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PODCAST

The Bike Shed

On The Bike Shed, hosts Joël Quenneville, Sally Hall, and Aji Slater discuss development experiences and challenges at thoughtbot with Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and whatever else is drawing their attention, admiration, or ire this week.

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All Episodes

41:38

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

The Bike Shed ·

2019/03/01

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

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38:01

188: A Function by Any Other Name

The Bike Shed ·

2019/02/22

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:

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41:31

187: Convincing People Not to Build Software

The Bike Shed ·

2019/02/15

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

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38:12

186: Let's Duplicate Stuff

The Bike Shed ·

2019/02/01

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

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35:01

185: The Transactional Fallacy (Avdi Grimm)

The Bike Shed ·

2019/01/25

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

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41:22

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

The Bike Shed ·

2019/01/18

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

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49:25

183: Former Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots...

The Bike Shed ·

2019/01/11

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

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39:12

182: What's it in the Service Of?

The Bike Shed ·

2019/01/04

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 -

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41:31

181: Strong Types and a Functional Flair

The Bike Shed ·

2018/12/14

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

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39:14

180: A Citizen of the Internet (John Resig)

The Bike Shed ·

2018/12/07

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

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49:47

179: We CAN Just Use a Form!

The Bike Shed ·

2018/11/30

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

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38:31

178: Friday is For Spikes

The Bike Shed ·

2018/11/16

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

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32:21

177: Tricking Computers Into Doing Things

The Bike Shed ·

2018/11/09

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

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37:10

176: The Machines Will Learn

The Bike Shed ·

2018/11/02

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. Does Progressive Enhancement

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42:11

175: Tell Me When It's Real

The Bike Shed ·

2018/10/26

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

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30:48

174: I've Watched a Lot of Vim Courses

The Bike Shed ·

2018/10/18

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 thoughtbot Purpose Statement Chad on Twitter

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50:05

173: A Combinatoric Explosion of Nulls

The Bike Shed ·

2018/10/12

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

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55:51

172: What I Believe About Software

The Bike Shed ·

2018/10/05

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

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45:55

171: What If We Just Used a Form?

The Bike Shed ·

2018/09/21

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 Ember's heroic focus on the URL & Routes GraphQL TypeScript Vimium Boston React Conference

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49:14

170: Less Charted Territory

The Bike Shed ·

2018/09/14

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

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489 results

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