The Bike Shed

301: Ants in the Cookie Store

July 20th, 2021  |  42 mins 17 secs

What do you get when you mix a worm and a hammerhead shark? Also ants. Steph made some cool new discoveries in bug-land. She also talks about deploys versus releases and how her and her team has changed their deploy structure. Two words: feature flags.

Chris talks about cookies: cookie sessions, cookie payloads, cookie footprints, cookie storing. Mmm cookies! The convo wraps up with lamenting over truthiness in code. Truthy or falsy? What's your call?

300: Mozzarella Sticks & Knowledge Silos

July 13th, 2021  |  45 mins 8 secs

The big "Three Oh Oh!" What a milestone for this podcast! Aside from celebrating that the show has made it this far, Chris gives some followup on some Inertia.js issues he had been having, and talks about open source licenses and legality and testing against external APIs. Steph has thoughts on mozzarella sticks and what makes good ones; particularly the cheese to bread ratio...

They then, together, answer a listener question re: knowledge silos:

Jan asked, "Our team (3 pairs) is currently working on two different projects due to that fact we are creating information silos. Now we are looking into ways how we can minimize those information silos. Do you have any ideas how we could achieve this?" With switching pairs they are unsure about it as it can be difficult for new pairs to get up to speed.

299: Is Agile Over?

July 6th, 2021  |  46 mins 15 secs

Let's talk about Agile! What is it, what do we like, we do we not like?

In this episode, Steph and Chris discuss:

• Broadly, are they fans?
• What makes this practice work well?
• What makes this practice work poorly?

And also, hit specific topics and practices like Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming.

298: Jawsification

June 29th, 2021  |  42 mins 30 secs

Chris gives some small updates on working with Svelte. He really likes Svelte so far. Svelte's great. Modals are complicated. He also talks about using a little JavaScript library, called Quicklink. Steph talks about sending data to a third-party system and using feature flags to help deprecate some code.

Finally, they both riff on a listener question on consulting. Said listener asked, "Do you think about your work as 'consulting first' or as 'building great software first and then good experiences for your clients will follow naturally?'" Find out their take and give us your own, here on this episode of 'The Bike Shed!'

297: We’re Making A Pixar Movie!

June 22nd, 2021  |  48 mins 57 secs

Chris gives the deets on that new new – (he joined a startup!) and laments about the back button being so complicated. Steph talks about extracting an untrustworthy service and likens the scenario to making a Pixar movie. You don't wanna miss this hero's journey!

296: Speedy Performance with Nate Berkopec

June 15th, 2021  |  1 hr 3 mins

Nate Berkopec is the author of the Complete Guide to Rails Performance, the creator of the Rails Performance Workshop, and the maintainer of Puma. He talks with Steph about being known as "The Rails Speed Guy," and how he ended up with that title, publishing content, working on workshops, and also contributing to open source projects. (You could say he's kind of a busy guy!)

295: To the Left, to the Left

June 7th, 2021  |  35 mins 33 secs

After the last episode where database switching was discussed, a number of listeners reached out with thoughts. In particular, one listener gave a reproducible example of how to make things better. Chris talks about why he always moves errors to the left, and Steph gives a hot take where she admits that she is not a fan of hackathons and explains why.

Steph and Chris also share exciting Bike Shed show news in that we now have transcripts for each episode, and tackle another listener question asking, "How do you properly implement a multi-step form in a boring Rails way?” Chris talks about his experiences with multi-step forms and gives his own hot take on refactoring: he doesn't until he feels pain!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.