

The Bike Shed
thoughtbot
On The Bike Shed, hosts Joël Quenneville and Stephanie Minn discuss development experiences and challenges at thoughtbot with Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and whatever else is drawing their attention, admiration, or ire this week.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Mar 16, 2021 • 40min
285: Tell a Cohesive, Testable Story
On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle a listener question around the world of service objects. Where, really, should we be putting our business logic. Model concerns, "service" objects, the model files themselves? Tune in to find out. They also discuss a perilous Rails 6 upgrade deployment and the ensuing debugging session, as well as Steph's retro on her extended break from work.
This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy
USDR (US Digital Response) Volunteer Organization
18f
USDS
TwiddleWakka
Clearance Issue w/ LOWER email
Say No To More Process
Bike Shed Question Form
dry-rb & dry-rb monad
Bike Shed Episode discussing dry-rb
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Mar 9, 2021 • 47min
284: Lovely, Wonderful Spam
On this week's episode Chris and Steph chat about upgrading to Rails 6, intercepting emails, and play a few rounds of Software Terminology Trivia. They also discuss "Deep Work" by Cal Newport and share strategies for finding and maintaining focus.
This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy
Letter Opener
recipient_interceptor
Spam Monty Python
CAN-SPAM Act
Deep Work by Cal Newport
brain.fm
Getting Things Done
Send us your question, we would love to hear about it.
Looking for your next role? thoughtbot is hiring!
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Mar 2, 2021 • 26min
283: Who's The User?
On this week's episode Steph and Chris discuss a listener question around managing content within an application, weighing options like an integrated CMS, headless CMS provides, proxying the content, and supporting marketing and landing pages without needing a developer for every change. They also provide an update on dead man's snitch and a preview of a rails 6 upgrade on the horizon and dreams of database switching.
This episode is brought to you by SPOTcon. Tune in to Scout APM's first conference, and join for developers from around the world to meet, engage with, and learn about solutions that drive leading-edge transformation in application development by registering for free today!
Dead Man's Snitch
Multiple Databases with Active Record
Refinery CMS
ActiveAdmin
Rails Admin
MBTA dotcom repo
Fastly thoughtbot.com proxy blog post
"There's a typo on the homepage" - thoughtbot.com website redesign workshop
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Feb 23, 2021 • 40min
282: What is Normal?
On this week's episode, Chris adds Dead Man's Snitch to a personal project and considers "what is the app doing at runtime?" as he touches on the importance of creating observable systems. Steph shares analyzing a site's traffic and using Apache Bench for simple load testing. They also respond to a listener question about creating environment-specific data for data-intensive applications.
This episode is brought to you by SPOTcon. Tune in to Scout APM's first conference, and join for developers from around the world to meet, engage with, and learn about solutions that drive leading-edge transformation in application development by registering for free today!
Dead Man's Snitch
Apache Bench
HTTP Keep-Alive
Send us your question, we would love to hear about it.
Looking for your next role? thoughtbot is hiring!
Become a Sponsor of The Bike ShedSponsored By:Scout: Register for SPOTcon, FREE today!Support The Bike Shed

Feb 16, 2021 • 31min
281: Finding That Middle Ground
On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle a listener question around switching from mostly-developing, to mostly-communicating and the tactics they've used to balance these facets of their work. They also discuss the new error objects in Rails 6.1, the value of breakable toys, and the importance of keeping presentational concerns out of the data model.
This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy
Rails 6.1's ActiveModel Errors Revamp blog post from @lulalala
Model error as object pull request with great conversation
Previous Bike Shed episode w/ discussion about error handling with dry-rb
Tell Me When It Closes
Monopoly Deal
Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!Sponsored By:Scout: Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy.Support The Bike Shed

Feb 9, 2021 • 32min
280: Stable New New
On this week's episode Chris and Steph discuss a new tmux feature and wvim, a script that streamlines shell command edits. They also discuss the value of taking a sabbatical and protecting downtime. Steph shares some exciting news about thoughtbot and they answer a listener question about GraphQL and whether your app really needs an API?
This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy
thoughtbot is hiring!
Send a question to The Bike Shed!
"which + vim = wvim" post
GraphQL Ruby
Hasura
PostGraphile
Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!Sponsored By:Scout: Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy.Support The Bike Shed

Feb 2, 2021 • 35min
279: Seeking Calm
On this week's episode Steph and Chris discuss some of characteristics and behaviors they've observed in high-performing teams, touching on pull request sizing and prioritizing code review, deploy cadence, error monitoring and response, and minimizing the number of themes being tackled by the team in parallel. They also touch on moving to Netlify and simplifying deploys, an odd edge case with 303 vs 302 status code, and the quirks of the ActiveRecord or method.
This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy
Netlify
Netlify build plugins
Git LFS
Issue opened on Inertia for 302 vs 303s
"Scoping .or clauses with common joins" post
Derek Prior's Building a Culture of Code Review
Charity Majors
Honeycomb.io
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Jan 26, 2021 • 39min
278: Beliefs in the Firmware
In this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss the popular testing themes and questions that emerged during the RSpec training course, reflecting on which testing "rules" still apply and when to break the rules. They also chat about the results of the 2020 State of JS survey and repurposing email validations to be helpful vs strict.
This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy
RSpec focus filter
RSpec subject
FactoryBot
The State of JS 2020
Svelte.js
Snowpack
esbuild
Mailcheck
Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!Sponsored By:Scout: Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy.Support The Bike Shed

Jan 19, 2021 • 40min
277: Making Communication Easier
In this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss some of their methods for helping out reviewers of their pull requests and keeping code review moving along smoothly. They also discus the shift to async communication and the tools, processes, and workflows that come with a shift to async. Does standup still have a place in an async world? Tune in to find out.
This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy
Svelte society coining an acronym
GitHub now supports video uploads
Recordit
Giphy Capture
Basecamp
Telegram
Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!Sponsored By:Scout: Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy.Support The Bike Shed

Jan 12, 2021 • 27min
276: Ride-Along Files
On this week's episode, Chris shares a new favorite tool for querying JSON and Steph revisits a previous deployment issue. They also dive into the new features in Ruby 3, ponder the idea of adding types to Ruby, revisit breaking changes, and round out the conversation with a listener question about managing tmux sessions.
This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy
fx - Command-line JSON processor
jq - Command-line JSON processor
Postman
Insomnia
Ruby 3 Release Notes
Ruby 3 - Separation of positional and keyword arguments
Ruby adds experimental support for end-less method definition
Tmuxinator
Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!Sponsored By:Scout: Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy.Support The Bike Shed