The Bike Shed

447: How to (not) implement impersonation

November 19th, 2024  |  37 mins 39 secs

446: All about rewrites

November 12th, 2024  |  35 mins 31 secs

445: Working Iteratively

October 29th, 2024  |  40 mins 6 secs

444: From Solutions To Patterns

October 15th, 2024  |  34 mins 58 secs

443: Rails World and Open Source with Stefanni Brasil

October 8th, 2024  |  32 mins 23 secs

442: Paradigms - What is a Program?

October 1st, 2024  |  42 mins 22 secs

441: The Pickaxe Book with Noel Rappin

September 24th, 2024  |  39 mins 44 secs

440: When we stray from Rails defaults

September 17th, 2024  |  42 mins 56 secs

439: Async Ruby & Rails with Trevor Turk

September 10th, 2024  |  34 mins 11 secs

438: Writing abstractions in tests

September 3rd, 2024  |  49 mins 8 secs

437: Contributing to Open Source in the Midst of Daily Work with Steve Polito

August 27th, 2024  |  35 mins 28 secs

436: Creating Conditions For Your Best Work with Steph Viccari

August 13th, 2024  |  43 mins 9 secs

435: Cohesive Code with Jared Norman

July 30th, 2024  |  28 mins 45 secs

434: Git and GitHub Workflows

July 23rd, 2024  |  47 mins 42 secs

433: Riffing with Kasper Timm Hansen

July 16th, 2024  |  37 mins 20 secs

432: The Semantics and Meaning of Nil

July 9th, 2024  |  38 mins 13 secs

The term ‘nil’ refers to the absence of value, but we often imbue it with much more meaning than just that. Today, hosts Joël and Stephanie discuss the various ways we tend to project extra semantics onto nil and the implications of this before unpacking potential alternatives and trade-offs. 

Joël and Stephanie highlight some of the key ways programmers project additional meaning onto nil (and why), like when it’s used to create a guest session, and how this can lead to bugs, confusion, and poor user experiences. They discuss solutions to this problem, like introducing objects for improved readability, before taking a closer look at the implications of excessive guard clauses in code.