The Bike Shed

139: Red, Green, Refactor (Alex Clark & Sean Doyle)

January 19th, 2018  |  33 mins 8 secs

Derek is joined by coworker Sean Doyle and Codecademy’s Alex Clark to discuss the process of test-driven development and the development of a new TDD course for Codecademy.

138: I Don't Know How the World Works Anymore

January 12th, 2018  |  48 mins

We chat about how shared global state in tests can cause you to doubt foundational truths of the universe, some issues with Rails system tests, and recent changes in browser behavior.

137: What's Up, Docs

January 5th, 2018  |  48 mins 43 secs

Who should library documentation be written for? How do you, as an author, know what your users will need to know? Should you have long form guides in addition to API documentation? We ask and answer these questions in the context of Sean's work to document Diesel 1.0.

Stick around for the spoiler-filled after show about Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

136: Propagating Conspiracy Theories

December 22nd, 2017  |  38 mins 23 secs

Amanda joins Derek to discuss KotlinConf, powerful IDEs, our Ralphapalooza hackathon, and the React Native experience from a native mobile developer's perspective.

135: A Series of Unfortunate Examples

December 13th, 2017  |  33 mins 12 secs

We discuss a possible ActiveRecord bug Derek encountered and explore the ambiguity of SQL formatting best practices.

134: Fastributes

December 8th, 2017  |  31 mins 24 secs

We share our favorite talks from RubyConf and discuss how Sean has made ActiveRecord attributes allocation significantly faster with Rust.

133: A Very Special Bike Shed

November 23rd, 2017  |  31 mins 1 sec

Sean is on to a significant ActiveRecord optimization using an extension written in Rust and Derek shares an overdue thanks to an excellent manager.

132: What Went Well?

November 16th, 2017  |  36 mins 52 secs

We discuss patterns and anti-patterns encountered in agile retrospectives and revisit a favorite topic: form objects.

131: Nouns For Verbs Sake

November 8th, 2017  |  39 mins 3 secs

We briefly discuss the renaming of factory_girl to factory_bot before diving in to the visitor pattern; what is it, and what are its inherent tradeoffs.

130: I Grew Up in Balloons

November 3rd, 2017  |  33 mins 49 secs

Is Database Cleaner necessary anymore? Tune in for our exciting play-by-play reporting on that issue and stick around for chatter on personal defaults for new Rails applications.

129: You Wanna Talk About GraphQL?

October 27th, 2017  |  47 mins 3 secs

We discuss an issue in the interaction between Rails, Chrome, and the HTTP referrer policy before Derek shares his love for GraphQL.

128: And Now for My Next Trick!

October 19th, 2017  |  45 mins 46 secs

We discuss strategies for fighting back against project management overhead, refactoring workflows, and on-call rotations.

127: Bike Shed: Discovery

October 13th, 2017  |  52 mins 42 secs

We discuss Bundler warning us to update to a prerelease version and other recent annoyances with our favorite dependency manager. We also wonder what GitHub diff stats can tell you about your contributions to a project and when they might be a smell. Stick around post credits for some spoiler-filled chatter about the first couple episodes of Star Trek: Discovery.

126: Speaking of Compilers...

October 5th, 2017  |  35 mins 25 secs

We discuss a major change to Diesel's insert statements in advance of its 1.0 release and reexamine Contracts.ruby after Derek spends some time with it in use.

125: Less Bad Than Expected

September 28th, 2017  |  44 mins 19 secs

We share and discuss some user feedback on fakes and mocks, discuss the benefits and drawbacks to FactoryGirl and share exasperation over the handling of the Equifax data breach.

124: Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

September 20th, 2017  |  41 mins 56 secs

We go inside the RubyConf CFP review process before turning our attention to questions about the impact of code review. Stick around post credits for some spoiler-filled, lukewarm Game of Thrones takes.