The Bike Shed

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 de...

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 worl...

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...

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 &a...

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...

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 in...

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. Giant Robots Podcast Upcase Test Driven Rails Mastering Git Fundamentals of TDD SOA on The Bike Shed Onramp to Vim thoug...

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...

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 poin...

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. Ethereum Ethereum Proof of Stake Browser History APIs including pushState SOAP...

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 e...

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, test...

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 develop...

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...

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. Things You Should Nev...

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. bin/setup ActiveStorage confi on heroku Rails encrypted "Credentials" 12 Factor App Semisonic- Closing Time Suspenders changes moving to per-topic generators Ruby bug Methods with more than 32 keyword argumen...

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. Visual Studio Code Language Server Protocol Vim-LSP Seamlessly Navigate Vim and tmux Splits rcm: rc file (dotfile) management Add facility for syncing VSCode extensions How to exit the Vim editor? Have you evaluated your toolchain recently?...

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: No...

Rails performance, rebalancing coherence, and themes from career advice requests. Jeff Atwood on Rails performance An analysis of memory bloat in Active Record 5.2 134: Fastributes | The Bike Shed 17: Railing About Performance (Sam Saffron) | The Bike Shed Re-Rebalancing Coherence

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. Vaidehi Joshi on Twitter Base CS – The Blog Posts Base CS - The Podcast Base CS - The Video Series RailsConf 2018: Re-graph...

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! Diesel v1.3.0 RailsConf 2018: Up And Down Again: A Migration's Tale by Derek Prior ActiveSupport::Inflector

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. Aaron Patterson (@tenderlove) on Twitter Parkinson's Law of Triviality (The Bike Shed Effect) Cargo Cult Building a Compacting GC for MRI by Aaron Patterson Allison McMillan on Twitter CAR and CDR Honeypot The meth...

Chris Toomey joins Derek to talk about their shared experience in Elm and their excitement about GraphQL. Chris on Twitter The Reader Monad — Part 1 Kind (type theory) Monads are like burritos Scala.js GraphQL | A query language for your API Tell Me When it Closes RailsConf 2017: In Relentless Pursuit of REST by Derek Prior Jobs at thoughtbot graphiql

We speak with Olivier Lacan about KeepAChangelog.com, tooling improvements for better developer experience, and the emotional impact of shutting down CodeSchool.com Keep a Changelog RubyGems Specification Reference Why Won't Bundle Update? bundler-stats The Life and Death of a Rails App by Olivier Lacan Online Learning Service Pluralsight Acquires Code School For $36 Million Human Errors by Olivie...