thoughtbot — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 00:15:00 -0500

Steph's taking a quick break this week, but while she's away, Chris is joined by special guest Gary Bernhardt. Gary is the creator of Destroy All Software screencasts as well as his more recent venture, Execute Program. Between Execute Program, his screencasts, conference talks, and more Gary has consistently provided some of the highest quality and most impactful educational content around building great software and has been a huge inspiration to the hosts of this show.

In the episode, Chris and Gary discuss Gary's recent work with TypeScript and how it compares with Gary's focus on testing, they revisit some of Gary's ideas around software architecture and how they map to his current work, Gary's thoughts around the value of knowing our tools deeply, and the trade-offs between careful upfront design and shipping early and often.

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268: Getting Your First-Through-N Jobs

thoughtbot — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 00:15:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Steph discusses the value of conducting student research when creating course content and Chris revisits a recent architecture decision to use Svelt and Inertia. They also explore the challenges developers face in acquiring their first job and share insights for those looking for their next big role.

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267: Shiny New Things

thoughtbot — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 00:15:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Steph describes her unique new project where they're building and presenting a training course around RSpec, testing, and TDD specific to an organization's codebase. Chris then runs some architecture choices by Steph to discuss a collection of new technologies he's considering, and more generally how we think about our experimentation budget.

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266: Spring is My Least Favorite Season

thoughtbot — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph share mixed-feelings about Spring preloader and how to use Spring just for tests. They also dive into troubleshooting an OpenSSL error, Postgres generated columns, and creating moments of contentment.

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265: There Are No Free Lunches

thoughtbot — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris chat about database transactions and job queues, building static sites with GatsbyJS and NetlifyCMS, the performance impacts of front end frameworks and static content, and lastly they catch up on Hacktoberfest and the complexities of encouraging and supporting work in open source.

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264: How to Win Friends and Influence Processes

thoughtbot — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode Steph and Chris discuss the ins and outs of joining teams, building trust, and working together to improve processes and communication. They also touch on some lesser used features of bundler, and revisit a discussion around Rails maintenance periods thanks to some listener feedback.

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263: Keeping The Night Brain At Bay (Dave Rupert)

thoughtbot — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 00:15:00 -0400

Steph's taking a quick break this week, but in her absence, Chris is joined by Dave Rupert. Dave is the lead developer at Paravel, co-host of the Shop Talk Show podcast, creator of The Accessibility Project, and an all-around prolific and thoughtful maker of digital things.

Chris and Dave chat about creating and sharing content like podcasts and blogs and how to get past your inner editor. They discuss the web platform and accessibility, and finally, they round out the conversation with a chat about design systems as an intersection between design and development.

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262: Good Idea, Terrible Idea?

thoughtbot — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris introduces a new segment called "Good Idea, Terrible Idea?" as he considers introducing a read-only mode to avoid interrupting users during scheduled downtime. Steph has started a new project and explores the idea of merging separate, but similar, applications into one codebase.

They also dive into micro-service environments to discuss the difficulties of integration testing and potential strategies.

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261: A Jenga Tower of Lets and Context

thoughtbot — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle a listener question around composition over inheritance, especially in the context of Rails which makes regular use of inheritance. Dependency injection, OOP vs FP, frameworks vs app code -- they hit it all!

They also chat about burnout and how they've dealt with it, using jq to investigate differences between json responses, refactoring tests and using let, and Steph shares her recent learnings about graphviz.

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Getting Back to Work by Carl Reyes
"If you're feeling down lately, here's a quick test to figure out why" tweet
jq (command-line JSON processor)
lets not
graphviz
Composition over Inheritance on Upcase
React hooks, composition

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260: N+1s For Days

thoughtbot — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris shares a tale of performance improvements and a recent discussion about replacing a REST API with GraphQL. Steph dives into migrating a database column to restrict input and dropping database columns safely. They also discuss when to abstract code (a topic that surprisingly, they may not agree on) and running "Unused" to identify dead code.

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259: That's Not How Numbers Work

thoughtbot — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle the thorny topic of 10X engineers. Do we think they really exist? What characteristics make an individual more effective, and more importantly, what can they do for a team?

To round out the conversation, they chat about rewrites and when they do and don't make sense, Ruby 2.7 keyword argument deprecation warnings, and a listener question revisiting Ruby popularity and what languages would we learn if we couldn't write Ruby anymore.

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Ruby 2.7 Deprecates Conversion Of Keyword Arguments
GitHub - Upgrading GitHub to Ruby 2.7
Matz -- New 2.7/3.0 keyword argument pain point
warnings gem
Bike Shed 217 -- we answer "encouraging companies to use Ruby and Rails and asking how we identify ourselves as developers"
Bike Shed 208 -- we answer "what makes Rails successful?"
Bike Shed 234 -- we answer "the complex tradeoffs between craft, preferences, and business needs"
GitHub Survey - Top Languages
Stack Overflow survey - Programming Languages
Google Trends - Dynamic Programming Languages
2020 Ruby on Rails Community Survey Results
Ruby on Rails Podcast - 2020 Ruby on Rails Community Survey with Robby Russell
Rust - Are we web yet?
10x engineer thread from 2019
Alice Goldfuss twitter thread on honesty in teams

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258: Digital Gardeners

thoughtbot — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss a git-blame feature that supports bypassing less helpful commits. They also revisit a discussion about Dependabot PRs and recent performance adjustments, sharing which strategies worked and which ones didn't. They also discuss the dreaded three-state boolean, designing a system for cacheability, and using Ruby's magic comment to freeze string literals.

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257: How Late On a Friday Can You Deploy?

thoughtbot — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph & Chris take a deep dive into all things technical debt. How do you know when your code has reached "good enough"? When might we purposefully knowingly take on technical debt? How do we tackle existing technical debt without halting new development? How can we tell high-interest, hair on fire debt from "ehh, it's fine" debt that we can let lie? Tune in to find out!

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256: Rational Pessimism

thoughtbot — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris shares his recent adventures of working with a team that prioritizes async-first communication and Steph revisits a previous discussion around the use of web sockets and optimistic user interfaces. They also dive into the classically hard question "should we rewrite the app?" and share survival tips for learning to type on a split keyboard.

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255: Aiming for 'Capable'

thoughtbot — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris chat about the relatively new Rails view_component library from GitHub, Steph talks about her work with Storybook as part of extracting and defining a design system, and they chat about the attr_extras project with convenience helpers for ruby & Rails apps. They round out the conversation with some keyboard updates (ErgoDox onramp is steep!) and project rotation notes.

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254: Listener Mailbag Roundup Rodeo

thoughtbot — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph celebrates passing an important test and discovers an API that returns different data than it's provided while Chris asks the important bikeshed question "What is the proper maximum line length?".

They also roundup the latest listener questions and discuss establishing freelancing rates, property-based testing, and time tracking skills that help them manage competing priorities.

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253: Find Yourself Through The Art of Podcast

thoughtbot — Tue, 21 Jul 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris have a brief chat about Snowpack, a new and ultra-speedy bundler in the front-end world, and revisit a conversation around namespacing models in Rails. The conversation then shifts to a discussion of the ins and outs of hosting a podcast and how folks might be able to dive in if they're interested in starting one themselves -- from selecting topics, to the hardware and software they use, to the guiding philosophy in how to discuss technical concepts.

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252: I'm a Designer Now

thoughtbot — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss leveraging the Unix utility sed to search files and remove unnecessary test setup, using Vim's Arglist to create a to-do list for file edits, and budgeting time for fancy command-line scripts. They then take a deep dive into the world of utility-first CSS and TailwindCSS.

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251: Absent-Minded Whistling

thoughtbot — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss using JSONB to store survey responses and the differences between JSON and JSONB, using (or not using!) exceptions in Ruby and the fail keyword, the pros and cons of namespacing models in Rails to organize features, and a new recommendation for running tests from vim.

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Seagull Mic Drop
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JSON types in Postgres
Ruby fail keyword
Avdi Grimm and Jim Weirich on exceptions
The Zen of Python
Idris programming language

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250: To Infinity and Beyond

thoughtbot — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss the importance of using inclusive language, branching into new branch names, and strategies that encourage the use of inclusive terminology. Chris also shares his latest experience with merging two systems that were split apart back into one system, tackling conflicting foreign keys and competing auth libraries. Steph discusses using polling vs web sockets to monitor work being completed in a background job and communicating to the user the various states of success and failure.

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249: What Would You Say You Do Here?

thoughtbot — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris trade some consulting and everyone comes out a winner. Steph talks about a win and a loss on the battlefield of refactoring, and Chris shares a related effort around identifying and removing unused code. Chris shares a pattern his team has been using with a special "demo" flag to provide small enhancements but otherwise keep sales demos within the product.

Steph then shares some friction related to using dependabot on her team's project that hints at more foundational ideas at the intersection of workflow, team dynamics, testing, deployment. And finally, Chris asks Steph for her thoughts on how best to add testing around the structure of API responses.

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Coverband for production code coverage
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Say no to more process, say yes to trust
One electron theory

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248: Here Be Dragons

thoughtbot — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph shares a keyboard confession and interest in migrating to a split keyboard layout. Chris dives into creating static error pages that are independent of the app while still leveraging the app's CSS framework. They also respond to a listener question about Conventional Commits and discuss when automation tooling feels helpful vs harmful.

ErgoDox EZ Keyboard
Keyboardio Atreus
Tailwind CSS
PurgeCSS
CSS Used Chrome Extension
Conventional Commits
SemVer
semantic-release
husky
GitHub Issue and Pull Request Templates

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247: Acronyms By Moonlight

thoughtbot — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss potential approaches to a complex client-side workflow, Chris shares the highs and lows of his recent adventures revising the caching in a REST API, Steph shares an Ember testing pro-tip and then explores the questions it brings up, and lastly, they revisit prettier-ruby and it's fantastic configuration setup.

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246: A True Movement (Pariss Athena)

thoughtbot — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 00:15:00 -0400

We are pausing our normal tech-talk this week in support of the ongoing protests and to re-share the #BlackTechTwitter episode with Pariss Athena from our sister podcast, Giant Robots.

During the past week, millions of people across the country have participated in protests in response to the killing of George Floyd and the systemic racism that plagues our nation.

For everyone fighting for equality and justice, we see you, we love you, and we support you. Black lives matter. Black culture matters. Black communities matter.

For those looking for ways to take action, we have provided a few resources in the show notes. The list is intentionally short as we ask everyone to research ways to get involved and listen to leaders in the Black community.

Fighting for equality falls on each of us, regardless of race or position, to work together to fight racism and unequal treatment.

Stay Safe.

Original Notes from Giant Robots Episode 343

Pariss Athena, Hiring & Product Team Member at G2i, creator of #BlackTechTwitter, and founder of Black Tech Pipeline, shares her journey from never hearing about code to viral awareness campaign creator, as well as discusses visibility, finding value on twitter, and life online with thousands of followers.

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245: Developer Therapy (German Velasco)

thoughtbot — Wed, 27 May 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph is joined by thoughtbotter German Velasco. German and Steph chat about remote work and the rewards and challenges of their new(ish) roles as Development Team Leads. German also shares that he is writing a book! German shares his approach for defining a MVB (Minimum Viable Book), ideas for how to collect feedback, and plans for publishing. Lastly, they discuss a vim plugin that lives up to the hype.

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244: Existential JavaScript

thoughtbot — Tue, 19 May 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph troubleshoots a mysterious Ember test failure that can't find a visible element, and Chris recounts an exciting three-act adventure that spans N+1 queries, caching, and SQL window functions. Steph also touches on upgrading to Ember Octane and Glimmer components and Chris shares a new helpful tool for drawing architecture diagrams.

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243: I'm Not a Couch Worker

thoughtbot — Tue, 12 May 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris shares his recent explorations of railway oriented programming (hint: not what you think!) while doing his best to avoid words like "monad" and "functor" (he does not succeed in this effort). Steph updates on her quest for the ultimate personal note taking app and some misadventures in DNS and networking, and they touch on their shared search for ergonomics in the home office world we all live in these days.

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242: As Few Consonants as Possible

thoughtbot — Tue, 05 May 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week’s episode, Chris and Steph share their excitement for Roam Research and formatting Ruby with Prettier Ruby. They also discuss writing test coverage for an important GDPR process, embracing async communication, and share their preferred strategies for knowledge sharing within teams and the broader community.

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241: What If We Just Put a Phone Number?

thoughtbot — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode Steph and Chris dig into MVP thinking and asking how we can write as little code as possible before finding out if any user will actually want the thing we're building.

They also tackle a listener question around Vim and the general ROI on honing our developer tools, discuss some of the subtleties of HTTP and forms as well as the difficulties when half of our UI is in React and the other half Rails, and lastly chat a bit about their adaptation to full-time remote work.

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240: A Framework in Motion Tends to Stay in Motion

thoughtbot — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss troubleshooting a race condition, trusting your intuition and pessimistic locks. They also touch briefly on TailWind CSS before diving deep into first impressions of Inertia.js.

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239: Admins All the Way Down

thoughtbot — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss what it really means to make a project "open source". Is it just about making the code publicly available, or should we be considering licenses and responsibility to update?

They also discuss the need for breaks and structure now that everyone is working from home, revisit previous discussions around building functionality for admin users and the various admin systems out there, and they round out the conversation with a discussion around doubles vs spies in testing.

Note - No snakes were harmed as Steph found them a new home 😊

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238: All the Single Quotes

thoughtbot — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 00:15:00 -0400

In this week's episode, Chris shares details about his new greenfield project, implementing static pages with high voltage, opting for just-in-time architecture decisions and working with various admin libraries. Steph discusses various ways to advocate for change across larger engineering teams, recognizing when it's important to push for change vs letting go of strong opinions, and how to gain buy-in from your team.

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237: I Love The Squiggles

thoughtbot — Tue, 17 Mar 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss the pros and cons of memoization, Chris revisits the discussion around the value of react snapshot tests as well as his continued explorations with Inertia.js while Steph updates us on living in a schema-less world, and they round out the conversation with a listener question about pairing tools, setup, and approaches.

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236: What's GNU With You?

thoughtbot — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 00:15:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss recent challenges associated with upgrading React Router and uploading files to Amazon S3. Steph also shares her latest reading adventure in cybersecurity and Chris reflects on his time at thoughtbot, how his approach to web development has shifted over the past seven years, and what he plans to do next.

*Correction - The Cuckoo's Egg helped pioneer cybersecurity techniques

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235: Take a Deep Breath

thoughtbot — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 00:15:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris dig into their shared love of refactoring. How do they think about it, have they ever reverted a refactor, thoughts on deferred refactoring, and more.

They also discuss some positive team habits, snapshot testing, the importance of keeping your testing as close to production as possible, and finally, Chris shares some big personal news.

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234: No More Weird Stuff

thoughtbot — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 00:15:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph respond to a listener question about the complex tradeoffs between craft, preferences, and business needs. They also revisit Steph's recent work with mirage factories, Chris's struggles with test failures, and discuss Steph's recent use of the acts_as_paranoid gem.

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233: Software Development in Ancient Rome (Joël Quenneville)

thoughtbot — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 00:15:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Steph is joined by Joël Quenneville. It's the season for CFPs (call for proposals) and Joël shares insights about his past conference talk submissions, both the accepted and rejected. They also discuss writing habits that help increase blogpost frequency and helping teams upgrade their Rails application.

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232: I'm Not Allowed to Play With Other Shells

thoughtbot — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 00:15:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph celebrate the new Bike Shed website and logo!

Steph finds a new way to optimize her keyboard happiness and Chris dabbles with Zsh auto-suggestions. They also explore the team and technical trade-offs in the pursuit of clean code and respond to a listener question about building products that meet strict security policies.

This episode is brought to you by Clubhouse. Click through to get 2 free months on any paid plan.

Sponsored By:

Clubhouse.io: Ship value, not features Get 2 free months on any paid plan with The Bike Shed

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231: Fun and Useful

thoughtbot — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 00:15:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Steph shares more of her Ember adventures, specifically sharing some of her work with the Mirage API mocking and prototyping library, and her search for factories and more ergonomic data in tests.

Chris shares some struggles he's had recently with automation and tooling around deployment and releasing packages, and they discuss the inherent trade-offs that we have to consider when automating anything.

Lastly they touch on Twitter's alt text accessibility features, and answer a listener question about using React without having an API, and instead just using it as a more dynamic view layer.

Support The Bike Shed

230: The Broken Road

thoughtbot — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 00:15:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph revisit the long-lived feature branch Chris has been working on and chat about adventures with Yalc. They also dive into the common questions and concerns associated with coding bootcamps, thoughtbot's exciting new partnership with Resilient Coders, and what it would be like to "start over".

This episode is brought to you by Clubhouse. Click through to get 2 free months on any paid plan.

Sponsored By:

Clubhouse.io: Ship value, not features Get 2 free months on any paid plan with The Bike Shed

Support The Bike Shed

229: Nothing but Positive Fire

thoughtbot — Tue, 21 Jan 2020 00:15:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris catch up in their first recording of 2020. They discuss git workflows and the surprisingly strong opinions often associated with them, testing at all levels of your application, Steph gives a quick summary of her Ember adventures, and they round out the discussion with some new years systems building and Star Wars reviews.

This episode is brought to you by Clubhouse. Click through to get 2 free months on any paid plan.

Ember Documentation
JSON Schema
Pretender
Apollo GraphQL
React Testing Library
Write good commit messages by blaming others (German's blog post)
Prettier

Sponsored By:

Clubhouse.io: Ship value, not features Get 2 free months on any paid plan with The Bike Shed

Support The Bike Shed

228: Friends and Food (George Brocklehurst)

thoughtbot — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Steph is joined by George Brocklehurst, a Development Director in the NYC thoughtbot office. Steph and George chat about the variety of projects and technologies that caught their attention during thoughtbot's recent internal hackathon. They also dive into Gitsh, a dedicated shell for Git commands, as they chat about preferred git workflows and George shares his recent adventure in updating Gitsh to support tab completion.

Support The Bike Shed

227: Hacks and Cheats

thoughtbot — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss their recent holiday hackathon efforts building a game in Elm. They discuss their experiences with Elm and the broader prospects of using Elm in more production applications. They also discuss the new git subcommands "git switch" and "git restore", and round things out with a listener question concerning FactoryBot and "minimum viable factories".

226: Bespoke Nonsense

thoughtbot — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 00:00:00 -0500

On this week's episode, in celebration of the new year, Thom shares the 2019 blooper reel! Words are hard and here's the audio to prove it. Listen to all of the silly mishaps, goofs, and general nonsense captured in between the moments of "professional podcasting". Chris and Steph also reflect on their top themes of 2019 and discuss New Year Systems vs New Year Resolutions.

Support The Bike Shed

225: Pepper in Some Security

thoughtbot — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 00:00:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Steph gets Chris to share his biggest developer regrets over the years. They also revisit a favorite topic of estimation and story points, and round out the conversation with some details from the world of application security.

224: The One Manhattan Rule

thoughtbot — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 00:00:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Chris catches us up on his latest keyboard adventures and Steph shares her first impression of working with Ember.

They also dive into Chris's experience triaging errors Sentry, their love for Elm, how teams achieve a consistent velocity, and Steph's upcoming workshop on how to stay agile when building a healthcare product. To bring it home, they respond to a listener who's wondering when is it a good idea to convert a loose data structure (e.g.: hash) into a class?

If you're enjoying The Bike Shed, we'd love it if you could give it a rating or review on iTunes. Thanks!

Support The Bike Shed

223: Terrible and Easy

thoughtbot — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 00:00:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss identifying refactoring opportunities by highlighting overly coupled code and Chris announces that he has advanced his vim setup into the 21st century by making the switch to Neovim.

222: That Eureka Moment

thoughtbot — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 00:00:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris dive into the world of crafting pull requests for optimal code review, as well as the flip side of providing code review. How can we make it easy for reviewers, and as reviewers, how can we make it easy for our teammates to incorporate our suggestions?

They also discuss the world of testing, from integration to visual to unit testing, and some of the tools an practices they use at each level.

Lastly, they discuss Steph's continued pairing adventures and possibly finding her max on the pairing front, a quick update on mechanical keyboards, and Steph shares a teaser of an upcoming workshop she'll be hosting around how to stay agile when building health tech products.

This episode of The Bike Shed is sponsored by Honeybadger.

If you're enjoying The Bike Shed, we'd love it if you could give it a rating or review on iTunes. Thanks!

221: An Informed Opinion

thoughtbot — Tue, 05 Nov 2019 00:00:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph catch up on recent client adventures, revisit their feelings on using let in rspec, and spend a bit of time outside their respective comfort zones. There's also some talk about nearly full-time pairing, mechanical keyboards, debugging thorny datetime issues, and how we interact with our developer tools and workflows.

This episode of The Bike Shed is sponsored by Honeybadger.

If you're enjoying The Bike Shed, we'd love it if you could give it a rating or review on iTunes. Thanks!

220: Adequately Fun

thoughtbot — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph chat about their new client projects, VimScript, and ways to automate refreshing materialized views in tests. They also play the game Overrated/Underrated, created by Tyler Owen, and respond to a CS student who is feeling overwhelmed by the various technologies and looking to transition from tutorials to meaningful projects.

This episode of The Bike Shed is sponsored by Honeybadger.

If you're enjoying The Bike Shed, we'd love it if you could give it a rating or review on iTunes. Thanks!

219: Seeking That Middle Option

thoughtbot — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph catches us up on her ever-growing collection of mechanical keyboards, Chris talks about his recent purchase of an apple watch, and they follow up a previous discussion around case-sensitivity (or insensitivity) in URLs and email addresses. They round out the discussion with a chat about writing blog posts and some postgres fun, and finally discuss the merits and drawbacks of monorepos.

This episode of The Bike Shed is sponsored by Honeybadger.

If you're enjoying The Bike Shed, we'd love it if you could give it a rating or review on iTunes. Thanks!

218: Finesse in Quitting (Brittany Martin)

thoughtbot — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 10:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph is joined by Brittany Martin, an avid Rubyist and the host of the Ruby on Rails Podcast. They discuss Brittany's passion for roller derby and her upcoming Ruby conference talk: "Hire Me, I'm Excellent at Quitting." They also discuss using AWS Serverless, troubleshooting Postgress connection errors and working with Google Pay and Apple Wallet to introduce digital tickets.

217: A Vote For Reasonableness

thoughtbot — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph shares an update on her mechanical keyboard adventures and provides a summary for the Ruby pipeline operator being reverted. Chris gets Steph's opinion on a possible improvement around using materialized views in tests and describes a recent debugging adventure he and Steph went on. They also discuss a listener question regarding encouraging companies to use Ruby and Rails and asking how we identify ourselves as developers. Finally, they round out the conversation with a clarification around public vs private GraphQL APIs.

If you're enjoying The Bike Shed, we'd love it if you could give it a rating or review on iTunes. Thanks!

216: I'm Not the Best Criminal

thoughtbot — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph recounts an issue with an email client that lowercases URLs and Chris ponders the art of logging and using structured logs. They also highlight a plugin that improves TypeScript support in Vim, how the Pinterest team celebrates the "retirement" of code, and respond to a listener who is debating between refactoring their app or investing in a full rewrite.

If you're enjoying The Bike Shed, we'd love it if you could give it a rating or review on iTunes. Thanks!

215: Start With People

thoughtbot — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph returns from vacation and Chris makes some noise about a fantastic new button. They discuss Steph's continued adventures in search of the perfect mechanical keyboard and then dig into two listener questions on landing a first job as a developer and what frameworks and languages to focus on, as well as discussing some of the common objections to GraphQL.

214: Have You Tried Refreshing the Page?

thoughtbot — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Matt Sumner guest stars to discuss his recent adventures on a project that uses React, TypeScript and GraphQL. Along the way, Matt and Chris discuss VS Code features, Apollo caching and reflect upon their first year as Development Directors.  

 thoughtbot is hiring!

213: Admins Matter Too

thoughtbot — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph discusses a mini design sprint she led to help validate an internal admin tool while Chris muses on the merits of net negative lines of code on a project. They dig into the idea that while code can certainly be an asset, it may also be a liability. They investigate ActiveSupport::MessageVerifier for secure time-sensitive tokens. Steph shares details about her recent visit to the Ruby on Rails Podcast and Chris shares the recording for a talk he gave on understanding technology choices. Lastly, they round out the conversation with a listener question about build times and lock files and how to organize and split up our tests.

212: Award Winning Sheds

thoughtbot — Wed, 04 Sep 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris share the news that The Bike Shed won the Best Dev Podcast on the Hackernoon Noonies awards! After a bit of celebration, they get back to their normal adventures with a discussion around onboarding covering the importance, approach, and pitfalls that they've seen in their time joining countless teams. They also touch on the relevance and increasing ease of SSL everywhere, and they answer a listener question about technical debt and rewriting applications.

211: I'm Not a Lawyer, But...

thoughtbot — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss their preferred strategy when building an admin portal (spoiler: it's not using a client-side technology), separating our identity from our preferred technology, coding styles that require greater mental effort, and answer a listener's question about deleting migrations.

210: Stop Trying to Make Fetch Happen

thoughtbot — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss mechanical keyboards, combating error fatigue, the joy of admin features and respond to two listener questions about typed vs dynamic languages and various ways to "speed up" third-party API calls.

Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

209: We Will Never Know Enough (Michael Chan)

thoughtbot — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode Chris is joined by Michael Chan aka @chantastic, host of the React Podcast and prolific maker and sharer throughout the internets. They discuss Micheal's work on the React Podcast and themes in open source in general, Michael's focus on communication and delivering value, and the honest take that no one has all the answers or a silver bullet.

208: Goldilocks and the Three Monitors

thoughtbot — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph weigh-in on curved monitors, discuss how pairing improves productivity and team morale, and respond to two listener questions inquiring what makes Rails successful and new project nerves.

Vote for us for 'Best Dev' Podcast in this year's Noonie Awards.

207: Very-Bad, Or Just Normal-Bad?

thoughtbot — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss a handful of utilities that help with their workflows and GitHub, and then dive into a handful of ActiveRecord, SQL, and postgres-related topics. They discuss safe vs unsafe migrations when dealing with larger volumes of data, adding an index safely in migration without downtime, and bringing postgres enums into Rails.

Vote for us for 'Best Dev Podcast' in this year's Noonie Awards.

This episode of The Bike Shed is sponsored by Indeed Prime

206: No-One Wants to be the Canary

thoughtbot — Tue, 23 Jul 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss working with Django, Angular, and explore the new features released in Ruby 2.7.0-preview1! They also respond to a listener's question regarding the trade-offs of using client state management tools like NgRx and Redux.

Vote for us for 'Best Dev' Podcast in this year's Noonie Awards.

205: Won't Somebody Think of The Jokes (Aaron Patterson)

thoughtbot — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris is joined in a live recording from RailsConf by the one and only Aaron Patterson. They discuss Aaron's many RailsConf keynotes, his recent work on Rails view rendering and his three-year-long effort to bring more advanced garbage collection to Ruby which will finally be seeing the light of day. And of course, plenty of puns.

This episode of The Bike Shed is sponsored by Indeed Prime

204: I Don't Like Rest

thoughtbot — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 00:00:00 -0400

In this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss ways to unplug and protect personal downtime, RESTful sorting, altering production data within a Rails migration vs a rake task, adopting Unicode characters, and respond to a listener's question about how they approach client relationships and share thoughtbot's Agile-like process.

203: A Blessed Monkeypatch (Eileen M. Uchitelle)

thoughtbot — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, we revisit RailsConf 2019 for another live recording, this time with Eileen M. Uchitelle, GitHubber and rails core team member. Eileen joins Chris to discuss her RailsConf talk on how GitHub maintained a custom fork of Rails for years, how they finally moved off it, and what lessons we can take away from their experience. They also discussed Eileen's recent work on automatic database switching coming in Rails 6, microservices and monoliths, and getting into working on Rails.

This episode of The Bike Shed is sponsored by Indeed Prime

202: I Left it All on The Dance Floor

thoughtbot — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 00:00:00 -0400

In this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss how working with typed-languages influences their work with dynamic languages. They also chat about the benefits of pair programming, tracking performance events using Rails' Instrumentation API and respond to a listener's question about how to structure code that doesn't fit neatly within the default Rails' structure.

201: Artisanally Indented Code (Kevin Deisz)

thoughtbot — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Kevin Deisz, CTO of CultureHQ, live from RailsConf. They discuss Kevin's RailsConf talk on preevalution in Ruby, but dig further into Kevin's core philosophies that drive his work on tools like preval. They round out the discussion with Kevin's work on prettier-plugin Ruby, an automated code formatter to finally tame the wild west of Ruby syntax, and the hopeful path to a v1.0 in the not too distant future.

200: FOMO for Hallway Track (200th Episode!)

thoughtbot — Wed, 29 May 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this very special Bike Shed, Steph and Chris celebrate reaching the 200th episode. They discuss the origins of the show and thank some of the wonderful folks who helped make it happen (thanks Derek, Sean, Amanda, Laila, and of course Thom!). They discuss Chris's recent trip to RailsConf and some strategies for making the most of conference attendance. Also, Steph's recent work hosting an intro to web development course. They wrap things up with a series of questions captured live from RailsConf at the community meetup covering career growth, naming, graphql, joy, and more.

Sandi & Derek's Rules - The Bike Shed's first episode, from Oct 31 2014.
New Podcast Hosts!
Derek Prior
Sean Griffin
Laila Winner
Amanda Adams (Amanda Hill at the time)
Intercom
Pacman rule - Eric Holscher
Girl Develop It
Women Who Code
"What happens when you type google.com into your browser's address box and press enter?"
Atom
Neocities
Netlify
Heroku
Minneapolis Sculpture Garden
Dependabot
Semisonic - Sculpture Garden

199: Pave That Path

thoughtbot — Tue, 21 May 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris talk about PR sizing, load testing (the weird way), and ponder the merits and pitfalls of personal style in code. They also discuss Hertz suing Accenture for undelivered software and the belief that engineers should talk to users! This one truly has something for everyone.

198: In Terms of Tradeoffs (Glenn Vanderburg)

thoughtbot — Tue, 14 May 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Glenn Vanderburg, VP of Engineering at First.io, live from RailsConf. They discuss Glenn's RailsConf talk, "The 30-Month Migration", covering distributed data models, refactoring, and the wonders of postgres. They also discuss Glenn's famous talk, "Real Software Engineering", and what the term "software engineering" means within our communities.

197: Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls

thoughtbot — Tue, 07 May 2019 00:00:00 -0400

Steph and Chris discuss Redux, integration testing strategies, scoping data for React components, and take a question from a listener about improving process and reducing bugs in a complex service-oriented system with a hint of waterfall in their workflow.

196: I Can Be Wrong on the Internet

thoughtbot — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris welcomes Steph as the new co-host of The Bike Shed! Chris and Steph discuss their experiences using React, TypeScript, and Angular.

195: WebAssembly & WASI (Lin Clark & Till Schneidereit)

thoughtbot — Fri, 19 Apr 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Lin Clark and Till Schneidereit of Mozilla to discuss all things WebAssembly. Lin and Till are helping to lead the development and advocacy around WebAssembly and in this conversation they discuss the current state of WASM, new developments like the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI), and the longer term possibilities and goals for WASM.

194: My PGP Shame

thoughtbot — Fri, 12 Apr 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Mike Burns, developer in our New York studio, to discuss the ins and outs of application security. Mike recently added a comprehensive Application Security Guide to the thoughtbot guides, and in this chat they discuss some of the high points of the guide, some of the low points of common security holes, and some of the fantastically specific workflows and approaches Mike has for his personal information and security management.

Mike Burns on Mastodon
Mike Burns on the thoughtbot blog
Application Security Guide
YAML
JSON
TOML
Bcrypt
Scrypt
TLS Handshake explained with paint colors
NIST - Digital Identity Guidelines
Clearance
DKIM & SPF for email verification
PGP Signing of Emails
PGP Signing git Commits
Facebook Stored Millions Of Passwords In Plaintext
PhishMe (now Cofense)
Mutt email client
YubiKey
Pass
pwgen
LastPass
Perfect Forward Secrecy
Tarsnap

193: A Thing I Know Almost Nothing About

thoughtbot — Fri, 05 Apr 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Edward Loveall, former thoughtbot design apprentice and now thoughtbot developer. After a quick chat about Edward's thoughtbot origin story, podcasts, and DNS, they dig into the heart of the conversation talking about their respective "must have" developer tools on new machines.

Thank you to CircleCI for sponsoring this episode.

192: I Don't Want to Think That Hard

thoughtbot — Fri, 29 Mar 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Sid Raval, developer in our New York studio. Chris and Sid chat about functional programming, strong types, and accessibility. Along the way they touch on TypeScript, Haskell, Scala, Elm, and plenty in between. They round out the conversation with a discussion around accessibility and developer tools.

Thank you to CircleCI for sponsoring this episode.

191: Open Source is Created By Humans (Devon Zuegel)

thoughtbot — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:00 -0400

Chris is joined by Devon Zuegel who recently joined GitHub in the new Open Source Product Manager role. Devon and Chris discuss the complexities inherent to open source including funding models, managing motivation and burnout, different open source models, and end with a discussion around how we can be better open source citizens, both as consumers and maintainers.

Thank you to CircleCI for sponsoring this episode.

190: Going Steady With a Platform

thoughtbot — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 00:00:00 -0400

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Alex Sullivan, mobile developer in our Boston office. Alex takes Chris on a tour of the mobile landscape comparing the core native platforms (Android and iOS), the languages, developer tooling and IDEs, and fundamental thinking. They also dip into a discussion around React Native highlighting some of its strengths, as well as areas where native still clearly wins. Finally they touch on Flutter, the newest entrant into the mobile space to round out the discussion.

Runkeeper
Android
iOS
ViewModel
Room
Java
Kotlin
Objective C
Swift
Scala
JetBrains
Type erasure
Reified types
Android Studio
Xcode
AppCode
Gary Bernhardt
React Native
Xamarin
Flutter
Dart
Alex's post comparing performance of native, Flutter, and React Native

Thank you to CircleCI for sponsoring this episode.

189: It's Gonna Work, Definitely, No Problems Whatsoever

thoughtbot — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 00:00:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Steph Viccari to chat about Steph's recent experience working on the Hubspot API ruby wrapper as a client project. They discuss strategies for testing third-party APIs, focusing on VCR and some of the benefits and trade-offs inherent to that style of API testing. Following that they chat about using exceptions for control flow, digging into why this seems to be a common pattern in Ruby API wrappers, what the alternatives are, and even a quick tour to React-land where this pattern is being used for interesting effect.

188: A Function by Any Other Name

thoughtbot — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by German Velasco for a conversation
that fully lives up to the name of the show with plenty of opinions and
impressively deep dives on topics that folks outside the world of programming
would never think could warrant this much discussion.

How much duplication should we have? Is there such a thing as too DRY? Is there
ever a need for code comments, really? Lest you worry that Chris & German spend
the whole episode just volleying opinions, have no fear: the episode is balanced
out with plenty of pointed suggestions and useful anecdotes to make sure
everyone will enjoy it.

187: Convincing People Not to Build Software

thoughtbot — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Matt Sumner, development director in our Boston Studio. Chris & Matt start with a quick update on Matt's crypto adventures, and then transition to the core of the conversation as Matt describes the past few weeks of starting a new project and all the decisions that come with that.

The project kicked off with a product design sprint to help determine the initial direction for MVP. From there, Matt describes some of the thinking that went into the technology choices for the app, as well as describing his experience thus far working in a novel ecosystem for him with Scala & GraphQL.

186: Let's Duplicate Stuff

thoughtbot — Fri, 01 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Daniel Colson, developer in our New York studio and current maintainer of all things FactoryBot. Chris & Daniel discuss Daniel's work as maintainer of one of thoughtbot's most popular open source projects and some of the parallels to thoughtbot's consulting work. They then discuss a bit more on the specifics of FactoryBot and what's in store for upcoming versions.

To round out the conversation Daniel and Chris also dig into some of the testing related best practices and patterns common to thoughtbot projects, linting and formatting tools, and even dip into the age old discussion around single quotes vs double quotes (just a tiny bit).

Thank you to One Month for sponsoring this episode.

185: The Transactional Fallacy (Avdi Grimm)

thoughtbot — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Ruby Hero Avdi Grimm. They discuss Avdi's history of guiding the Ruby and broader programming communities, his thoughts about where we're at with object-oriented programming, and where he's looking to next for our industry.

This conversation touches on a variety of topics both technical and personal. Avdi shares some of his thinking around where we've failed with our approaches to object-oriented programming and viewing the world as transactional, and instead offers ideas around modeling our systems as processes.

Avdi & Chris also chat about some of Avdi's my recent explorations into the world of JavaScript & React, as well as the growing "resilience engineering" mindset.

Thank you to One Month for sponsoring this episode.

184: Fun, Interesting, and I Wouldn't Recommend It

thoughtbot — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0500

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Eebs Kobeissi, a developer in our Boston studio, for a discussion encompassing the front end, back end, and everything in between. They start by discussing Eebs' recent work with both Elm & TypeScript, and the relative merits of these two strongly typed languages for the front end. From there they move on to a discussion around the different communities and rates of change in each.

Shifting gears, Chris then asks Eebs about his experience with more distributed systems and technologies like JSON Web Tokens, ElasitcSearch, RabbitMQ, Kafka, and more.

They round out the conversation with a discussion around some recent security discussions in package managers and their collective surprise that things work at all.

Thank you to One Month for sponsoring this episode.

183: Former Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots (Ben Orenstein)

thoughtbot — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0500

On this episode of the Bike Shed, Chris is joined by former thoughtbotter Ben Orenstein. Ben & team are currently feverishly working towards launching Tuple.app, an app for remote pair programming. The conversation covers the unique technical challenges inherent to building this sort of app (WebRTC & firewalls, oh my), as well as a discussion around the merits and value of pair programming. To round out the conversation, Ben checks in on whether Chris is still "nerding out hard on Vim".

Thank you to One Month for sponsoring this episode.

182: What's it in the Service Of?

thoughtbot — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0500

Chris is joined by Eric Bailey, thoughtbot designer and champion for all things accessibility on the web. Chris & Eric chat about how Eric approaches accessibility and works to include it throughout the design process, design systems, functional CSS, CSS in JS, and more.

Eric's recent accessibility talk
Shifting Left
Vimium
Salesforce Lightning Design System
Shadow DOM
Introducing the CSS Cascade
The element
Heydon Pickering - Reluctant Gatekeeping: The Problem With Full Stack
Nicole Sulivan - Object Oriented CSS
CSS in JS
BEM CSS Methodology
Tachyons
Tailwind CSS
Sass Lang
shame.css
Reach.tech - Accessible foundation for React component design system
JAWS Screen Reader
ericwbailey.design

181: Strong Types and a Functional Flair

thoughtbot — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 00:00:00 -0500

On this episode of the Bike Shed, Chris is joined by thoughtbot CTO Joe Ferris. Chris & Joe start by talking about all things data. More and more we're building applications that need to manage medium to large data sets, combining data from multiple sources, and our approaches and frameworks need to evolve to match these needs. Joe provides the low down on how this can shape the way we build our applications.

As part of the discussion around data they dig into the idea of event logs, most notably discussing Apache Kafka and it's unique approach to capturing state by storing an immutable event log, and the resulting architecture that falls out of this.

Lastly they chat about the Scala language both in relation to data and streaming applications, but also more generally as an example of an approachable yet powerful strongly typed language.

180: A Citizen of the Internet (John Resig)

thoughtbot — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 00:00:00 -0500

On this episode of the Bike Shed, we're thrilled to welcome special guest John Resig, creator of jQuery and front-end architect at Khan Academy. The conversation begins with a discussion around John's work on jQuery, one of the most influential libraries in the history of the web. From there the discussion shifts to John's role as front-end architect at Khan Academy and how he balances feature development and paying down tech debt or exploring new technologies.

John and Chris then discuss the rate of change of front-end technologies, and John provides wonderfully pragmatic guidance distinguishing the rate of innovation from the perceived needed rate of adoption. The conversation also ventures into discussions around the trade-offs involved in open sourcing internal projects. Lastly, they touch briefly on the topic of GraphQL based on John's work at Kahn Academy, as well as his in-progress book, The GraphQL Guide.

A little bit of everything with one of the most influential web developers of
the past 15 years. What more could you ask for?

179: We CAN Just Use a Form!

thoughtbot — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 00:00:00 -0500

On this episode of the Bike Shed, Matt Sumner returns to chat with Chris about their recent adventures. They start by discussing Matt's ongoing work building an open source Ethereum implementation in Elixir and the joys of a test suite guiding your work. From there, Matt asks Chris about Chris's recent trip to speak at GraphQL Summit and his take on the current state of affairs in the GraphQL world (hint, it's good).

Matt and Chris then discussed the progress they've made on simpler form handling in React applications and consider how far they could go with this, and then discuss the recent announcement of React Hooks.

And finally, they discuss the fact that thoughtbot is hiring, and we think you should apply! Head on over to thoughtbot.com/jobs and drop us a line :)

178: Friday is For Spikes

thoughtbot — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 00:00:00 -0500

On this episode of the Bike Shed Chris is joined by Derek Prior, former
thoughtbotter and previous host of this very podcast. Derek has recently moved
on from thoughtbot to try out a new role as an engineering manager at GitHub.

During their conversation they talk about Derek's experience shipping the
"Suggested Changes" feature on github.com, and the MVP process Derek brought to
the planning and development of the feature. They also touch on the architecture
of GitHub and where services and monoliths fit in the world of larger systems
like GitHub. Lastly they discuss Chris & Derek's respective transitions into
more roles with a bit less code and a bit more management. As usual, this one
has a little bit of everything!

177: Tricking Computers Into Doing Things

thoughtbot — Fri, 09 Nov 2018 00:00:00 -0500

On this episode of the Bike Shed, Chris is joined by Christina Entcheva, developer from thoughtbot's New York studio who has been a product manager and designer previously in her career, but has since settled in to her role as a developer.

Chris & Christina share a conversation ranging from their shared love of "boring Rails apps", Christina's recent work with headless CMSs like Contentful & Prismic, and a discussion around Rails performance. Throughout the conversation they touch on theme's of keeping a focus on user needs throughout the work of developing applications.

176: The Machines Will Learn

thoughtbot — Fri, 02 Nov 2018 00:00:00 -0400

On this episode of the Bike Shed Chris is joined by George Brocklehurst, development director in thoughtbot's New York studio. The conversation starts with a discussion around progressive enhancement and the state of the modern web, and then shifts to focus on George's recent explorations of machine learning. This episode is a perfect introduction to the topic of ML, and provides a great summary of why you might want to start working with it and how to go about that.

Frameworks and Tools For Exploring Machine Learning

Getting Started with Machine Learning:

175: Tell Me When It's Real

thoughtbot — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:00:00 -0400

On this episode of the Bike Shed, Chris is joined by Josh Clayton, thoughtbot's managing director in our Boston studio. Chris and Josh spend the episode discussing the various patterns and trends they see in the world of web development. Specifically, they touch on server side frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Phoenix in the Elixir world. In addition, they discuss a variety of front end trends including the move towards typed languages like ReasonML, TypeScript, Elm, PureScript, and Scala.js, as well as frameworks like React, Ember, Angular, and Vue.js.

174: I've Watched a Lot of Vim Courses

thoughtbot — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 00:00:00 -0400

In this special crossover episode, Chris is joined by Chad Pytel, Co-founder & CEO of thoughtbot and host of Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, to discuss the content, history, and the process of making Upcase, thoughtbot's online learning platform, FREE.

173: A Combinatoric Explosion of Nulls

thoughtbot — Fri, 12 Oct 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Joël Quenneville joins Chris to discuss Elm, the strongly typed functional programming language for writing reliable client side web apps. They discuss recent changes from the 0.19 release including reduced bundle size from dead code elimination, the somewhat controversial removal of custom operators. Anecdotally, Joël and team saw a reduction from 31.5K to 16.6K in bundle size going from 0.18 to 0.19 and felt no pain from the custom operators removal, so a big net win for them with this new version.

Along the way Joël and Chris detour into the complexity of managing a project and community like Elm's and discuss Joël‘s recent work with the thoughtbot apprentice program. To round things out, Joël and Chris discuss the power of using a type system like Elm's to constrain the valid states of your application and make your apps more robust and maintainable.

172: What I Believe About Software

thoughtbot — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Steph Viccari joins Chris for a conversation starting with a discussion of some deployment and orchestration issues Chris was helping out with, followed by some of Steph's recent experiences with JSONB in postgres and the relative trade-offs of unstructured data.

The heart of the conversation revolves around the core processes we use to develop software touching on sprint planning & story points, deadlines, the place for refactoring and code review in the regular cadence of development, and the often lamented retrospective meeting.

Aptible - PAAS with strong security and HIPAA compliance
Heroku Shield
Google hiding www in URLs
Auth0 - Identity management and auth as a service
ActiveStorage - Rails's built in filie attachment framework
Postgres JSON & JSONB Types
The Real Story Behind Story Points
Laurie Young Post on His Use of Story Points
Deadlines
XKCD - And Check Whether the Photo is of a Bird
Headspace meditation

171: What If We Just Used a Form?

thoughtbot — Fri, 21 Sep 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Matt Sumner joins Chris for a discussion around Matt's recent adventures with the block chain and Ethereum, as well as tackling the thorny issue of server rendered vs client side apps. They cover a bit of history, a bit of opinion, and some practical considerations to keep in mind when tackling rich client development.

170: Less Charted Territory

thoughtbot — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Chris is joined by Paul Smith to discuss Crystal, a statically-typed and compiled language with a Ruby inspired syntax. Paul has spent much of the past few years exploring Crystal and building a new web framework called Lucky.

Paul's infectious enthusiasm for the Crystal language shines through in this discussion covering some of the unique features of Crystal & Lucky, but there is plenty to enjoy even if you're not specifically interested in Crystal.

With Lucky, Paul has done a great job of taking the best of what has been built in other frameworks and bring it to Crystal, drawing inspiration from Ruby & Rails, Elixir & Phoenix, and even PHP and the Laravel framework. There's something in this episode for everyone!

169: Fear Driven Development

thoughtbot — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Chris is joined by Kane Baccigalupi, development director from thoughtbot's San Francisco office to discuss Kane's history in government working for 18F and California State and how those experiences have informed Kane's work since.

Throughout the conversation Chris and Kane discuss their shared desire to hide all implementation details and their love of Ruby for how it allows us to do
that, testing vs test driven development, and approaches for refactoring large
untested systems.

18F - A consulting team within the government helping to introduce modern
software development practices.
Kane's tweet about the enjoyment of the refactoring and design parts of the process.
Sarah Mei on The Bike Shed
Uniform Access Principle
Observations on the testing culture of Test Driven Development - TDD
article that introduces the phrase "calling the shot" for the practice of TDD.
Convenience class methods on service objects
Testing Pyramid - A way to think about the cost and value of the
various types of tests.
Therapeutic Refactoring by Katrina Owen
Katrina Owen on The Bike Shed
Strangler Pattern - A systematic approach to refactoring and decomposing
large-scale
The encasement strategy: on legacy systems and the importance of APIs
Martin Fowler on the Strangler Pattern

168: An Escape Rope of Learning

thoughtbot — Fri, 31 Aug 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Chris is joined by Rachel Mathew to discuss Rachel's recent experiences with
Scala on a handful of client and side projects. They discuss the benefits of
working within a type system, learning to work with a compiler, and the process
of getting to know a new language and paradigm.

Along they way they dip into the complexity of twitter as a platform for
discussion and making improvements to development workflows.

Scala
Scala implicits
Kotlin
Four stages of competence
Scala Play - Full-featured Scala web framework, comparable to Rails
http4s - Lower level Scala web framework
SOAP - An approach to building APIs popular before the focus on REST APIs
WSDL - Schemas in the land of SOAP
Sangria - Scala GraphQL library
neo4j - An example of a graph database
Are Services the New Rewrite? - recent Bike Shed episode discussion
microservice architecture
283: Overcoming Awkward Data (Joe Ferris) - Recent Giant Robots episode
with Joe Ferris discussing "awkward data"
GraphQL Code Generation
Purple Train App

167: I Feel Like We Should've Solved This By Now

thoughtbot — Fri, 24 Aug 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Chris is joined by German Velasco for a discussion ranging from German's
recent transition to remote working to the wonders of the Elixir language and
the Erlang platform, blockchain, Ethereum, TypeScript, the Language Server
Protocol, and more!

tmate - shared terminal sessions via a special build of tmux
Sneak - Human contact for remote teams (persistent video chat for teams)
Ryan Tomayko - Your team should work like an open source project - great
post with actionable advice for teams adopting the remote life
How to Create a Distributed Work Culture
5 Things that Suck about Remote Work
Taking the Pain Out of Video Conferences
thoughtbot.com/jobs - Come work with us!
Elixir - The language German loves!
Pattern matching in Elixir
Hindley–Milner type system
dialyzer - Erlang static analysis
Erlang OTP - a set of Erlang libraries & principles that carry over to
Elixir
Erlang "Let It Crash"
Blockchain
Ethereum
Proof of Authority
GraphQL
VS Code
Language Server Protocol
TypeScript 3.0

166: Are Services the New Rewrite?

thoughtbot — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Chris & Derek discuss the world of services, exploring the various forms SOA can take, the oft stated benefits, and some of the pitfalls they commonly see in the
wild. The discussion ranges from alternative architectures, guidelines for how to think about services within your platform, and even includes an anecdote about thoughtbot's foray into the world of SOA on Upcase.

165: The Tables Have Turned

thoughtbot — Fri, 03 Aug 2018 11:00:00 -0400

Chris & Derek talk about beginnings and ends, borrowing from their consulting mindset for a conversation spanning CI, deployment, communication, team structure, and everything in between.

164: A Piece of My Identity

thoughtbot — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Support The Bike Shed

163: Insert Some Colons For Me

thoughtbot — Fri, 20 Jul 2018 11:00:00 -0400

After Sean confronts some breaking changes to Diesel, we discuss what we like about Visual Studio Code and how changing your tools can change your perspective.

162: You Have Ruined Your Rails App (Sam Phippen)

thoughtbot — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 12:00:00 -0400

Sam Phippen joins us to discuss the maintenance burden of supporting old Rubies, service oriented architecture, and explorations of GraphQL and graph databases.

Sam Phippen on Twitter
RFC: rspec-rails versioning strategy
Mix deps documentation
NP-hardness
bundle update --conservative docs
Use create_or_find_by to avoid race condition in Rails 6.0
Dgraph — A Distributed, Fast Graph Database
100: Nouns You Can Verb | The Bike Shed - Sam's previous discussion of GRPC on the podcast
PostgreSQL: WITH Queries (Common Table Expressions)
Work at DigitalOcean
Jobs - thoughtbot
Careers and Jobs at Shopify

161: Re-Incoherence

thoughtbot — Fri, 06 Jul 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Rails performance, rebalancing coherence, and themes from career advice requests.

Support The Bike Shed

160: Praise Hands Emoji 🙌 (Vaidehi Joshi)

thoughtbot — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:45:00 -0400

We're joined by Vaidehi Joshi to discuss her multimedia empire, conference talk prep, getting started with computer science, and the applicability of a computer science education in every day development work. We wrap the episode with live Q&A from our RailsConf audience.

159: Confusing and Hard to Use

thoughtbot — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 12:00:00 -0400

An ORM that's a pleasure to use with raw SQL when needed? Sean discusses how that can be. Plus, Derek shares a new and exciting way for migrations to break!

Support The Bike Shed

158: This is How I Ruin Meetings (Aaron Patterson)

thoughtbot — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 00:00:00 -0400

We're joined by Aaron Patterson for puns. Aaron also updates us on compacting GC for Ruby and Ruby 2.6's JIT compiler before telling us how he really feels about functional programming.

157: Whiz-Bangy Frontend Thing (Chris Toomey)

thoughtbot — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Chris Toomey joins Derek to talk about their shared experience in Elm and their excitement about GraphQL.

156: It's a Commercial Enterprise (Olivier Lacan)

thoughtbot — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 11:45:00 -0400

We speak with Olivier Lacan about KeepAChangelog.com, tooling improvements for better developer experience, and the emotional impact of shutting down CodeSchool.com

155: Abstractions on Abstractions (Alex Sullivan)

thoughtbot — Fri, 25 May 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Amanda is joined by Alex Sullivan, Android developer at thoughtbot, to discuss the state of React Native and its new competitor from Google, Flutter.

154: We All Have Work to Do (Eileen Uchitelle)

thoughtbot — Fri, 18 May 2018 01:00:00 -0400

Eileen Uchitelle joins us live from RailsConf to talk about exciting improvements coming to Rails 6, problems encountered by larger Rails apps, strategies for upgrading Rails and more!

153: 🎶 I Would Lose 3,000 Crates, and I Would Lose 12,000 More 🎶

thoughtbot — Fri, 11 May 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Is the bug in Postgres? Sean takes over operations of crates.io and keeps himself very busy. We also wrap up our experience at RailsConf.

See open positions at thoughtbot!

Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

152: I Look For Stories (Nickolas Means)

thoughtbot — Fri, 04 May 2018 00:00:00 -0400

We catch up with Nick Means at RailsConf and discuss storytelling, "human error", advice for job seekers, and the idea of licensing software developers.

Nick on Twitter
The Bike Shed #71: It's a Total Hack - Our earlier episode discussing Nick's previous keynote at RailsConf
Skunk Works by Nickolas Means
Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed
The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'
Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters
Retro Report | Go or no Go: The Challenger Legacy
Three Mile Island accident
Southwest’s Fatal Accident Prompts Scrutiny of Engine Inspections
People wearing oxygen masks wrong
xkcd: Compiling
The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition
Don't Get Distracted - Caleb Thompson

151: Scheming About Schema

thoughtbot — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Derek & Sean discuss their final preparations for RailsConf, the role of Diesel's schema.rs is in comparison to schema.rb in Rails, and how Derek took down production.

Support The Bike Shed

150: I Fight For the Users

thoughtbot — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Derek and Sean discuss ethical concerns in software development and the prospect of licensing software developers.

149: E With an Umlaut

thoughtbot — Fri, 06 Apr 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Sean experiences a frustrating Ruby bug while building tooling to enforce module boundaries in Shopfiy's monolith. Derek deprecates Rails functionality instead of preparing his talk.

148: Baseball is a Legacy App

thoughtbot — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 17:00:00 -0400

Amanda and Sean discuss Flutter, modeling the game of baseball, and the state of persistence and networking in Android.

147: Is a Lambda a Sandwich?

thoughtbot — Fri, 23 Mar 2018 11:00:00 -0400

Derek shares his experiences with new features in Ruby 2.5 before we turn our ire towards daylight savings time and timezones once more.

146: --YOLO

thoughtbot — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 12:45:00 -0400

Amanda, Derek, and Sean discuss style guides, automated code formatting, and the cycle of disillusionment in development work.

145: The Internet is Ruined

thoughtbot — Fri, 09 Mar 2018 00:00:00 -0500

Derek and Sean commiserate about the latest generation of MacBooks, Slack, and the state of the Web.

144: Fisher Price™ Tools

thoughtbot — Fri, 02 Mar 2018 00:00:00 -0500

We talk about everyone's favorite Fisher-Price web framework and a small upcoming change to it before pivoting to discuss Derek's experience with his first Elm PR.

143: It's Hard to Have a Secret Rocket

thoughtbot — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 10:00:00 -0500

We chat about the Falcon Heavy launch before discussing a couple of issues Derek encountered when upgrading to Rails 5.2

142: What if We Didn't Do Any of This?

thoughtbot — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 00:00:00 -0500

Derek and Sean debate the value provided by database migrations written in your programming language of choice versus those written in SQL.

141: Go Baby, Go

thoughtbot — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 00:00:00 -0500

We discuss the challenges in parallelizing development work and also take a look at what's coming soon in Rails 5.2.

140: A Sign of... Stability?

thoughtbot — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 12:00:00 -0500

Sean and Derek argue the semantics of versioning and opine for automated reporting on more structured changelogs as a feature of future package managers.

139: Red, Green, Refactor (Alex Clark & Sean Doyle)

thoughtbot — Fri, 19 Jan 2018 10:15:00 -0500

Derek is joined by coworker Sean Doyle and Codecademy’s Alex Clark to discuss the process of test-driven development and the development of a new TDD course for Codecademy.

Testing Rails
Four-Phase Test
Test-Driven Development Course on Codecademy
Red-Green-Refactor
Chai
WebdriverIO - WebDriver bindings for Node.js
SuperTest - Super-agent driven library for testing node.js HTTP servers using a fluent API

138: I Don't Know How the World Works Anymore

thoughtbot — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 00:00:00 -0500

We chat about how shared global state in tests can cause you to doubt foundational truths of the universe, some issues with Rails system tests, and recent changes in browser behavior.

137: What's Up, Docs

thoughtbot — Fri, 05 Jan 2018 00:00:00 -0500

Who should library documentation be written for? How do you, as an author, know what your users will need to know? Should you have long form guides in addition to API documentation? We ask and answer these questions in the context of Sean's work to document Diesel 1.0.

Stick around for the spoiler-filled after show about Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Support The Bike Shed

136: Propagating Conspiracy Theories

thoughtbot — Fri, 22 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0500

Amanda joins Derek to discuss KotlinConf, powerful IDEs, our Ralphapalooza hackathon, and the React Native experience from a native mobile developer's perspective.

A View State Machine for Network Calls on Android - Amanda's KotlinConf talk
How to Build a React App in Kotlin by Dave Ford
Kotlin Static Analysis with Android Lint by Tor Norbye
ReSharper: Visual Studio Extension for .NET Developers
thoughtbot Trail Maps
Lucky - a web framework for Crystal
Frinkiac
thoughtbot does screen printing
The Pixar Theory
MLB Twitter thinks something fishy is going on with Jeter trading Stanton to Yankees - CBSSports.com
React Native Web

135: A Series of Unfortunate Examples

thoughtbot — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0500

We discuss a possible ActiveRecord bug Derek encountered and explore the ambiguity of SQL formatting best practices.

134: Fastributes

thoughtbot — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0500

We share our favorite talks from RubyConf and discuss how Sean has made ActiveRecord attributes allocation significantly faster with Rust.

Saving Ruby From the Apocalypse by Jason Charnes
Esoteric, Obfuscated, Artistic Programming in Ruby by Yusuke Endoh
The Impermanence of Software by Andy Croll
Git Driven Refactoring by Ashley Ellis Pierce
The Unbearable Vulnerability of Open Source by Eileen Uchitelle
All The Great Talks from RubyConf
thoughtbot Podcast Swag Sale

133: A Very Special Bike Shed

thoughtbot — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 00:00:00 -0500

Sean is on to a significant ActiveRecord optimization using an extension written in Rust and Derek shares an overdue thanks to an excellent manager.

Helix
Fast Blank
Turns out, Rails Fast Attributes might be more on the order of 2x faster!
Bootsnap
Do I need Database Cleaner?
GraphQL Query Resolver
PostGraphQL
Headless Capybara!
Working in Siebel… Ugh
Rebecca wrote a book
Upcase Crossroads

132: What Went Well?

thoughtbot — Thu, 16 Nov 2017 11:30:00 -0500

We discuss patterns and anti-patterns encountered in agile retrospectives and revisit a favorite topic: form objects.

131: Nouns For Verbs Sake

thoughtbot — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 00:00:00 -0500

We briefly discuss the renaming of factory_girl to factory_bot before diving in to the visitor pattern; what is it, and what are its inherent tradeoffs.

Support The Bike Shed

130: I Grew Up in Balloons

thoughtbot — Fri, 03 Nov 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Is Database Cleaner necessary anymore? Tune in for our exciting play-by-play reporting on that issue and stick around for chatter on personal defaults for new Rails applications.

129: You Wanna Talk About GraphQL?

thoughtbot — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 10:00:00 -0400

We discuss an issue in the interaction between Rails, Chrome, and the HTTP referrer policy before Derek shares his love for GraphQL.

128: And Now for My Next Trick!

thoughtbot — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 00:00:00 -0400

We discuss strategies for fighting back against project management overhead, refactoring workflows, and on-call rotations.

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127: Bike Shed: Discovery

thoughtbot — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 10:00:00 -0400

We discuss Bundler warning us to update to a prerelease version and other recent annoyances with our favorite dependency manager. We also wonder what GitHub diff stats can tell you about your contributions to a project and when they might be a smell. Stick around post credits for some spoiler-filled chatter about the first couple episodes of Star Trek: Discovery.

126: Speaking of Compilers...

thoughtbot — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 10:00:00 -0400

We discuss a major change to Diesel's insert statements in advance of its 1.0 release and reexamine Contracts.ruby after Derek spends some time with it in use.

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125: Less Bad Than Expected

thoughtbot — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 10:00:00 -0400

We share and discuss some user feedback on fakes and mocks, discuss the benefits and drawbacks to FactoryGirl and share exasperation over the handling of the Equifax data breach.

124: Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

thoughtbot — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 00:00:00 -0400

We go inside the RubyConf CFP review process before turning our attention to questions about the impact of code review. Stick around post credits for some spoiler-filled, lukewarm Game of Thrones takes.

What Your Conference Proposal is Missing by Sarah Mei
Add a configuration option to cause tests to fail if they write stderr or stdout
Survivorship Bias
Cultivating a Code Review Culture by Derek
Goldilocks and the Three Code Reviews by Vaidehi Joshi

Support The Bike Shed

123: Too Many Parameters

thoughtbot — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Derek and Sean discuss the troubles encountered when code reuse is a goal above all others and strategies to have your reusable cake and eat it too.

122: Name That Smell

thoughtbot — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Derek and Sean discuss going from zero to code on new projects, writing tests that deal with external services, and a tricky floating point precision bug Sean encountered in ActiveRecord.

121: The Bike Log (Jerod Santo)

thoughtbot — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 00:00:00 -0400

The Changelog's Jerod Santo joins the show to talk finding time for, sustaining, and funding open source development.

120: Free Apples

thoughtbot — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 10:00:00 -0400

We do some follow-up on open source fundraising and discuss some interesting patterns in Derek's new client project.

119: Questions Are For the Weak (Caleb Thompson & Matt Mongeau)

thoughtbot — Wed, 26 Jul 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Sean and Derek are joined by Caleb Thompson and Matthew Mongeau for our annual live episode to discuss lessons learned from past projects, and speaking at conferences.

Video Version
myglu.com (The project being discussed)
Sandi Metz' Rules for Developers
Facade pattern
Diesel's association API
has_many
The foreigner gem
Goose talks about designing a programming language
Service Objects
Monban
Why you shouldn't roll your own authentication
Please send Caleb sunglasses.
Rails 5.1 did ship while we were recording.
How to Talk to Developers

118: Nonsense In, Nonsense Out

thoughtbot — Tue, 18 Jul 2017 00:00:00 -0400

We discuss the economics of remote work, ActionDispatch::SystemTest in RSpec, and the use of Patreon on open source projects.

117: S.A.L.T. (Justin Searls)

thoughtbot — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 00:00:00 -0400

We chat with Justin Searls about testing, programmer personality types, programming communities, and putting spreadsheets on the Internet.

116: A More "WALL-E" Future

thoughtbot — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Amanda is joined by SF thoughtbot developers Tony, Josh, & Greg to discuss learning new languages (and whether developers should do that in their free time), machine learning, the future of AR/VR, and tech that strives to make a social difference.

115: I Don't Need Another Google Hangout (Cecy Correa)

thoughtbot — Thu, 22 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0400

We talk with Cecy Correa about how to hire and get hired.

114: Reasonably Thread Safe

thoughtbot — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 10:00:00 -0400

We discuss a tiny DOS caused when upgrading thoughtbot.com to Rails 5.1 and how Rails could better surface warnings that only occur in your production configuration. We also get an update on multi-table joins in Rust.

Meaningful schema diffs in Rails 5.1
HSTS
Firesheep
Use a secure session cookie for new installs
pshtt
Observatory by Mozilla
Encrypted secrets in Rails 5.1
PhantomJS maintainer steps down
Sean solves his problem: Multi-tabls joins in Rust

113: Have You Considered Rust? (Matt Casper)

thoughtbot — Fri, 09 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0400

We talk to Matt Casper about contributing to Diesel, Rust's ecosystem, and the next big thing.

112: Lifecycles Are Dead, Long Live Lifecycles!

thoughtbot — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Amanda joins Sean to discuss all the Android news to come out of Google I/O, Kotlin as a "first class language", and features of Android "O"!

111: Trike Shed (Aaron Patterson)

thoughtbot — Thu, 25 May 2017 00:00:00 -0400

We talk with Aaron Patterson about Ruby and Rails upgrades, and the goal of making Ruby 3 three times faster than Ruby 2.

110: Green Chips

thoughtbot — Thu, 18 May 2017 00:00:00 -0400

What’s the deal with green potato chips? Also: RailsConf wrap up and an AST pass refactor for Diesel.

109: The Final Countdown

thoughtbot — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Follow up about Service Objects and Computer Engineering. Plus, RailsConf prep, code slide woes, and modal pop-ups.

Sandi Metz- Gilded Rose Kata
Ben Orenstein- How to Talk to Developers
Sean @ RubyConf Portugal '15- With smoke machine and intro music
Google's Intrusive Pop-Up Announcement

Thank you to our sponsor this week, SparkPost

Support The Bike Shed

108: Have You Tried Rebooting?

thoughtbot — Tue, 18 Apr 2017 16:00:00 -0400

Is your operating system hosed? That might be related to Rails! We also chat about the trend towards compiled languages.

RailsConf Shirts- Please only order if you will be at RailsConf to pick up!
The pre-show
The listen gem breaks my laptop
Interpreted Language
LLVM
Cambrian Explosion
Crystal
Rob Pike on Googlers
Rob Pike on the programmer prerequisites

Thank you to our sponsor this week, SparkPost

107: "Composition" Over Inheritance

thoughtbot — Fri, 14 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Single table inheritance, polymorphic associations, state machines and service objects, oh my!

RailsConf Shirts- Please only order if you will be at RailsConf to pick up!
How to Win at Monopoly and Lose All Your Friends
Touchdown! SpaceX’s 1st Reused Rocket Lands on Drone Ship
Little Boy Blue
Single Table Inheritance
Polymorphic Associations
Tagged Union
Canada
Snoo

Thank you to our sponsor this week, SparkPost

106: Nerd Sniping (Chris Toomey)

thoughtbot — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Chris Toomey joins to talk about Tell Me When It Closes, Haskell, and GraphQL.

Thank you to our sponsor this week, SparkPost

105: For Display Purposes Only

thoughtbot — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Complexity vs Functionality, Validations vs Database Constraints, plus whatever a Cap'n Proto is.

Second Quests in Zelda Games
5 Useful Tips For A Better Commit Message
Sean’s rocket equations
Atlas Rocket Family
Removed deprecated mathn extentions is targeted for Ruby 2.5
Complexity and Strategy
How to Build a Skyscrapper
Rein - database constraints for Rails
Scenic - database views for Rails
Validation, Database Constraint, or Both?
The Perils of Uniqueness Validations
Ecto Validations and Constraints
Cap’n Proto
Protocol Buffer
WSDL

104: It's Dangerous to Refactor Alone!

thoughtbot — Thu, 23 Mar 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Google's carrot-and-stick HTTPS policies and how playing The Legend of Zelda is like refactoring.

103: I Just Want to See Green Dots

thoughtbot — Thu, 16 Mar 2017 00:00:00 -0400

When a hash isn't a hash, GitHub as your Résumé, and porting Crates.io to Diesel.

102: To the Moon!

thoughtbot — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 00:00:00 -0500

Going "to" the moon, hidden type errors in our Rails apps, the process of talk prep, and the S3 outage.

101: Hey, You Leaned!

thoughtbot — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 00:00:00 -0500

Amanda and Sean discuss the evolving stages of open source projects, native apps vs web apps, and space.

AppVeyor
Electron
Xamarin is the Microsoft-owned cross-platform mobile application company.
NASA TRAPPIST 1 Announcement
Spaceflight Now
Write/Speak/Code

Thank you to our sponsor this week, FreshBooks

100: Nouns You Can Verb

thoughtbot — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:00:00 -0500

Sam Phippen helps us celebrate episode 100, as we discuss Diesel bugs, REST, RPC, and more.

Thank you to our sponsor this week, FreshBooks!

99: Just Sayin'

thoughtbot — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 00:00:00 -0500

We go into the weeds with MySQL and discuss the virtues of database migrations written in SQL.

Thank you to our sponsor this week, FreshBooks!

98: I Have Good Branch Hygiene

thoughtbot — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 11:00:00 -0500

We discuss complexity and progressive disclosure, garbage collection, and the impenetrable nature of Git.

Chris Lattner on Accidental Tech Podcase
Simple Made Easy
Garbage Collection was a feature of Objective-C 2.0
The listen gem breaks my laptop
Go GC: Prioritizing low latency and simplicity
Modern Garbage Collection which calls out the tradeoffs of Go's approach
WebKit’s Retreating Wavefront Concurrent Garbage Collector
The Joel Test
Tig: text-mode interface for Git

Thank you to our sponsor this week, FreshBooks!

97: One Equals Zero

thoughtbot — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 00:00:00 -0500

We wonder why writing parameterized associations in Rails is not easy, and discuss the difficulty in eliminating no-op queries in ActiveRecord. Plus, we discuss how you can give a great RailsConf talk proposal that doesn't have anything to do with Rails.

RequestStore
The IDs writer patch Derek sent Sean
Skunk Works by Nickolas Means
It’s a Total Hack The Bike Shed episode inspired by Skunk Works
Hanami

Thank you to our sponsor this week, FreshBooks!

96: Who Stinks?

thoughtbot — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 00:00:00 -0500

Baby Ruby, Ruby refinements, Rails discoverability, and annoying polyfills.

- "Send me onesies!"

Thank you to our sponsor this week, FreshBooks!

95: Click 'Cat' to go 'Home' (Morgane Santos)

thoughtbot — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 13:00:00 -0500

Amanda is joined by Morgane Santos to discuss the experiences, technology, and development of Virtual Reality.

Thank you to our sponsor this week, FreshBooks!

94: It's Not Supposed to Work

thoughtbot — Wed, 11 Jan 2017 10:00:00 -0500

We discuss the pain of custom inputs in HTML, ActiveRecord bugs, and Rust's Fire Flower.

Thank you to our sponsor this week, FreshBooks!

93: I Have Complex Feelings

thoughtbot — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0500

The impact of codes of conduct on community behavior, shipping a mobile app written in Elm, and yet more to say on SemVer.

92: The Queen of Canada

thoughtbot — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0500

We discuss the sneaky performance differences between present?, any?, blank? and empty? with ActiveRecord, when N+1 is a "feature", and the future of Diesel.

91: I Think It's a Fish

thoughtbot — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0500

Derek briefly complains of the staleness of the asset pipeline in Rails 5, before Sean catches Derek up on Rails 5.1's support for Webpack, Yarn, and ES6. We also discuss the pain of deprecations in the upgrade to Rails 5.

90: Freedom Units

thoughtbot — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 11:00:00 -0500

We discuss adventures with shared mutable state in Elixir before turning to our thoughts on mocking HTTP interaction and how our approaches may differ depending on the language we’re using.

How to Solve a Rubik’s Cube
GenServer
Agent
Mocks and Explicit Contracts by José Valim
VCR and exvcr
actual radio buttons

89: There Will Never Be One Right Way (Ashley Williams)

thoughtbot — Wed, 23 Nov 2016 14:00:00 -0500

Ashley Williams joins the show to discuss NPM, Yarn, and the general package manager ecosystem.

88: How Many Puppies Now?

thoughtbot — Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00:00 -0500

Amanda and Sean discuss talk prep and slide envy before diving in to Kotlin 1.0.5, UTF-8 identifiers in programming, and responsive layouts in Android.

87: The Refrigerator Took Down Your Website

thoughtbot — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 17:00:00 -0500

We talk about a widespread DNS outage and what steps you might take to avoid or limit your application's exposure to these things in the future.

86: Purple Train, Purrrple Train (Ian Anderson)

thoughtbot — Wed, 02 Nov 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Derek chats with Ian Anderson about developing a mobile app for iOS and Android with React Native.

85: Are We in a Black Hole?

thoughtbot — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 00:00:00 -0400

We briefly ponder the very nature of our existence before discussing edge cases and interesting bugs encountered in ActiveRecord.

84: Why Are Manhole Covers Round?

thoughtbot — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 00:00:00 -0400

What do we look for when reviewing job applications, interviewing candidates, and pairing with prospective co-workers?

83: Canadian Halloween

thoughtbot — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Sean encounters a roadblock in updating Diesel to use Rust’s new soon-to-be-stabilized procedural macros. Derek and Sean discuss the most recent CVE filed for Bundler, which is a lot like the previous CVE filed for Bundler.

82: I Just Want a Dog in a Spacesuit

thoughtbot — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 10:00:00 -0400

We discuss the problems with getting a CVE and the new lightning fast search tool, ripgrep. Sandwiched between those topics, we dive into the colonization of Mars. Yes, that's right, Mars.

81: Is This Really a CVE?

thoughtbot — Wed, 28 Sep 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Derek and Sean talk through how to handle a security vulnerability that was reported for Clearance, a user authentication library.

80: Back to the Futures

thoughtbot — Wed, 21 Sep 2016 00:00:00 -0400

What's appropriate for a web middleware stack to provide? Does Rack do too much? Plus, our thoughts on NeoVim and Vim 8.

79: Comments in Your Queries

thoughtbot — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Derek and Sean talk through some complex SQL before they examine the calluses developed from years of writing software on OS X.

78: I'm an Adult and I Choose Java

thoughtbot — Fri, 09 Sep 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Sean and Amanda discuss the state of Android Development in 2016. Java, Kotlin, Dependency Injection, and Functional Reactive Programming, oh my!

Amanda Hill on Twitter
Android Debug Bridge (ADB)
Android Studio - The Official IDE for Android
JetBrains
Kotlin
Tropos Weather
Runes: Monadic Functions in Swift
Receiving Location Updates in Android
Dagger: A fast dependency injector for Android
Introducing ExpandingRecyclerView
RxAndroid
Marial Codex

77: The Floors Are Not Zero Indexed

thoughtbot — Wed, 31 Aug 2016 00:00:00 -0400

How can you get your open source pull request merged?

Elevator number pad
Sorry, video of Sean’s Abstractions Conference talk is not yet available
Clearance PR discussion driven by contributors
Module#prepend is the end of alias_method_chain - by Justin Weiss

Support The Bike Shed

76: The One With Laila & Brenda

thoughtbot — Wed, 17 Aug 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Between thoughtbot's Summer Summit and Sean's vacation, we are sadly without a new episode this week. However, we would love you all to check out thoughtbot's newest podcast, interviewing inspirational designers, developers, and other makers in tech, The Laila & Brenda Show!

Give their latest episode a listen here, and if you like it subscribe to their feed however you listen to podcasts!

The Laila & Brenda Show

Support The Bike Shed

75: I'm Not Sure That's Better

thoughtbot — Thu, 11 Aug 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Derek and Sean discuss hunting down intermittently failing tests, finding unused code in your application, and why you should never ever change your test framework.

74: A Dip in the Connection Pool

thoughtbot — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 00:00:00 -0400

We talk through design considerations for a user-visible custom query builder for a high volume ecommerce system.

73: Probably In My Other Pants

thoughtbot — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 00:00:00 -0400

We discuss Pokémon Go and what it's success might mean for software developers before Sean lays out his case for replacing the pg gem and libpq.

72: Surprises Cut For Time (Aaron Patterson)

thoughtbot — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 10:00:00 -0400

Aaron Patterson joins us from RailsConf for puns, performance improvements in Ruby, and AirDropping cats.

Gorbypuff Virus
UTF8 vs UTF16 vs UTF32
What happened to the Rails 4 queue API?
Koichi talks about AOT compilation
Aaron hates encoding. This isn't a link, just a fact.
Sean's terrifying test script, slightly out of date
rails.vim, the tpope jam

71: It's a Total Hack

thoughtbot — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Inspired by Nickolas Means’ fantastic RailsConf keynote, we discuss the corollaries between Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works projects and our software development projects.

Sean’s DXRacer Chair
Skunk Works by Nickolas Means
Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II
Big Design Up Front
Kelly’s 14 Rules and Processes
Rules Made Up by You - Kelly’s rules as applied to modern software development
Factory, Workshop, Stage by Sarah Mei
The Tyranny of Structurelessness
How to Crash an Airplane by Nickolas Means

70: Make Small Things (Sandi Metz)

thoughtbot — Wed, 06 Jul 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Sandi Metz joins us live from RailsConf to talk about the rules, the trouble with naming things, making the right kinds of errors, and conference speaking.

A big thanks to everyone who came out to our live show! A video version of this episode is available on the thoughtbot YouTube Page.

69: No More Drills

thoughtbot — Wed, 29 Jun 2016 00:00:00 -0400

We discuss thoughtbot's increasing use of Elixir and Phoenix and what that means for our Rails work before diving into what's new in Elixir 1.3 and Ecto 2.0.

68: Mostly Undocumented

thoughtbot — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 10:30:00 -0400

Sean runs through a Rails bug that sits at the intersection of several magical and confusing Rails features.

67: Longtime Listener, First Time Caller (Rafael Franca)

thoughtbot — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 11:00:00 -0400

Leading Rails contributor Rafael Franca joins us from RailsConf to talk about taking over Sprockets, the future of the asset pipeline in Rails, managing Rails dependencies, and the hard work of software maintenance.

Rafael Franca
Rails Contributors
Sprockets
Reintroducing gzip file generation in Sprockets
LibSass is Sass in C (and fast)
Spriting with Compass
Rails Assets is not Dead
turbograft
TC39

Sean said you'd all "definitely" have the final build of Rails 5 by now. Whoops!

66: Make Ruby Scripting Great Again (Terence Lee)

thoughtbot — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 00:00:00 -0400

We talk with Terence Lee of Heroku, Bundler, and mruby-cli fame about Apache Kafka and the future of mruby scripting.

Terence Lee
Kafka
I Can’t Believe It’s Not A Queue: Using Kafka with Rails - Terence’s RailsConf talk.
mruby
mruby-cli
Traveling Ruby
Keep Ruby Weird

65: Free as in Puppy (Katrina Owen)

thoughtbot — Wed, 25 May 2016 00:00:00 -0400

While at RailsConf, we talk with Katrina Owen about finding metaphors for software development, the successes and mistakes of Exercism.io, and the benefits of providing code reviews.

64: Open Mic SF

thoughtbot — Wed, 18 May 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Open Mic is back by popular demand, this time in San Francisco. We hear from developers in thoughtbot's San Francisco office about their recent investment time projects.

63: Types Are Only Good If You Use Them

thoughtbot — Wed, 11 May 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Derek and Sean discuss some recent issues with exciting language features like pattern matching, macros, and static types.

Support The Bike Shed

62: Shipping is the Fastest Way to Get Somewhere

thoughtbot — Wed, 04 May 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Sean celebrates Diesel reaching "faster than a SQL string" status before we chat about Rails 5 blockers and the clarity of focus and priorities that only shipping can bring.

61: I'm Not Telling You My Birthday

thoughtbot — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0400

"Send me an email every year for my birthday" is an easy thing for a human to understand but it can be deceptively tricky to do with computers. Also tricky for (some) computers: SELECT * FROM. Wait... what?

DATE_PART or EXTRACT
Triggers
Using EXPLAIN
Using ANALYZE
VACUUM
Derek's (mostly useless) Approximately Gem

60: Remote Control (Katherine Fellows)

thoughtbot — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0400

KF (Katherine Fellows) joins the show to chat about successful BridgeFoundry events and creating environments where remote developers, junior and otherwise, can thrive.

59: I Wish They Wouldn't Do That

thoughtbot — Wed, 13 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Derek and Sean discuss the left-pad saga, how other programming communities are reacting to it, and what you should learn from it as a library or application author.

Bash on Ubuntu on Windows
I’ve Just Liberated My Modules by Azer Koçulu
A discussion about the breaking of the internet (Kik’s side of the story) by Mike Roberts
Kik, left-pad, and npm by Isaac Z. Schlueter from npm
npm Package Hijacking: From the Hijackers Perspective by Nathan Johnson
Is gem yank a security concern?
Kill Your Dependencies by Mike Perham
To gem, or not to gem by Elle Meredith
changes to npm’s unpublish policy by Ashley Williams from npm
ApplicationRecord in Rails 5

Thank you to Hired for sponsoring this episode!

58: Nobody Gets Fired For Buying IBM

thoughtbot — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Should you rewrite or refactor? What should you consider as you weigh this decision and what exactly constitutes a rewrite anyway?

Things You Should Never Do, Part I - Joel Spolsky on Software Rewrites
What does the phrase "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" mean?
When Understanding Means Rewriting by Jeff Atwood
The Big Rewrite, revisited by DHH

Thank you to Hired for sponsoring this episode!

57: Mutability Ruins the Whole Party (José Valim)

thoughtbot — Wed, 30 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0400

We chat with José Valim about bringing light to Elixir's dark corners, the design goals of Ecto, and the future of Elixir, Ecto, and Phoenix.

José Valim on Twitter
Introducing unifying calendar types to Elixir
Falsehoods programmers believe about time and time zones by Lau Taarnskov
mix deps.tree in Elixir 1.3
mix app.tree in Elixir 1.3
Ecto.Query.preload
Working with Ecto Associations and Embeds by José Valim.
Ecto.Changeset
Ecto 2 beta is out, including concurrent database tests
github_ecto: An Ecto adapter for the GitHub API.
What Makes Phoenix Presence Special by Chris McCord
ExMachina - test factories for Elixir
GenRouter
ElixirConf EU
ElixirConf US

56: Most People Aren't Building Trello

thoughtbot — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Is ActiveRecord reinventing Sequel? If it is, does it matter? Derek and Sean discuss that and whether maybe we could all stand to tone down the JavaScript.

55: Hot Dog is Not a Dessert

thoughtbot — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0500

Derek and Sean talk about their experience with the Rails 5 betas, how to test against them today, and things that you might want to look out for when updating your app.

54: Argument Error

thoughtbot — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0500

Derek shares some Elixir annoyances with Sean and they discus how a consulting role colors their perception of languages and frameworks, both for better and for worse. Sean provides an update on SQLite and Association support in Diesel.

GoodTImes, Timex, and Ecto.DateTime
When should you use DateTime and when should you use Time by Andrew White
Twitter conversation with Brandon Hikert
Postgres RETURNING
Preloading in Ecto
User Focused Design in Elm by Evan Czaplicki
Getting Started with Diesel
Rust API Evolution

53: Cache Machine

thoughtbot — Wed, 24 Feb 2016 00:00:00 -0500

Laila and Derek go on a tour of the various caching mechanisms available to web applications in general, and Rails specifically. When is the right time to cache and at what level?

The Road to 2 Million Websocket Connections in Phoenix by Gary Rennie
Toxic Synovitis
Memoization is a Liability by Henrik Nyh
Use a leading underscore for memoization
Two Hard Things in Computer Science
Rails SQL Cache
Low-Level Caching (Rails.cache.fetch)
Association counter_cache
Fragment Caching
Introduction to Conditional HTTP Caching With Rails by Damian Galarza
A Guide to Caching Your Rails Application with Fastly by Jessie Young
Caching Tutorial for Web Authors and Webmasters by Mark Nottingham
Web Fundamentals: HTTP Caching

52: You're an Elixir Developer Now

thoughtbot — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 00:00:00 -0500

Derek and Laila discuss Derek's excitement for Elixir and Phoenix. Is Elixir as fun to write as Ruby? Is Phoenix a better Rails?

Elixir and Phoenix
Routes in Phoenix
Using ctags with Elixir
Static Assets in Phoenix
ja_serializers
ecto
Is There a JSON Schema describing JSON API?
Elixir 1.2 Map and MapSet scale better
ExMachina - factories for Elixir
Elixir Typespecs and Behaviours

51: Is Sim City Running? (Steve Klabnik)

thoughtbot — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 00:00:00 -0500

We enjoy a wide-ranging discussion with Steve Klabnik on the importance of good documentation, the sometimes cloudy definition of a breaking change, the politics of open source contributions, and work/life balance or boundaries.

Steve Klabnik - twitter, website, blog
Let’s Talk About Ecosystem Documentation
SimCity Mode in Windows 3.1 from Joel Spolsky
Rescuing Resque… Again
Netrunner
IntermezzOS
Writing an OS in Rust by Philipp Oppermann
Bors - an automated integrator for GitHub
High Five - a bot that encourages good contributions

50: Open Mic

thoughtbot — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 00:00:00 -0500

It's Open Mic day at The Bike Shed. We hear from other thoughtbot designers and developers about what they're excited to be spending their investment time on lately.

Matt Sumner
Hunchpig Podcast
Haskell Programming
The Lambda Calculus
Learn You a Haskell for Great Good
Is Everyone Trying Their Best? - The Bike Shed on software quality
Cole Townsend
Velocity JS
Cole on Dribbble
The Buffalo Bills` Playoff Drought - The longest current drought in sports
Joël Quenneville
Alter Ego
Elm
Elm's Time Traveling Debugger

49: A More Practical Haskell

thoughtbot — Wed, 27 Jan 2016 00:00:00 -0500

How can an ORM be faster than a SQL String? Laila and Sean discuss the latest happenings in Diesel and why it is that a systems language needs an ORM, anyway.

What is the difference between traits in Rust and typeclasses in Haskell?
What is a pure function?
Why Rust Ditched Pure Functions
The ActiveRecord and DataMapper patterns (not libraries) as defined by Martin Fowler in Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
Zero-cost abstractions in Rust by Aaron Turon.
What should Diesel associations look like?
Iron and Nickel web frameworks for Rust.
Adapterizing storage for ActionCable - Thanks Jon Moss!
Moving ActionCable from Celluloid to ConcurrentRuby - Thanks Mike Perham!

48: Is Everyone Trying Their Best?

thoughtbot — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 10:00:00 -0500

Software is broken. In this episode, Derek and Sean discuss why exactly it's broken, and what we can do to make it better.

The origin of "software engineering"
The Coq Proof Assistant
NASA's 10 rules for developing safety critical code
The differences between strong and static typing
"If it compiles it works"
Derek adds IS NULL to Diesel
"Quickcheck in Ruby"
Note: Shopify is fewer than 700 developers

47: Star Wars Oranges

thoughtbot — Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 -0500

Ruby 2.3 is out! What are we looking forward to trying and what do we think of &. and try? Stick around after the credits for spoiler-filled discussion of Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Star Wars Fruit
What is Kerberos?
Safe navigation operator (AKA the lonely operator) by Georgi Mitrev
ActiveSupport’s #try might not be doing what you think it’s doing by Avdi Grimm
The history of try in Rails a comment from Myron Marston
In Ruby, &method Passes You!
Hash#dig
Hash Comparison in Ruby 2.3 by Olivier Lacan
did_you_mean by Yuki Nishijima.
Immutable Strings in Ruby 2.3 by Alexis Mas
Multiline strings in Ruby 2.3 - the squiggly heredoc by Damir Svrtan

46: Don't Breathe, Save the Planet

thoughtbot — Wed, 06 Jan 2016 13:00:00 -0500

We discuss the maintenance burden of ActionCable and its dependencies on Rails 5, follow-up on Scenic issues, and discuss implementing migrations anew in Diesel.

45: I Think I'd Prefer An Error to Nonsense

thoughtbot — Wed, 23 Dec 2015 00:00:00 -0500

Derek shipped Scenic 1.0, which spurs a conversation about semantic versioning and the value of the 1.0 milestone. We discuss what the bar for breaking changes in a library should be and look at some specific changes on tap for Scenic and whether they will or should carry a major version bump.

44: It Won't Crash... It Might Crash

thoughtbot — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 00:00:00 -0500

Sean has shipped early versions of Diesel, an ORM for Rust! We discuss its semantic versioning, the ergonomics of use versus the complexities of implementation, early issues with the API and the road to Diesel 1.0.

43: That's DOCTOR Internet Technologist

thoughtbot — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 00:00:00 -0500

We talk about lessons learned from teachable moments both in the moment and decades later.

Teachable moment
Safe Operations for High Volume PostgreSQL by Paul Gross
How to Create Postgres Indexes Concurrently in ActiveRecord Migrations by Dan Croak
PostgreSQL COPY FROM
Guarding against truncating the production database in Suspenders
Have Some (Referential) Integrity with Foreign Keys
"Inheritance is not for sharing code" tweet from Sarah Mei
"Inheritance is for specialization, not for sharing code" from Sandi Metz' "Nothing is Something" talk at RailsConf
Let's Not by Joe Ferris
Mystery Guest by Dan Croak
A modem pool
Diesel née YAQB

42: That's Incredibly Ambitious (Grayson Wright)

thoughtbot — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 11:30:00 -0500

We speak to Grayson Wright about building Administrate, an open source Rails framework for administrative interfaces. What makes Administrate different than existing solutions and what are the challenges in maintaining high-level dependencies.

41: Ugh, I Have to Write Web Apps in This Thing

thoughtbot — Wed, 25 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0500

Derek and Sean talk about Derek's exploration into Elixir and Phoenix, when and how performance matters, and ways to keep your Rails app fast from day 1.

40: ActiveRecord Deprecated Persistence

thoughtbot — Wed, 18 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0500

The ActiveRecord update API is a mess of methods that confuse even ActiveRecord’s maintainer. What are the problems and is there any hope for a solution?

39: Okay with Instability (Yehuda Katz)

thoughtbot — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0500

We talk with Yehuda Katz about how much risk is right for you and your app, the sharp tools of high level abstractions, and how our statistical intuition leads us astray on web performance.

Remove The Stress, Pick a Deadline
Writing Software by DHH
Skylight
The Log Normal Reality - On how our statistical intuition leads us astray.
Yehuda on Twitter

Support The Bike Shed

38: Ugh, Forms

thoughtbot — Tue, 03 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0500

Laila and Derek discuss how they have handled forms with complex validation requirements and how to make these forms have a smooth user experience.

37: The Web is Faster Without Garbage

thoughtbot — Thu, 29 Oct 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Begun, the ad block wars have. Derek debugs an issue that arises from iOS ad blocking and wonders if analytics will move back to the server side. Sean fills us in on how dirty checking works in ActiveRecord and how he's making it faster and better in Rails 5.

36: Python Unchained

thoughtbot — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Derek and Laila talk about learning Python and Django and discuss how thoughtbot adopts new languages, frameworks, and libraries. What factors influence adoption? How do we share what works and doesn't work?

35: GitHub Ate My Résumé

thoughtbot — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Sean and Derek explain why you should always use a personal email address in your Git configuration before they dive into Ruby exception handling, and potential MRI proc optimizations.

Set your Git email address to an address you own "forever".
Git .mailmap
Jobs at thoughtbot
rest-client
Ruby's Kernel#raise documentation
Ruby's Exception#cause documentation
Spring overrides raise, but feels uneasy about it.
Exceptional Ruby by Avdi Grim.
Proc#=== documentation.
Upcase: 50% Off Your First Month For Bike Shed Listeners!

34: README.md

thoughtbot — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Derek is joined by Laila Winner to discuss Neo4j, the importance of fantastic documentation, and the different types of documentation a project requires.

PLIBMTTBHGATY
Neo4j
Teach, Don't Tell
Let's talk about ecosystem documentation - Grading documentation of the top 40 crates in Rust.
FactoryGirl Getting Started
Clearance SignInGuard documentation
Rails Security Guide
Jobs at thoughtbot
Laila on Twitter

33: Just Put it in a Module, Man

thoughtbot — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Sean and Derek take some listener questions, and dig into DRY.

Thanks for sending us your questions and feedback. Got more? You can email us at hosts@bikeshed.fm or tweet us.

32: Bug For Bug Compatibility

thoughtbot — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Derek and Sean discuss Microsoft's interest in open source, improving the Rails development story on Windows, and Sean's progress implementing an ORM in Rust.

31: Oxidizing an ORM

thoughtbot — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Are provably correct queries of interest to you? Sean gives a rundown of what a Rusty ORM might be like to build.

String, str, and CStr.
What's a marker trait?
Rust macros.
Rust compiler plugins.
hy·gien·ic ˌhī-ˈjē-nik, -ˈje- also -jē-ˈe-nik
Sean's ORM query thoughts

30: Just Go to Slash Wibble

thoughtbot — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Derek and Sean discuss hypothetical changes to Rails routing before turning their attention toward hunting memory bloat and the proposal that strings be frozen by default in Ruby 3.

The Bike Shed listeners make disable_with default on submit_tag
Derek tries to explain the trouble with unrestricted routes to a client.
The trouble with singular resources and form_for
Use derailed benchmarks to find memory leaks and bloat.
ActiveRecord memory bloat
Matz: String literals frozen by default in Ruby 3
The issue for discussion because Twitter is terrible for these things.
The trouble with symbols
Required keyword argument syntax is ugly.

29: Django Unchained (Mike Burns)

thoughtbot — Tue, 25 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Sean is joined by Mike Burns to discuss what Ruby and Rails can learn from Python and Django.

Mike Burns
Python's map
Django
George's Sleeping with the Enemy talk from RailsConf 2013
A False Midnight
Python doctest
Python Decorator Library

28: Minisode 0.1.1

thoughtbot — Tue, 18 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Did you know Rails has no integration test suite? What could go wrong?

ActionController::Parameters no longer inherits from Hash

Support The Bike Shed

27: I've Got 29.97 Problems (and codecs are some)

thoughtbot — Tue, 11 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Sean and Derek circle back on HTTP before diving into unsafe rust, and finally the merits of a small standard library.

26: My Cache is in the Cloud

thoughtbot — Tue, 04 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0400

This week, Sean and Derek discuss performance and inheriting code. In a stroke of complete madness, Derek decides that turbolinks isn't that bad.

Spree
Browserscope network profile details
RFC2616 is Dead
Original HTTP/1.1 connection limit
Updated HTTP/1.1 connection specification removes the specific limit
cloud-to-butt
turbolinks
jquery.turbolinks
async script loading
Disabling form buttons with disable_with
FOUT: flash of unstyled text

25: Throwing the Schema Out With the SOAPy Bathwater (Gordon Fontenot)

thoughtbot — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Derek is joined by Gordon Fontenot for a discussion of the JSON API specification, problems consuming it from Swift, and the future of functional programming in Swift.

This episode of The Bike Shed is sponsored by:

Code School: Entertaining online learning for existing and aspiring developers. Leave a review on our iTunes page to be entered to win a free month of Code School.

Links / Show Notes

JSON API
Argo: Functional JSON parsing in Swift
Swift Optionals
Spine: A Swift JSON API client
Curry: Swift framework for function currying.
HAL: Hypertext Application Language
SOAP
JSON Schema
Runes
Build Phase- For more of Gordon's insight into baseball and iOS development
Gordon on Twitter
Cookie Clicker
Swarm Sim

24: You Look Good in a Lab Coat (Richard Schneeman)

thoughtbot — Tue, 21 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Richard Schneeman joins The Bike Shed to discuss ruby memory use, horizontal scaling, and tackling open source issues big and small.

This episode of The Bike Shed is sponsored by:

Code School: Entertaining online learning for existing and aspiring developers. Leave a review on our iTunes page to be entered to win a free month of Code School.

Links & Show Notes

Speed Science - Richard's Railsconf 2015 talk
mail gem memory use
mime-types memory use
Deprecate *_path methods in mailers
XKCD: Evey change breaks someone's workflow
Why does 6 times 9 equal 42?
The Language Strangeness Budget
Code Triage
Docs Doctor
Ruby Together
Keep Ruby Weird
Richard on Twitter

23: Why Did They Call it Rust?!

thoughtbot — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Sean gives Derek a tour of Rust, a new systems language from Mozilla.

This episode of The Bike Shed is sponsored by:

Code School: Entertaining online learning for existing and aspiring developers. Leave a review on our iTunes page to be entered to win a free month of Code School.
Rust
The Rust Programming Language
Guaranteeing Memory Safety in Rust
Rust traits
Cargo
include_str!
Pattern matching in Rust

22: No Capes! (Eileen Uchitelle)

thoughtbot — Tue, 07 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Eileen Uchitelle joins the show to discuss performance improvements to ActiveRecord, speeding up integration tests, and contributing to or running open source projects.

This episode of The Bike Shed is sponsored by:

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Links & Show Notes

No Capes!
CRUD! The Consequences of Not Understanding How ActiveRecord - Eileen's Midwest Ruby Talk
fix delete_all to remove records directly
How To Performance - Eileen's talk from GORUCO
Breaking Down the Barrier: Demystifying Contributing to Rails - Eileen's lab from RailsConf
Eileen on Twitter

21: The "Best" Canada (Godfrey Chan)

thoughtbot — Tue, 30 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Rails Core Team member Godfrey Chan joins the show to demystify rails bug hunting and contributing.

Godfrey's RailsConf talk: Prying Open The Black Box
The Waltons Say Goodnight
Canada gem
Rails Bug Templates
Rails Contributing Guide
Travis Container Infrastructure
Vancouver Ruby Group
Godfrey on Twitter

20: Intentionally Excruciatingly Painful

thoughtbot — Tue, 23 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0400

We're joined by Josh Clayton to discuss our differing strategies on testing view behavior, strategies for dealing with brittle feature specs, and what types of tests each of us favor.

Verifying partial doubles
Decent exposure
Defining helpers directly on the view in view specs
Don't stub the system under test
Clearance Back Door
Automatic form filling driven by i18n and Factory Girl with Formulaic
Mystery guests
Using data attributes to decouple data from presentation
Testing pyramid
Shoulda Matchers
Consistency Fail
Josh Clayton on Twitter

19: The Oncoming Storm (Sam Phippen)

thoughtbot — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Derek and Sean are joined by Sam Phippen from the RSpec core team to discuss RSpec mocks, testing strategies, and minitest.

RSpec 3 adds composable matchers
Spies were added to RSpec in 2.14
Using any_instance to test legacy code
minitest
RSpec's stub_const method.
Don't Stub the System Under Test
assigns and assert_template are deprecated in Rails 5
Sam's RailsConf talk: Understanding Rails Test Types in RSpec
Fun & Plausible Solutions
Sam on Twitter

18: This Podcast is Rigged (But Not Animated)

thoughtbot — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Sean and Derek discuss rails asset dependencies before diving into an overview of animation techniques and C extensions.

17: Railing About Performance (Sam Saffron)

thoughtbot — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0400

We chat with Sam Saffron about performance, benchmarking, and database migration strategies.

Feedback? You can tweet us, email us, or leave a comment on our website.

16: Wizards Are Hard to Kill

thoughtbot — Wed, 27 May 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Grab Bag! Derek and Sean talk about math, augmented reality, RailsConf wrap up, Minimum Viable Products, Accessibility...

Homography
Isomorphism
Homomorphism
Sean's Augmented Reality PoC
Kerbal Space Program
Derek's talk on Cultivating Code Review Culture
Sean's talk on Designing a Great Ruby API
Attributes API documentation
Minimum Viable Product
Chandra Carney's talk on Programming with Accessibility in Mind
Nothing is Something by Sandi Metz
Sometimes a Controller is Just a Controller by Justin Searls

15: Might As Well Be About Trains (Sarah Mei)

thoughtbot — Tue, 19 May 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Sean, Derek, and Sarah Mei talk about conference speaking, refactoring, and OO vs FP problems.

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14: An Acceptable Level of Hassle (David Heinemeier Hansson)

thoughtbot — Tue, 12 May 2015 00:00:00 -0400

This week, we're joined by DHH and discuss microservices, monoliths, shared abstractions, and the fate of Action Cable.

DHH's Keynote
Microservices
Sacrificial Architecture
Scaling Mercurial at Facebook
has_secure_password
BCrypt
Request Forgery Protection
error_messages_for removed in Rails 3
Sandi Metz on the cost of the wrong abstraction
WebSockets
Event Machine
Faye
Basecamp

13: Begrudging Applause (Aaron Patterson)

thoughtbot — Tue, 05 May 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Live from RailsConf, Aaron Patterson joins the show to talk about Rails 5, Rack 2, Contributing to Open Source, and cats. We also field audience questions.

12: A Poor Man's binding.pry

thoughtbot — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 13:00:00 -0400

Derek and Sean talk about naming, debugging, and the anxiety of conference talks.

Sean fixes Android tooling in one line.
Martin Fowler on naming objects after patterns
Dash for OS X
Alfred for OS X
The beauty of Intellisense in Visual Studio
Derek's bundle search command
Ruby Mine
Sean's talk at windy city rails
How to talk to Developers by Ben Orenstein

11: Form-ing Opinions

thoughtbot — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Sean and Derek talk about the state of Android tooling, refactoring journeys, and an approach to rails form objects.

Dalvik executables limited to 65,536 methods
ProGuard
Stylesheet limits in Internet Explorer
A refactoring jounrney in animated gif form.
Simple Form wrappers
ScalaForms
Type-safe URLs in Yesod
Django forms
Batching up touch calls
Issues with uniqueness validations

10: I Don't Get Functional Programming

thoughtbot — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Pat Brisbin joins Derek to discuss the many advantages of Haskell programming.

note: at 27:01 Pat says "referential integrity" when he meant "referential transparency"; he's very sorry.

Maybe Haskell 50% off
xmonad tiling window manager
Learn You A Haskell
Carnival - Open source, Haskell-powered commenting for the Giant Robots Blog
Pointfree Style
How to say dots and dollars
The Maybe data type
The Incomplete Guide to Lazy Evaluation (in Haskell)
Building Haskell Projects with Halcyon

9: Monorails, For the Kids

thoughtbot — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0500

Sean and Derek discuss Monoliths, Service Oriented Architecture, and the new Adapter Specific Type Registry in Rails 5.

8: Attributes API, Relation#or, Paid Open Source

thoughtbot — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 13:00:00 -0500

Derek and Sean discuss what the Attributes API enables, the addition of Relation#or and paid open source.

Sean's attributes API is "finished"
Attributes API documentation
PostGIS ActiveRecord Adapter
composed_of
Yehuda's RailsConf Keynote on the power of shared abstractions.
Ernie Miller's RailsConf talk on the consequences of Rails' abstractions.
load_schema makes sense now.
DelegateClass
Steve Klabnik tweets about companies not giving back significantly to Ruby open source
Sean speeds up &block on MRI and jRuby

7: At the Car Wash

thoughtbot — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 10:00:00 -0500

Derek and Sean talk trade schools, sneaky bugs, bad method names, before_filters, and the Superbowl.

Turing School and Metis trade schools.
"Car Wash" by Rose Royce
Sean introduces accessed_fields to the ActiveRecord Attributes API.
Peek for insights into your rails app.
Bullet for hunting down N+1 queries and unused eager loading.
What does Faraday middleware look like?
The Clearance redirect loop Derek introduced and fixed.
before filter and its friends have been deprecated in Rails 5.0
The various ways people set instance variables in Rails controllers.
read_attribute_before_typecast
problems from _before_type_cast
dirty checking causes errors
RangeError s are hard (Sean's solution to the test placement problem was to not commit the test)

6: Shh! Library Under Maintenance

thoughtbot — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 11:00:00 -0500

Sean and Derek discuss thoughtful deprecations, backwards compatibility, and other joys of library maintenance.

Trailblazer
Clearance
Ember 2.0 - Stability without Stagnation
Ruby 2.2 on Rails 3.2. Now merged, but unreleased.
The original removal of ARel type casting
Narrowing the scope - a less impactful ARel deprecation
Rails changes to accompany the ARel API changes.
An example of an issue these refactorings solve.

5: Rails is Not Your Architecture

thoughtbot — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 11:30:00 -0500

Derek and Sean discuss various ways of taking the Rails out of your Ruby on Rails application, what folder to put your files in, and the difficulties and rewards of learning new programming languages.

Rails Does Not Define Your Application Architecture
What the hell is a service object?
Fuzzy file finding with ctrl-p
Query Objects
Uncle Bob's Clean Architecture
Form Objects
Scala Play forms
Haskell Yesod Forms
But Pointfree Has More Points!

4: Put Everything on the Front End

thoughtbot — Fri, 12 Dec 2014 14:00:00 -0500

Derek and Sean discuss hunting Rails performance regressions and techniques for improving performance in your web applications.

Speeding Up Rails 4.2
StackProf
Flame Graphs
5 Reasons to Use Protocol Buffers Instead of JSON For Your Next Service
Key Frames
Binary Search Algorithm
Writing Fast Ruby from Erik Micahels-Ober
The select and pluck methods
Fragment Caching
Exposing CSRF token refresh in the jQuery UJS public API.
Postgres Explain Plans
Implementing Multi-Table Full Text Search with Postgres in Rails
Creating database views in Rails with Scenic
Tweet us @_bikeshed or send us email

3: Flipping the Script

thoughtbot — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 01:00:00 -0500

Sean and Derek take a fresh look at the tradeoffs in writing CoffeeScript and whether we should be using an ES6 transpiler instead.

destructiring assignment in JavaScript
function currying in CoffeeScript
The existential operator in CoffeeScript
Stockholm syndrome
CoffeeScript writes better JavaScript than you
ES5 Compatibility Chart: When can I use map, reduce and forEach?
Underscore.js removes fallbacks to native ES5 array functions
Safari's LLVM-optimized FTL JIT Compiler
ES6 Transpilers traceur and ESNext
ES6 Features
A plethora of JavaScript build tools
ES5 strict mode
Sprockets road map for source maps support

2: Rails 4.2

thoughtbot — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 09:00:00 -0500

Derek and Sean discuss Sean's commit access to Rails, what's coming in Rails 4.2, and how to go about making Rails code better.

Ylan Segal wrote us to raise a clarification on one of Sandi's rules discussed in episode #1.
Ernie Miller's RailsConf Talk
The Rails 4.2 release notes.
Sean's work on the attributes API.
Aaron Patterson explains Adequate Record
Aaron Patterson discusses adequate record, rails, and other topics on Giant Robots #100.
Active Job
Global Id
Web Console
Foreigner and Immigrant are a good foreign key combination today with Foreigner subsumed by 4.2.
transform_values
Responders
Derek's unDRY Rails Commit.
Thanks to Rachel Cope and Reda Lemeden for our great artwork.

1: Sandi & Derek's Rules

thoughtbot — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 10:00:00 -0400

Sean and Derek discuss lessons learned from following Sandi Metz' rules on a project and the overall impact of rules on code.

Sandi Metz' Rules
Ruby Rogues, episode #87, where Sandi tells us the rules at 1 hour, 18 minutes, 27 seconds in.
Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby, or POODR, is an excellent book you should all check out.
God classes
thoughtbot's Ruby style guidelines wherein we disavow ternary operators and conditional modifiers.
The facade pattern
Guard clause
Ruby's method_added method.