The Bike Shed

339: What About Pictures?

May 24th, 2022  |  45 mins 3 secs

Steph has a baby update and thoughts on movies, plus a question for Chris related to migrating Test Unit tests to RSpec.

Chris watched a video from Google I/O where Chrome devs talked about a new feature called Page Transitions. He's also been working with a tool called Customer.io, an omnichannel communication whiz-bang adventure!

338: Meticulously Wrong

May 17th, 2022  |  45 mins 52 secs

Chris switched from Trello over to Linear for product management and talks about prioritizing backlogs.

Steph shares and discusses a tweet from Curtis Einsmann that super resonated with the work she's doing right now: "In software engineering, rabbit holes are inevitable. You will research libraries and not use them. You'll write code just to delete it. This isn't a waste; sometimes, you need to go down a few wrong paths to get to the right one."

337: Oh, Henry

May 10th, 2022  |  43 mins 46 secs

We've got a tricycle anniversary! 🥳 Will it be ruined by a cockroach?

Steph shares an update regarding some of the progress and discoveries that she's helped make with a client in regards to speeding up CI.

Chris is finally getting a little bit more back into the code at work and finds himself riding another time management struggle bus. P.S.: Who even names these apps?!?!

336: Million Dollar Password

May 3rd, 2022  |  35 mins 7 secs

Chris came up with a mnemonic device: Fn-Delete – for when he really wants to delete something and is also thinking about password complexity requirements, which leads to an exciting discussion around security theater.

Steph talks about the upcoming RailsConf and the not-in-person option for virtual attendees. She also gives a shoutout to the Ruby Weekly newsletter for being awesome.

335: Start Messy

April 26th, 2022  |  35 mins 38 secs

Steph has a question for Chris: When you have no idea how you're going to implement a feature, how do you write your first test?

Chris has thoughts about hybrid teams (remote/in-person) and masked inputs.

334: Name That Bike

April 19th, 2022  |  42 mins 24 secs

Chris got a bike. Specifically, he bought a bike to use in a triathlon he signed up to participate in. Now he needs to name the bike, and speaking of naming things, a more technical topic that he talks about is the Crispy Brussels Snack Hour.

Steph talks about Rescue Rails projects and increasing developer acceleration.

They answer a listener question asking, "Why do so many developers and agencies, thoughtbot included, replace the default test suite in Rails with RSpec?"

333: Tapas

April 12th, 2022  |  41 mins 53 secs

Being pregnant is hard, but this tapas episode is good! Steph discovered and used a #yelling Slack channel and attended a remote magic show. Chris touches on TypeScript design decisions and edge cases.

Then they answer a question captured from a client Slack channel regarding a debate about whether I18n should be used in tests and whether tests should break when localized text changes.

332: Ludicrous Speed

April 5th, 2022  |  39 mins 28 secs

Chris is back from vacation and gives hiring and onboarding updates.

Steph has an update about the CI slowdown and scaling CI.

They tackle a listener question regarding having some fear around potential merge conflicts.

331: Git Down

March 22nd, 2022  |  29 mins 28 secs

Steph celebrates Utah's adoption day and Daylight Savings Time and troubleshoots a CI build time that had suddenly spiked for a client project using TeamCity. She also shares a minor update regarding the work that thoughtbot is doing to scale horizontally and add more machines quickly and efficiently to process more RSpec tests.

Chris was alarmed by logs and unknown-unknowns and had some fun using Git down. Git bless his heart!

330: Bikeshed Baby

March 15th, 2022  |  33 mins 50 secs

BIG NEWS! Steph's expecting a baby boy! 🍼🎉

Aaaand unfortunately, the rest of the show isn't nearly as exciting. Chris talks about admin pagination using Pagy, and Steph wants to delete some code and has nervousness around that she's going to break something.

They answer a listener question from Slash, who asks, "What are the first keyboard shortcuts you teach junior devs?"

329: Fire Mode

March 8th, 2022  |  31 mins 41 secs

Steph is excited to be headed on a retreat with her mom in the mountains, but before that, she details how she helped troubleshoot a production issue with her team and appreciated their process. She's also looking into tooling around spinning up more machines to process more RSpec tests.

Chris had a developer start their new job at Sagewell and highlights how they involved the new person in rectifying potentially missing and/or confusing existing documentation. He also has a gripe, and that is accounts. Handling too many accounts. Additionally, he talks about triaging an error and how it was tough initially to understand if something was actually broken. And then it was even harder to understand what was broken. So he paired through it and used the power of putting two heads together.

328: Terrible Simplicity

March 1st, 2022  |  52 mins 36 secs

Chris is helping with efforts to introduce security, practices, and policies at Sagewell. Right now, they are refining the usage of 1Password to standardize passwords and secure information. He also shares (what he believes) is a terrible idea around fixing inconsistencies around symbols and strings.

Steph shares an update around factories.

Also, at Sagewell, Chris is helping to build mobile apps, one for iOS and one for Android, and is considering pursuing having them be all native. Good idea? Terrible idea? Chris and Steph riff on that a bit.

327: Estimate Crafting

February 22nd, 2022  |  42 mins 33 secs

Steph joins Chris in trying new things! For her, it's a new email client – the Newton email client – because she really wants to love her inbox. She also talks about implementing a suggestion from Chris on improving CI speed.

Chris continues his search for the perfect to-do list app. (It's not going great.) But he has made hiring progress and is excited to move on to the next step: onboarding.

Together they answer a listener question who asked for advice on crafting project estimates for clients.

326: Dongle Life

February 15th, 2022  |  41 mins 2 secs

Chris is making hiring progress and loves asdf and M1 laptops. Steph is anticipating the arrival of one dongle to rule them all and talks about moving away from having a lot of Bluetooth connections.

Two other big things on Steph's mind are education around factories because they're v important and shared examples and how they can be overused. She and Chris agree that it is better to tell stories in tests instead.

325: Pranting

February 8th, 2022  |  35 mins 12 secs

Steph is super excited about changing her schedule to dedicate a full day to focus on being a great team lead. Chris talks about his continued adventures in the world of hiring.

Together they answer a listener question about what they consider a “large” table in a database and how they review schema changes.

324: Coding Time!

February 1st, 2022  |  41 mins 23 secs

Chris updates us on his new window manager of choice, Moom, and tells us what's good with it. He's also giving yet another task manager a go: OmniFocus. (Sorry Things.) Steph talks about defining test classes in RSpec and readdresses flaky tests to improve CI build time.

Chris is worried about productivity. He's still not coding as much as he'd like to be. Steph lends an ear, and together, they discuss potential ways Chris could gain back a little bit of coding time at work.