The Bike Shed

259: That's Not How Numbers Work

September 8th, 2020  |  48 mins 43 secs

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle the thorny topic of 10X engineers. Do we think they really exist? What characteristics make an individual more effective, and more importantly, what can they do for a team?

To round out the conversation, they chat about rewrites and when they do and don't make sense, Ruby 2.7 keyword argument deprecation warnings, and a listener question revisiting Ruby popularity and what languages would we learn if we couldn't write Ruby anymore.

258: Digital Gardeners

September 1st, 2020  |  41 mins 14 secs

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss a git-blame feature that supports bypassing less helpful commits. They also revisit a discussion about Dependabot PRs and recent performance adjustments, sharing which strategies worked and which ones didn't. They also discuss the dreaded three-state boolean, designing a system for cacheability, and using Ruby's magic comment to freeze string literals.

257: How Late On a Friday Can You Deploy?

August 18th, 2020  |  50 mins 27 secs

On this week's episode, Steph & Chris take a deep dive into all things technical debt. How do you know when your code has reached "good enough"? When might we purposefully knowingly take on technical debt? How do we tackle existing technical debt without halting new development? How can we tell high-interest, hair on fire debt from "ehh, it's fine" debt that we can let lie? Tune in to find out!

256: Rational Pessimism

August 11th, 2020  |  46 mins 31 secs

On this week's episode, Chris shares his recent adventures of working with a team that prioritizes async-first communication and Steph revisits a previous discussion around the use of web sockets and optimistic user interfaces. They also dive into the classically hard question "should we rewrite the app?" and share survival tips for learning to type on a split keyboard.

255: Aiming for 'Capable'

August 4th, 2020  |  28 mins 47 secs

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris chat about the relatively new Rails view_component library from GitHub, Steph talks about her work with Storybook as part of extracting and defining a design system, and they chat about the attr_extras project with convenience helpers for ruby & Rails apps. They round out the conversation with some keyboard updates (ErgoDox onramp is steep!) and project rotation notes.

254: Listener Mailbag Roundup Rodeo

July 28th, 2020  |  42 mins 26 secs

On this week's episode, Steph celebrates passing an important test and discovers an API that returns different data than it's provided while Chris asks the important bikeshed question "What is the proper maximum line length?". They also roundup the latest listener questions and discuss establishing freelancing rates, property-based testing, and time tracking skills that help them manage competing priorities.

253: Find Yourself Through The Art of Podcast

July 21st, 2020  |  46 mins 34 secs

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris have a brief chat about Snowpack, a new and ultra-speedy bundler in the front-end world, and revisit a conversation around namespacing models in Rails. The conversation then shifts to a discussion of the ins and outs of hosting a podcast and how folks might be able to dive in if they're interested in starting one themselves -- from selecting topics, to the hardware and software they use, to the guiding philosophy in how to discuss technical concepts.

252: I'm a Designer Now

July 14th, 2020  |  54 mins 50 secs

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss leveraging the Unix utility sed to search files and remove unnecessary test setup, using Vim's Arglist to create a to-do list for file edits, and budgeting time for fancy command-line scripts. They then take a deep dive into the world of utility-first CSS and TailwindCSS.

251: Absent-Minded Whistling

July 7th, 2020  |  37 mins 27 secs

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss using JSONB to store survey responses and the differences between JSON and JSONB, using (or not using!) exceptions in Ruby and the fail keyword, the pros and cons of namespacing models in Rails to organize features, and a new recommendation for running tests from vim.

250: To Infinity and Beyond

June 30th, 2020  |  42 mins 5 secs

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss the importance of using inclusive language, branching into new branch names, and strategies that encourage the use of inclusive terminology. Chris also shares his latest experience with merging two systems that were split apart back into one system, tackling conflicting foreign keys and competing auth libraries. Steph discusses using polling vs web sockets to monitor work being completed in a background job and communicating to the user the various states of success and failure.

249: What Would You Say You Do Here?

June 23rd, 2020  |  41 mins 2 secs

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris trade some consulting and everyone comes out a winner. Steph talks about a win and a loss on the battlefield of refactoring, and Chris shares a related effort around identifying and removing unused code. Chris shares a pattern his team has been using with a special "demo" flag to provide small enhancements but otherwise keep sales demos within the product.

Steph then shares some friction related to using dependabot on her team's project that hints at more foundational ideas at the intersection of workflow, team dynamics, testing, deployment. And finally, Chris asks Steph for her thoughts on how best to add testing around the structure of API responses.

248: Here Be Dragons

June 16th, 2020  |  34 mins 16 secs

On this week's episode, Steph shares a keyboard confession and interest in migrating to a split keyboard layout. Chris dives into creating static error pages that are independent of the app while still leveraging the app's CSS framework. They also respond to a listener question about Conventional Commits and discuss when automation tooling feels helpful vs harmful.

247: Acronyms By Moonlight

June 9th, 2020  |  49 mins 28 secs

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss potential approaches to a complex client-side workflow, Chris shares the highs and lows of his recent adventures revising the caching in a REST API, Steph shares an Ember testing pro-tip and then explores the questions it brings up, and lastly, they revisit prettier-ruby and it's fantastic configuration setup.

246: A True Movement (Pariss Athena)

June 2nd, 2020  |  28 mins 13 secs

We are pausing our normal tech-talk this week in support of the ongoing protests and to re-share the #BlackTechTwitter episode with Pariss Athena from our sister podcast, Giant Robots.

During the past week, millions of people across the country have participated in protests in response to the killing of George Floyd and the systemic racism that plagues our nation.

For everyone fighting for equality and justice, we see you, we love you, and we support you. Black lives matter. Black culture matters. Black communities matter.

For those looking for ways to take action, we have provided a few resources in the show notes. The list is intentionally short as we ask everyone to research ways to get involved and listen to leaders in the Black community.

Fighting for equality falls on each of us, regardless of race or position, to work together to fight racism and unequal treatment.

Stay Safe.

245: Developer Therapy (German Velasco)

May 27th, 2020  |  45 mins 17 secs

On this week's episode, Steph is joined by thoughtbotter German Velasco. German and Steph chat about remote work and the rewards and challenges of their new(ish) roles as Development Team Leads. German also shares that he is writing a book! German shares his approach for defining an MVB (Minimum Viable Book), ideas for how to collect feedback, and plans for publishing. Lastly, they discuss a vim plugin that lives up to the hype.

244: Existential JavaScript

May 19th, 2020  |  40 mins 54 secs

On this week's episode, Steph troubleshoots a mysterious Ember test failure that can't find a visible element, and Chris recounts an exciting three-act adventure that spans N+1 queries, caching, and SQL window functions. Steph also touches on upgrading to Ember Octane and Glimmer components and Chris shares a new helpful tool for drawing architecture diagrams.