The Bike Shed

275: In Search of An Acronym

January 5th, 2021  |  35 mins

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris revisit their discussion about testing rack rewrite redirect logic, mystery guests, DNS configuration, and trying very hard to not be too dogmatic. Steph describes her recent work trying to debug failing deploys with Concourse, Kubernetes, and Google Cloud while touching on blue-green deployment and secrets management. Finally, Chris talks about porting a svelte project to typescript and the trade-offs of adding Types upfront vs types after the fact, and the parallels to testing and TDD.

274: Top 10 Review for 2020

December 29th, 2020  |  26 mins 10 secs

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph reflect on their top themes and technical picks for 2020.

273: Revisiting 2019, A Top 10 Review

December 22nd, 2020  |  27 mins 29 secs

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris begin wrapping up 2020 with a review of their 2019 top 10 list. They share what's changed, what's stayed the same, and what they'd like to see more of in the coming year.

272: Hacking the Gibson

December 15th, 2020  |  33 mins 27 secs

In this week's episode, Chris undertakes long-running background jobs that are performing duplicate work and adding significant load on the database. Steph shares her initial take of the book "Soul of a New Machine", a non-fiction account that chronicles the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. They also dive into the question "how can teams turn a slow, hard to maintain test suite from a liability into an asset?" and touch on how to identify highly-functioning teams.

271: Is That Your Final Answer?

December 8th, 2020  |  37 mins 49 secs

On this week's episode, Chris describes his continued explorations with Svelte specifically bringing TypeScript into the mix. Steph discusses the first cohort for the RSpec training and some related testing questions around third party APIs. They round things out with a listener question about managing permissions and roles, with a brief detour around single table inheritance vs polymorphic associations. Oh, and Steph rented goats to mow her lawn. 🐐

270: Both Nothing and Deeply Special

December 1st, 2020  |  38 mins 57 secs

In this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss redirecting requests for various hostnames to one canonical host, creating student personas to improve educational content, and walking away from failing tests. They also embark on a Hollywood themed tour of RSpec mocks, stubs, and spies, when to use each approach, and discuss the types of tests they do (or do not) write.

269: Things are Knowable (Gary Bernhardt)

November 17th, 2020  |  46 mins 4 secs

In the episode, Chris is joined by Gary Bernhardt to discuss Gary's recent work with TypeScript and how it compares with his focus on testing, they revisit some of Gary's ideas around software architecture and how they map to his current work, Gary's thoughts around the value of knowing our tools deeply, and the trade-offs between careful upfront design and shipping early and often.

268: Getting Your First-Through-N Jobs

November 10th, 2020  |  52 mins 56 secs

career, inertia, jobs, rails, svelte

On this week's episode, Steph discusses the value of conducting student research when creating course content and Chris revisits a recent architecture decision to use Svelt and Inertia. They also explore the challenges developers face in acquiring their first job and share insights for those looking for their next big role.

267: Shiny New Things

November 3rd, 2020  |  48 mins 1 sec

On this week's episode, Steph describes her unique new project where they're building and presenting a training course around RSpec, testing, and TDD specific to an organization's codebase. Chris then runs some architecture choices by Steph to discuss a collection of new technologies he's considering, and more generally how we think about our experimentation budget.

266: Spring is My Least Favorite Season

October 27th, 2020  |  37 mins 48 secs

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph share mixed-feelings about Spring preloader and how to use Spring just for tests. They also dive into troubleshooting an OpenSSL error, Postgres generated columns, and creating moments of contentment.

265: There Are No Free Lunches

October 20th, 2020  |  46 mins 2 secs

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris chat about database transactions and job queues, building static sites with GatsbyJS and NetlifyCMS, the performance impacts of front end frameworks and static content, and lastly they catch up on Hacktoberfest and the complexities of encouraging and supporting work in open source.

264: How to Win Friends and Influence Processes

October 13th, 2020  |  41 mins 42 secs

On this week's episode Steph and Chris discuss the ins and outs of joining teams, building trust, and working together to improve processes and communication. They also touch on some lesser used features of bundler, and revisit a discussion around Rails maintenance periods thanks to some listener feedback.

263: Keeping The Night Brain At Bay (Dave Rupert)

October 6th, 2020  |  54 mins

Steph's taking a quick break this week, but in her absence, Chris is joined by [Dave Rupert][]. Dave is the lead developer at Paravel, co-host of the Shop Talk Show podcast, creator of The Accessibility Project, and an all-around prolific and thoughtful maker of digital things.

Chris and Dave chat about creating and sharing content like podcasts and blogs and how to get past your inner editor. They discuss the web platform and accessibility, and finally, they round out the conversation with a chat about design systems as an intersection between design and development.

262: Good Idea, Terrible Idea?

September 29th, 2020  |  52 mins 41 secs

On this week's episode, Chris introduces a new segment called "Good Idea, Bad Idea?" as he considers introducing a read-only mode to avoid interrupting users during scheduled downtime. Steph has started a new project and explores the idea of merging separate, but similar, applications into one codebase. They also dive into micro-service environments to discuss the difficulties of integration testing and potential strategies.

261: A Jenga Tower of Lets and Context

September 22nd, 2020  |  52 mins 30 secs

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle a listener question around composition over inheritance, especially in the context of Rails which makes regular use of inheritance. Dependency injection, OOP vs FP, frameworks vs app code -- they hit it all!

They also chat about burnout and how they've dealt with it, using jq to investigate differences between json responses, refactoring tests and using let, and Steph shares her recent learnings about graphviz.

260: N+1s For Days

September 15th, 2020  |  44 mins 59 secs

On this week's episode, Chris shares a tale of performance improvements and a recent discussion about replacing a REST API with GraphQL. Steph dives into migrating a database column to restrict input and dropping database columns safely. They also discuss when to abstract code (a topic that surprisingly, they may not agree on) and running "Unused" to identify dead code.