The Bike Shed

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...

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. Slack GitHub - Pull Request Review React Angular Postgres MySQL REST...

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 automat...

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. Elm React TypeScript Scala Java...

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 th...

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...

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. prettier elm-format Query objects Prettier plugin-ruby Stop Coding and Start Drawing -...

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. Glenn o...

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. Angular Apollo Capybara CircleCI CircleCI Orbs Cypress Docker Enzyme GraphQL HTTP Heroku Buildpack Mystery Guests Nightmare.js Normalizer RSpec...

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. Angular Backbone BDD Elm Ember ES6 HTTP Javascript Python Rails React RSJX TDD Typescript Vue

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. Lin Clark Till S...

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 an...

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. edwardloveall.com thoughtbot apprenticeship Domain Name Sanity Heroku DNSimp...

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. Ruby Haskell Scala Elm GHCJS Reflex (frp library for...

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. Devon on Twitter Devon's Blog N...

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 cle...

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...

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?...

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...

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 upco...

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 fa...

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 communit...

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 programmin...

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 Cas...

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...