The Bike Shed

75: I'm Not Sure That's Better

August 11th, 2016  |  33 mins 49 secs

Derek and Sean discuss hunting down intermittently failing tests, finding unused code in your application, and why you should never ever change your test framework.

74: A Dip in the Connection Pool

August 3rd, 2016  |  34 mins 48 secs

We talk through design considerations for a user-visible custom query builder for a high volume ecommerce system.

73: Probably In My Other Pants

July 28th, 2016  |  43 mins 31 secs

We discuss Pokémon Go and what its success might mean for software developers before Sean lays out his case for replacing the pg gem and libpq.

72: Surprises Cut For Time (Aaron Patterson)

July 20th, 2016  |  43 mins 28 secs

Aaron Patterson joins us from RailsConf for puns, performance improvements in Ruby, and AirDropping cats.

71: It's a Total Hack

July 13th, 2016  |  42 mins 25 secs

Inspired by Nickolas Means’ fantastic RailsConf keynote, we discuss the corollaries between Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works projects and our software development projects.

70: Make Small Things (Sandi Metz)

July 6th, 2016  |  1 hr 4 mins

Sandi Metz joins us live from RailsConf to talk about the rules, the trouble with naming things, making the right kinds of errors, and conference speaking.

A big thanks to everyone who came out to our live show! A video version of this episode is available on the thoughtbot YouTube Page.

69: No More Drills

June 29th, 2016  |  40 mins 31 secs

We discuss thoughtbot's increasing use of Elixir and Phoenix and what that means for our Rails work before diving into what's new in Elixir 1.3 and Ecto 2.0.

68: Mostly Undocumented

June 22nd, 2016  |  33 mins 9 secs

Sean runs through a Rails bug that sits at the intersection of several magical and confusing Rails features.

67: Longtime Listener, First Time Caller (Rafael Franca)

June 15th, 2016  |  39 mins 30 secs

Leading Rails contributor Rafael Franca joins us from RailsConf to talk about taking over Sprockets, the future of the asset pipeline in Rails, managing Rails dependencies, and the hard work of software maintenance.

Also, Sean said you'd all "definitely" have the final build of Rails 5 by now. Whoops!

66: Make Ruby Scripting Great Again (Terence Lee)

June 8th, 2016  |  39 mins 31 secs

We talk with Terence Lee of Heroku, Bundler, and mruby-cli fame about Apache Kafka and the future of mruby scripting.

65: Free as in Puppy (Katrina Owen)

May 25th, 2016  |  45 mins 52 secs

While at RailsConf, we talk with Katrina Owen about finding metaphors for software development, the successes and mistakes of Exercism.io, and the benefits of providing code reviews.

64: Open Mic SF

May 18th, 2016  |  55 mins 11 secs

Open Mic is back by popular demand, this time in San Francisco. We hear from developers in thoughtbot's San Francisco office about their recent investment time projects.

63: Types Are Only Good If You Use Them

May 11th, 2016  |  38 mins 16 secs

Derek and Sean discuss some recent issues with exciting language features like pattern matching, macros, and static types.

62: Shipping is the Fastest Way to Get Somewhere

May 4th, 2016  |  34 mins 16 secs

Sean celebrates Diesel reaching "faster than a SQL string" status before we chat about Rails 5 blockers and the clarity of focus and priorities that only shipping can bring.

61: I'm Not Telling You My Birthday

April 27th, 2016  |  31 mins 4 secs

"Send me an email every year for my birthday" is an easy thing for a human to understand but it can be deceptively tricky to do with computers. Also tricky for (some) computers: SELECT * FROM. Wait... what?

60: Remote Control (Katherine Fellows)

April 20th, 2016  |  38 mins 2 secs

KF (Katherine Fellows) joins the show to chat about successful BridgeFoundry events and creating environments where remote developers, junior and otherwise, can thrive.