The Bike Shed

About the show

On The Bike Shed, hosts Joël Quenneville and Stephanie Minn discuss development experiences and challenges at thoughtbot with Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and whatever else is drawing their attention, admiration, or ire this week.

The Bike Shed on social media

Episodes

  • 51: Is Sim City Running? (Steve Klabnik)

    February 10th, 2016  |  43 mins 56 secs

    We enjoy a wide-ranging discussion with Steve Klabnik on the importance of good documentation, the sometimes cloudy definition of a breaking change, the politics of open source contributions, and work/life balance or boundaries.

  • 50: Open Mic

    February 3rd, 2016  |  28 mins 30 secs

    It's Open Mic day at The Bike Shed. We hear from other thoughtbot designers and developers about what they're excited to be spending their investment time on lately.

  •

    49: A More Practical Haskell

    January 27th, 2016  |  34 mins 40 secs

    How can an ORM be faster than a SQL String? Laila and Sean discuss the latest happenings in Diesel and why it is that a systems language needs an ORM, anyway.

  • 48: Is Everyone Trying Their Best?

    January 21st, 2016  |  34 mins 44 secs

    Software is broken. In this episode, Derek and Sean discuss why exactly it's broken, and what we can do to make it better.

  •

    47: Star Wars Oranges

    January 13th, 2016  |  54 mins 12 secs

    Ruby 2.3 is out! What are we looking forward to trying and what do we think of &. and try? Stick around after the credits for spoiler-filled discussion of Star Wars: The Force Awakens

  •

    46: Don't Breathe, Save the Planet

    January 6th, 2016  |  34 mins 14 secs

    We discuss the maintenance burden of ActionCable and its dependencies on Rails 5, follow-up on Scenic issues, and discuss implementing migrations anew in Diesel.

  •

    45: I Think I'd Prefer An Error to Nonsense

    December 23rd, 2015  |  47 mins 57 secs

    Derek shipped Scenic 1.0, which spurs a conversation about semantic versioning and the value of the 1.0 milestone. We discuss what the bar for breaking changes in a library should be and look at some specific changes on tap for Scenic and whether they will or should carry a major version bump.

  •

    44: It Won't Crash... It Might Crash

    December 17th, 2015  |  47 mins 29 secs

    Sean has shipped early versions of Diesel, an ORM for Rust! We discuss its semantic versioning, the ergonomics of use versus the complexities of implementation, early issues with the API and the road to Diesel 1.0.

  • 43: That's DOCTOR Internet Technologist

    December 9th, 2015  |  50 mins 43 secs

    We talk about lessons learned from teachable moments both in the moment and decades later.

  • 42: That's Incredibly Ambitious (Grayson Wright)

    December 2nd, 2015  |  37 mins 32 secs

    We speak to Grayson Wright about building Administrate, an open source Rails framework for administrative interfaces. What makes Administrate different than existing solutions and what are the challenges in maintaining high-level dependencies.

  •

    41: Ugh, I Have to Write Web Apps in This Thing

    November 25th, 2015  |  35 mins 25 secs

    Derek and Sean talk about Derek's exploration into Elixir and Phoenix, when and how performance matters, and ways to keep your Rails app fast from day 1.

  •

    40: ActiveRecord Deprecated Persistence

    November 18th, 2015  |  34 mins 22 secs

    The ActiveRecord update API is a mess of methods that confuse even ActiveRecord’s maintainer. What are the problems and is there any hope for a solution?

  •

    39: Okay with Instability (Yehuda Katz)

    November 11th, 2015  |  1 hr 7 mins

    We talk with Yehuda Katz about how much risk is right for you and your app, the sharp tools of high level abstractions, and how our statistical intuition leads us astray on web performance.

  •

    38: Ugh, Forms

    November 3rd, 2015  |  40 mins 33 secs

    Laila and Derek discuss how they have handled forms with complex validation requirements and how to make these forms have a smooth user experience.

  •

    37: The Web is Faster Without Garbage

    October 29th, 2015  |  44 mins 15 secs

    Begun, the ad block wars have. Derek debugs an issue that arises from iOS ad blocking and wonders if analytics will move back to the server side. Sean fills us in on how dirty checking works in ActiveRecord and how he's making it faster and better in Rails 5.

  •

    36: Python Unchained

    October 15th, 2015  |  50 mins 6 secs

    Derek and Laila talk about learning Python and Django and discuss how thoughtbot adopts new languages, frameworks, and libraries. What factors influence adoption? How do we share what works and doesn't work?