The Bike Shed

189: It's Gonna Work, Definitely, No Problems Whatsoever

March 1st, 2019  |  41 mins 38 secs

Chris is joined by Steph Viccari to chat about Steph's recent experience working on the Hubspot API ruby wrapper, testing third-party APIs, VCR, using exceptions as control flow, and spooky mystery guests at a distance. A little something for everyone!

188: A Function by Any Other Name

February 22nd, 2019  |  38 mins 1 sec

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by German Velasco for a conversation that fully lives up to the name of the show with plenty of opinions and impressively deep dives on topics that folks outside the world of programming would never think could warrant this much discussion.

187: Convincing People Not to Build Software

February 15th, 2019  |  41 mins 31 secs

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Matt Sumner, development director in our Boston Studio to discuss Matt's crypto adventures, design sprint experiences, a new ecosystem for him with Scala & GraphQL.

186: Let's Duplicate Stuff

February 1st, 2019  |  38 mins 12 secs

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Daniel Colson, developer in our New York studio and current maintainer of all things FactoryBot. Chris & Daniel discuss Daniel's work as maintainer of one of thoughtbot's most popular open source projects and some of the parallels to thoughtbot's consulting work. They then discuss a bit more on the specifics of FactoryBot and what's in store for upcoming versions.

185: The Transactional Fallacy (Avdi Grimm)

January 25th, 2019  |  35 mins 1 sec

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Ruby Hero Avdi Grimm. They discuss Avdi's history of guiding the Ruby and broader programming communities, his thoughts about where we're at with object-oriented programming, and where he's looking to next for our industry.

184: Fun, Interesting, and I Wouldn't Recommend It

January 18th, 2019  |  41 mins 22 secs

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Eebs Kobeissi, a developer in our Boston studio, for a discussion encompassing the front end, back end, and everything in between. They start by discussing Eebs' recent work with both Elm & TypeScript, and the relative merits of these two strongly typed languages for the front end. From there they move on to a discussion around the different communities and rates of change in each.

183: Former Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots (Ben Orenstein)

January 11th, 2019  |  49 mins 25 secs

On this episode of the Bike Shed, Chris is joined by former thoughtbotter Ben Orenstein. Ben & team are currently feverishly working towards launching Tuple.app, an app for remote pair programming. The conversation covers the unique technical challenges inherent to building this sort of app (WebRTC & firewalls, oh my), as well as a discussion around the merits and value of pair programming. To round out the conversation, Ben checks in on whether Chris is still "nerding out hard on Vim".

182: What's it in the Service Of?

January 4th, 2019  |  39 mins 12 secs

Chris is joined by Eric Bailey, thoughtbot designer and champion for all things accessibility on the web. Chris & Eric chat about how Eric approaches accessibility and works to include it throughout the design process, design systems, functional CSS, CSS in JS, and more.

181: Strong Types and a Functional Flair

December 14th, 2018  |  41 mins 31 secs

On this episode of the Bike Shed, Chris is joined by thoughtbot CTO Joe Ferris. Chris & Joe start by talking about all things data. More and more we're building applications that need to manage medium to large data sets, combining data from multiple sources, and our approaches and frameworks need to evolve to match these needs. Joe provides the low down on how this can shape the way we build our applications.

As part of the discussion around data they dig into the idea of event logs, most notably discussing Apache Kafka and it's unique approach to capturing state by storing an immutable event log, and the resulting architecture that falls out of this.

Lastly they chat about the Scala language both in relation to data and streaming applications, but also more generally as an example of an approachable yet powerful strongly typed language.

180: A Citizen of the Internet (John Resig)

December 7th, 2018  |  39 mins 14 secs

We're thrilled to welcome special guest John Resig, creator of jQuery and front-end architect at Khan Academy.

179: We CAN Just Use a Form!

November 30th, 2018  |  49 mins 47 secs

Matt Sumner returns to chat with Chris about their recent adventures. They discuss Matt's ongoing work building an open source Ethereum implementation in Elixir, Chris's recent trip to speak at GraphQL Summit, and React Hooks.

178: Friday is For Spikes

November 16th, 2018  |  38 mins 31 secs

On this episode of the Bike Shed Chris is joined by Derek Prior, former thoughtbotter and previous host of this very podcast. Derek has recently moved on from thoughtbot to try out a new role as an engineering manager at GitHub.

177: Tricking Computers Into Doing Things

November 9th, 2018  |  32 mins 21 secs

On this episode of the Bike Shed, Chris is joined by Christina Entcheva, developer from thoughtbot’s New York studio to discuss rails performance, user focused development, and headless CMSs.

176: The Machines Will Learn

November 2nd, 2018  |  37 mins 10 secs

On this episode of the Bike Shed Chris is joined by George Brocklehurst, development director in thoughtbot's New York studio. The conversation starts with a discussion around progressive enhancement and the state of the modern web, and then shifts to focus on George's recent explorations of machine learning. This episode is a perfect introduction to the topic of ML, and provides a great summary of why you might want to start working with it and how to go about that.

175: Tell Me When It's Real

October 26th, 2018  |  42 mins 11 secs

On this episode of the Bike Shed, Chris is joined by Josh Clayton, thoughtbot’s managing director in our Boston studio. Chris and Josh spend the episode discussing the various patterns and trends they see in the world of web development, covering languages and frameworks as well as more general patterns and approaches.

174: I've Watched a Lot of Vim Courses

October 18th, 2018  |  30 mins 48 secs

In this special crossover episode, Chris is joined by Chad Pytel, Co-founder & CEO of thoughtbot and host of Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, to discuss the content, history, and the process of making Upcase, thoughtbot's online learning platform, FREE.