The Bike Shed
Episodes
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294: Perfect Duplication
May 25th, 2021 | 45 mins 31 secs
On this week's episode, Steph and Chris respond to a listener question about how to know if we're improving as developers. They discuss the heuristics they think about when it comes to improving, how they've helped the teams they've worked with plan for and measure their growth, and they share some specific tips for improving.
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293: Sportstaphors
May 18th, 2021 | 41 mins 17 secs
On this week's episode, Chris and Steph share a speedy step to restart your rails server and chat about accessibility improvements and favorite a11y tools. They also dive into a tale of database switching and delight in a new Rails query method that returns orphaned records.
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292: Debugging with Joël Quenneville
May 11th, 2021 | 43 mins 1 sec
On this week's episode, Steph and Chris are joined by fellow thoughtbotter, Joël Quenneville, to discuss all things debugging. Joël is helping publish a weekly debugging blog series and in this conversation they discuss how the series got started, technology agnostic debugging strategies, writing less bug-prone software, and speculate if Joël moonlights as a hockey coach.
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291: All Things Inertia.js with Jonathan Reinink
May 4th, 2021 | 50 mins 25 secs
This week, Steph's taking a quick break, but while she's off, Chris is joined by a special guest - Jonathan Reinink. Jonathan is the creator of Inertia.js. Inertia.js lets you quickly build modern single-page React, Vue and Svelte apps using classic server-side routing and controllers, and listeners of the show will certainly have heard Chris rave about it on previous episodes.
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290: Can You See My Secrets?
April 27th, 2021 | 32 mins 54 secs
On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss testing webhooks, the challenges in replicating third-party data, and troubleshooting unexpected side effects. They also respond to a listener question about secrets management, touring popular solutions and discussing the trade-offs.
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289: Have You Ever Ridden a Horse?
April 20th, 2021 | 37 mins 58 secs
On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle a pair of questions -- the first dealing with how closely we might want to map an API to the underlying database schema, and the second dealing with back of the envelope math and horses (it makes more sense in context.... mostly). They also discuss the subtleties of the javascript date API across browsers, and a quick adventure in tuning database indexes for fun and profit.
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288: 10x Puppy
April 13th, 2021 | 36 mins 34 secs
On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss migrating a polymorphic relationship over to UUIDs and balancing trade-offs between data integrity vs complexity. They also touch on a new Rails feature that adds support to safely remove and add columns, GitHub Discussions, measuring team experiments, and purposeful communication.
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287: Turn it up to Eleven
March 30th, 2021 | 37 mins 30 secs
On this week's episode, Steph shares a recent performance improvement, a Postgres delight, and testing concurrency in RSpec. Chris revisits an earlier theme of "Good Idea, Bad Idea?" as he explores ways to speed up tests builds and avoid duplicate test builds. They round things out with a listener question about managing ERB partials and Vue components.
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286: Time After Time
March 23rd, 2021 | 26 mins 46 secs
On this week's episode, Chris shares a rare airing of grievances regarding the importance of secure, encrypted websites, and Steph shares a tale of time zone troubles and testing.
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285: Tell a Cohesive, Testable Story
March 16th, 2021 | 39 mins 39 secs
On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle a listener question around the world of service objects. Where, really, should we be putting our business logic. Model concerns, "service" objects, the model files themselves? Tune in to find out. They also discuss a perilous Rails 6 upgrade deployment and the ensuing debugging session, as well as Steph's retro on her extended break from work.
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284: Lovely, Wonderful Spam
March 9th, 2021 | 46 mins 55 secs
On this week's episode Chris and Steph chat about upgrading to Rails 6, intercepting emails, and play a few rounds of Software Terminology Trivia. They also discuss "Deep Work" by Cal Newport and share strategies for finding and maintaining focus.
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283: Who's The User?
March 2nd, 2021 | 26 mins 14 secs
On this week's episode Steph and Chris discuss a listener question around managing content within an application, weighing options like an integrated CMS, headless CMS provides, proxying the content, and supporting marketing and landing pages without needing a developer for every change. They also provide an update on dead man's snitch and a preview of a rails 6 upgrade on the horizon and dreams of database switching.
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282: What is Normal?
February 23rd, 2021 | 39 mins 54 secs
On this week's episode, Chris adds Dead Man's Snitch to a personal project and considers "what is the app doing at runtime?" as he touches on the importance of creating observable systems. Steph shares analyzing a site's traffic and using Apache Bench for simple load testing. They also respond to a listener question about creating environment-specific data for data-intensive applications.
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281: Finding That Middle Ground
February 16th, 2021 | 31 mins 29 secs
On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle a listener question around switching from mostly-developing to mostly-communicating and the tactics they've used to balance these facets of their work. They also discuss the new error objects in Rails 6.1, the value of breakable toys, and the importance of keeping presentational concerns out of the data model.
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280: Stable New New
February 9th, 2021 | 31 mins 56 secs
On this week's episode Chris and Steph discuss a new tmux feature and wvim, a script that streamlines shell command edits. They also discuss the value of taking a sabbatical and protecting downtime. Steph shares some exciting news about thoughtbot and they answer a listener question about GraphQL and whether your app really needs an API?
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279: Seeking Calm
February 2nd, 2021 | 35 mins 7 secs
On this week's episode Steph and Chris discuss some of characteristics and behaviors they've observed in high-performing teams, touching on pull request sizing and prioritizing code review, deploy cadence, error monitoring and response, and minimizing the number of themes being tackled by the team in parallel. They also touch on moving to Netlify and simplifying deploys, an odd edge case with 303 vs 302 status code, and the quirks of the ActiveRecord
ormethod.