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508: The Wonders of Static Analysis

Episode 508 · September 29th, 2026 · 42 mins 31 secs

About this Episode

In this week’s episode of The Bike Shed, Aji and Joël dive into the distrust around the phrase ‘programmer discipline’, why you cannot just rely on willpower, and how Static Analysis tools can help with not crossing boundaries.

From competing priorities and team member changeovers to documentation not being read, things can still fall through the cracks, so having a tool that can check the ones and zeroes that you send into GitHub. So what makes Static Analysis so different to other forms of analysis? Well, you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out!

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Mentioned in this episode:
Joel’s talk at Rails World - ‘Harness Engineering on Rails’
Justin Searle’s Standard.rb talk - ‘Let’s Standardize Rails, Once and For All!’

Your hosts for this episode have been thoughtbot’s own Joël Quenneville and Aji Slater.

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