The Bike Shed

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...

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...

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 h...

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. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today a...

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. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM . Give Scout a try for free today and Sc...

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 s...

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. S...

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 A...

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. This episode is brought to you by Datado...

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 equalit...

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 pl...

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. Window.find() Dash Wat - Lightning ta...

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 hom...

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. Roam Research Bear DayOne Reveal.js Github Draft Pull Requests Prettier Ruby C...

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...

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. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN . Click through to get three months for free. ActiveRecord::Locking::Pessimistic#with_lock Derek Prior's blog post - "Validation,...

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 var...

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 b...

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. This episode is brought to you...

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. The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll GNU UNIX POSIX...

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. Snapshot tests styled...

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

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. Joël's "Rolling Random Romans" talk Steph's "Building Compliant Health...

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 Cl...

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 consid...