

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

Sep 24, 2019 • 35min
215: Start With People
On this week's episode, Steph returns from vacation and Chris makes some noise about a fantastic new button. They discuss Steph's continued adventures in search of the perfect mechanical keyboard and then dig into two listener questions on landing a first job as a developer and what frameworks and languages to focus on, as well as discussing some of the common objections to GraphQL.Rails ActionableErrors - Migration ButtonCODE KeyboardKeychron K2 keyboardCassidy Williams on TwitterAvdi Confident Code talkAvdi Confident Ruby bookRobustness principleThe Rails TutorialStack Overflow 2019 developer surveyDataloader for GraphQLgraphql-batch from ShopifyGraphQL persisted QueriesSupport The Bike Shed

Sep 17, 2019 • 39min
214: Have You Tried Refreshing the Page?
On this week's episode, Matt Sumner guest stars to discuss his recent adventures on a project that uses React, TypeScript and GraphQL. Along the way, Matt and Chris discuss VS Code features, Apollo caching and reflect upon their first year as Development Directors.
RoR Podcast episode with StephEtheriumReactTypeScriptGraphQLTDD
VS CodeApollo
Apollo tooling
ElmReduxGerman Velasco - A Function by Any Other NameGerman Velasco - I Feel Like We Should've Solved This By NowPlucky
thoughtbot is hiring!Support The Bike Shed

Sep 10, 2019 • 35min
213: Admins Matter Too
On this week's episode, Steph discusses a mini design sprint she led to help validate an internal admin tool while Chris muses on the merits of net negative lines of code on a project. They dig into the idea that while code can certainly be an asset, it may also be a liability. They investigate ActiveSupport::MessageVerifier for secure time-sensitive tokens. Steph shares details about her recent visit to the Ruby on Rails Podcast and Chris shares the recording for a talk he gave on understanding technology choices. Lastly, they round out the conversation with a listener question about build times and lock files and how to organize and split up our tests.Your First Technology Decisions Talk by Chris Toomey - video recordingSteph on The Ruby on Rails PodcastProduct Design Sprint GuideProduct Design Sprint - Five Phases Overview VideoActiveSupport::MessageVerifierMaking Impossible States Impossible talk by Richard FeldmanRails View SpecsSupport The Bike Shed

Sep 4, 2019 • 37min
212: Award Winning Sheds
On this week's episode, Steph and Chris share the news that The Bike Shed won the Best Dev Podcast on the Hackernoon Noonies awards! After a bit of celebration, they get back to their normal adventures with a discussion around onboarding covering the importance, approach, and pitfalls that they've seen in their time joining countless teams. They also touch on the relevance and increasing ease of SSL everywhere, and they answer a listener question about technical debt and rewriting applications.
Bike Shed - Best Dev Podcast Noonies
Simplecast
Let's Encrypt
Heroku
Netlify
Nadia Odunayo on Giant Robots
A Guide To Code Hospitality - Nadia Odunayo
The Headphones Rule
Second System Syndrome
Entity Service Antipattern
Devon Zuegel on Giant Robots
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Aug 27, 2019 • 36min
211: I'm Not a Lawyer, But...
On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss their preferred strategy when building an admin portal (spoiler: it's not using a client-side technology), separating our identity from our preferred technology, coding styles that require greater mental effort, and answer a listener's question about deleting migrations.
JQuery
Elm
Enumerable#drop_while
rails dev prime task
Active Record Migrations
Factory Bot - linting factories
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Aug 20, 2019 • 35min
210: Stop Trying to Make Fetch Happen
On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss mechanical keyboards, combating error fatigue, the joy of admin features and respond to two listener questions about typed vs dynamic languages and various ways to "speed up" third-party API calls.
AppSignal
New Relic - Six Steps to Combat Alert Fatigue
Details and Summary HTML elements
Elm
Scala
Typescript
Active Job
Action Cable
Stimulus
Ajax
Typheous
Rails HTTP Streaming
JQuery
Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!Support The Bike Shed

Aug 13, 2019 • 39min
209: We Will Never Know Enough (Michael Chan)
On this week's episode Chris is joined by Michael Chan aka @chantastic, host of the React Podcast and prolific maker and sharer throughout the internets. They discuss Micheal's work on the React Podcast and themes in open source in general, Michael's focus on communication and delivering value, and the honest take that no one has all the answers or a silver bullet.
Michael Chan
@chantastic - Michael on twitter
React Podcast
Michael's Blog
Michael's writing on dev.to
Hot Garbage - the Death Of Clean Code
War of Art
Sandi Metz
Styled Components
Emotion
CSS Variables
React: CSS in JS - talk by Christopher "vjeux" Chedeau
BEM
Lerna
Web components
Paul Henschel on React Spring - React Podcast episode
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Aug 6, 2019 • 34min
208: Goldilocks and the Three Monitors
On this week's episode, Chris and Steph weigh-in on curved monitors, discuss how pairing improves productivity and team morale, and respond to two listener questions inquiring what makes Rails successful and new project nerves.
Vote for us for 'Best Dev' Podcast in this year's Noonie Awards.
Rails
react-testing-library
React
Elm
active_model_serializers
RABL
Jbuilder
Ruby
Scala
Python
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Jul 30, 2019 • 40min
207: Very-Bad, Or Just Normal-Bad?
On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss a handful of utilities that help with their workflows and GitHub, and then dive into a handful of ActiveRecord, SQL, and postgres-related topics. They discuss safe vs unsafe migrations when dealing with larger volumes of data, adding an index safely in migration without downtime, and bringing postgres enums into Rails.
Vote for us for 'Best Dev Podcast' in this year's Noonie Awards.
This episode of The Bike Shed is sponsored by Indeed Prime
GitHub beta jump to definition
ESlint
Rubocop
Refined GitHub
Sindresorhus
Paper Cuts team at github
GitHub permalinks
Tell Me When It Closes
GitHub "Custom thread subscriptions" - TMWIC native on GitHub
Apollo codegen
ActiveRecord safer migrations gem
Strong migrations gem
Strong migrations README summary of unsafe operations
Postgres add index concurrently
ActiveRecord::PGEnum
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Jul 23, 2019 • 38min
206: No-One Wants to be the Canary
On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss working with Django, Angular, and explore the new features released in Ruby 2.7.0-preview1! They also respond to a listener's question regarding the trade-offs of using client state management tools like NgRx and Redux.
Vote for us for 'Best Dev' Podcast in this year's Noonie Awards.
Python
Django
Angular
TypeScript
MySQL
GraphQL
Ruby
Ruby 2.7.0-preview1
Manual Compaction for MRI's GC submitted by Aaron Patterson
IRB - Interactive Ruby Shell
A Brief History of Pipeline Operator
Using yield_self for composable ActiveRecord relations
Ruby trunk - roadmap
Elixir
Elm
NgRx
React
Redux
Redux thunk
Flux
Redux Hooks
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