

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

Jan 25, 2019 • 35min
185: The Transactional Fallacy (Avdi Grimm)
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 instead offers ideas around modeling our systems as processes.
Avdi & Chris also chat about some of Avdi's my recent explorations into the world of JavaScript & React, as well as the growing "resilience engineering" mindset.
Ruby Rouges Podcast
Confident Code
Avdi's Keep Ruby Weird Keynote
Alan Kay - Creator of Object Oriented Programming
Actor Model
Kafka
Ruby Tapas - Avdi's Weekly Ruby Screencast Series
Greater Than Code Podcast
Mastering the Object Oriented Mindset
Pair Program With Me
Avdi - Ruby Duck Sessions
Avdi and Jess stumble through modern web development
Glitch
TypeScript
Australian Disaster Resilience Conference
Chaos Monkey from Netflix
avdi.codes
Thank you to One Month for sponsoring this episode.Support The Bike Shed

Jan 18, 2019 • 41min
184: Fun, Interesting, and I Wouldn't Recommend It
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 distributed systems and technologies like JSON Web Tokens, ElasitcSearch, RabbitMQ, Kafka, and more.
They round out the conversation with a discussion around some recent security discussions in package managers and their collective surprise that things work at all.
chruby
asdf
Matz replies to post around Ruby moving slowly
TypeScript
Elm
TypeScript Growing Popularity on State of JS 2018
JSON Web Tokens (JTW)
RSA Public Key Cryptography
OAuth
RabbitMQ
ElasitcSearch
Postgres Full Text Search
Kafka
Event Sourcing
Details about the event-stream incident
Heartbleed
Transcendence and the Future of React with Laurie Voss
Thank you to One Month for sponsoring this episode.Support The Bike Shed

Jan 11, 2019 • 49min
183: Former Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots (Ben Orenstein)
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 Vim".
Giant Robots
Art of Product Podcast
Tuple App
WebRTC
Tuple - Pair Programming Guide
Infamous Hacker News Comment about the initial version Dropbox
Let's Encrypt
Red Hat - Enterprise Linux
fzf - generic fuzzy finder
VS Code
Mastering the Vim Language
@r00k - Ben on twitter
Thank you to One Month for sponsoring this episode.Support The Bike Shed

Jan 4, 2019 • 39min
182: What's it in the Service Of?
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 - Object Oriented CSS
CSS in JS
BEM CSS Methodology
Tachyons
Tailwind CSS
Sass Lang
shame.css
Reach.tech - Accessible foundation for React component design system
JAWS Screen Reader
ericwbailey.design
Support The Bike Shed

Dec 14, 2018 • 42min
181: Strong Types and a Functional Flair
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 notably discussing Apache Kafka and it's unique approach to capturing state by storing an immutable event log, and the resulting architecture that falls out of this.
Lastly they chat about the Scala language both in relation to data and streaming applications, but also more generally as an example of an approachable yet powerful strongly typed language.
Kafka
Redux
Flink
Spark
Postgres Write-Ahead Log
"Turning the database inside out with Apache Samza" by Martin Kleppmann
Big Data or Pokemon
Datomic
RabbitMQ
AMQP
Event Sourcing
Python typing — Support for type hints
Sorbet - gradual type annotations for Ruby from Strip
Support The Bike Shed

Dec 7, 2018 • 39min
180: A Citizen of the Internet (John Resig)
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 of change of front-end technologies, and John provides wonderfully pragmatic guidance distinguishing the rate of innovation from the perceived needed rate of adoption. The conversation also ventures into discussions around the trade-offs involved in open sourcing internal projects. Lastly, they touch briefly on the topic of GraphQL based on John's work at Kahn Academy, as well as his in-progress book, The GraphQL Guide.
A little bit of everything with one of the most influential web developers of
the past 15 years. What more could you ask for?
jQuery
Khan Academy
Removing jQuery from GitHub.com frontend
React hooks
Webpack
Aphrodite styling library from Khan Academy
Event Stream NPM Package Security Issue
The GraphQL Guide
Sangria GraphQL Framework in Scala
John's personal site
John on twitter
Support The Bike Shed

Nov 30, 2018 • 50min
179: We CAN Just Use a Form!
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 React applications and consider how far they could go with this, and then discuss the recent announcement of React Hooks.
And finally, they discuss the fact that thoughtbot is hiring, and we think you should apply! Head on over to thoughtbot.com/jobs and drop us a line :)
Mana - ethereum
Heroku SSH
Erlang OTP
GraphQL Summit 2018
GraphQL Foundation
Apollo GraphQL
Prisma
Graph.cool
Falcor (Netflix GraphQL-like library)
JSON Graph
Lee Byron
Nick Schrock
Shopify GraphQL Design Tutorial
Chris Toomey: React & GraphQL – Bringing Simplicity to Client Side Development video
CodeSandbox Proof of Concept - Simple React Form Handling
Formik & Yup
React -- Introducing Hooks
React Hooks RFC (now merged)
Support The Bike Shed

Nov 16, 2018 • 39min
178: Friday is For Spikes
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 and monoliths fit in the world of larger systems
like GitHub. Lastly they discuss Chris & Derek's respective transitions into
more roles with a bit less code and a bit more management. As usual, this one
has a little bit of everything!
Suggested Changes feature
GitHub Universe
GitHub Actions
Project Papercuts at GitHub
Are Services the New Rewrite Bike Shed Episode
GitHub Scientist
Be Plucky Manager Training
Support The Bike Shed

Nov 9, 2018 • 32min
177: Tricking Computers Into Doing Things
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 on theme's of keeping a focus on user needs throughout the work of developing applications.
Contentful
Prismic
Essential Scala book
Nate Berkopec
The Complete Guide to Rails Performance
Mark/Compact GC in MRI - Aaron Patterson
Benchmark module in Ruby
Postgres Table Partitioning
Getting Real book by Basecamp
It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work
Upcase is now Free!
Testing Interaction with 3rd-party APIs on Upcase
Composition Over Inheritance on Upcase
Support The Bike Shed

Nov 2, 2018 • 37min
176: The Machines Will Learn
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 Have a Place in Today's Web?
Vue.js
Electron
React Native
React Native for Desktop
Frameworks and Tools For Exploring Machine Learning
NumPy
SciPy
Jupyter Notebook
Pandas
scikit-learn
Natural Language Toolkit (NLKT)
spaCy
gensim
Getting Started with Machine Learning:
Intro to Machine Learning Workshop
What is Machine Learning?
Named Entity Recognition
Recommending blog posts with machine learning
Support The Bike Shed