The Bike Shed

403: Productivity Tricks

September 26th, 2023  |  37 mins 49 secs

Stephanie is engrossed in Kent Beck's Substack newsletter, which she appreciates for its "working thoughts" format. Unlike traditional media that undergo rigorous editing, Kent's content is more of a work-in-progress, focusing on thought processes and evolving ideas. Joël has been putting a lot of thought into various tools and techniques and realized that they all fall under one umbrella term: analysis.

From there, Stephanie and Joël discuss all the productivity tricks they like to use in their daily workflows. Do you have some keyboard shortcuts you like? Are you an Alfred wizard? What are some tools or mindsets around productivity that make YOUR life better?

402: Musings on Mentorship

September 19th, 2023  |  37 mins 56 secs

Joël describes an old-school object orientation exercise that involves circling nouns in a business problem description. The purpose is determining which nouns could become entities or objects in a system. Stephanie shares she's working from the Hudson Valley in New York as a trial run for potentially relocating there. She enjoys the rail trails for biking and contrasts it with urban biking in Chicago.

The conversation between Joël and Stephanie revolves around mentorship, both one-on-one and within a group setting. They introduce a new initiative at thoughbot where team members pair up with principal developers for weekly sessions, emphasizing sharing perspectives and experiences.

401: Making the Right Thing Easy

September 12th, 2023  |  31 mins 24 secs

Stephanie has another debugging mystery to share. Earlier this year, Joël mentioned that he was experimenting with a bookmark manager to keep track of helpful and interesting articles. He's happy to report that it's working very well for him!

Together, they discuss tactics to ensure the easiest route also upholds app health and aids fellow developers. They explore streamlining test fixes over mere re-runs and how to motivate desired actions across teams and individuals.

400: How To Search

September 5th, 2023  |  36 mins 2 secs

Joël shares he has been getting more into long-form reading. Stephanie talks about the challenges she faced in a new project that required integrating with another company's system.

Together, they delve into the importance of search techniques for developers, covering various approaches to finding information online.

399: Scaling Code Ownership and Accountability

August 29th, 2023  |  34 mins 16 secs

Stephanie experienced bike camping. Joël describes his experience during a week when he's in between projects.

Stephanie and Joël discuss the concept of code ownership, the mechanisms to enforce it, and the balance between bureaucracy and collaboration. They highlight the challenges and benefits of these systems in large codebases and emphasize that scaling a team is as much a social challenge as it is a technical one.

398: Developing Heuristics For Writing Software

August 22nd, 2023  |  34 mins 7 secs

Want a cool cucumber salad? Joël's got you covered. Stephanie has evolved and found some pickles she enjoys.

Experienced programmers use a lot of heuristics or "rules of thumb" about what makes their code better. These aren't always true, but they work in most situations. Stephanie and Joël discuss a range of heuristics, how to use them, how to come up with them, how to know when to break them, and how to teach them to more junior devs.

397: Dependency Graphs

August 15th, 2023  |  42 mins 53 secs

Stephanie is consciously trying to make meetings better for herself by limiting distractions. A few episodes ago, Joël talked about a frustrating bug he was chasing down and couldn't get closure on, so he had to move on. This week, that bug popped up again and he chased it down! AND he got to use binary search to find its source–which was pretty cool!

Together, Stephanie and Joël discuss dependency graphs as a mental model, and while they apply to code, they also help when it comes to planning tasks and systems. They talk about coupling, cycles, re-structuring, and visualizations.

396: Build vs. Buy

August 8th, 2023  |  33 mins 57 secs

Joël has been fighting a frustrating bug where he's integrating with a third-party database, and some queries just crash. Stephanie shares her own debugging story about a leaky stub that caused flaky tests.

Additionally, they discuss the build vs. buy decision when integrating with third-party systems. They consider the time and cost implications of building their own integration versus using off-the-shelf components and conclude that the decision often depends on the specific needs and priorities of the project, including how quickly a solution is needed and whether the integration is core to the business's value proposition.

395: Human Connection in a Virtual (Work) World

August 1st, 2023  |  30 mins 59 secs

Stephanie had a small consulting win: saying no to a client. GeoGuessr is all the rage for thoughtbot's remote working culture, which leads to today's topic of forming human connections in a virtual (work) environment.

394: Submitting a Conference Talk Proposal from Start to Finish

July 25th, 2023  |  38 mins 53 secs

Joël recently had a fascinating conversation with some friends about the power of celebrating and highlighting small wins in their lives. He talks about bringing this into his work life. May Stephanie interest you in a secret she learned regarding homemade pizza?

RubyConf is coming! Who's submitting talks?! It's hekkin scary. Don't fret! Joël and Stephannie are here to help. Today, they discussed submitting a conference talk proposal from start to finish.

393: Is REST the Best? APIs and Domain Modeling

July 18th, 2023  |  33 mins 49 secs

It's updates on the work front today! Stephanie was tasked with removing a six-year-old feature flag from a codebase. Joël's been doing a lot of small database migrations.

A listener question sparked today's main discussion on gerunds' interesting relationship to data modeling.

392: Managing Changing Business Requirements

July 11th, 2023  |  39 mins 14 secs

Joël has a fascinating discovery! He learned a new nuance around working with dependency graphs. Stephanie just finished playing a 100-hour video game on Nintendo Switch: a Japanese role-playing game called Octopath Traveler II. On the work front, she is struggling with a lot of churn in acceptance criteria and ideas about how features should work.

• How do these get documented?
• What happens when they change?
• What happens when people lose this context over time?

391: Learn with APPL

July 5th, 2023  |  40 mins 45 secs

Stephanie went to her first WNBA game. Also: Bingo. Joël's new project has him trying to bring in multiple databases to back their ActiveRecord models. He's never done multi-database setups in Rails before, and he doesn't hate it.

Stephanie shares bits from a discussion with former Bike Shed host Steph Viccari about learning goals. Four elements stood out:

Adventure (try something new)
Passion (topic)
Profit (from recent learnings)
Low-risk (applicable today)

= APPL

Stephanie and Joël discuss what motivates them, what they find interesting vs. what has immediate business value, and how they advocate for themselves in these situations. They ponder if these topics can bring long-term value and discuss the impact that learning Elm had on Joël's client work.

390: The Truth about Truthiness

June 27th, 2023  |  39 mins 58 secs

Joël's new work project involves tricky date formats. Stephanie has been working with former Bike Shed host Steph Viccari and loved her peer review feedback.

The concept of truthiness is tough to grasp sometimes, and JavaScript and Ruby differ in their implementation of truthiness.

• Is this a problem?
• Do you prefer one model over the other?
• What can we learn about these design decisions?
• How can we avoid common pitfalls?

389: Review Season

June 20th, 2023  |  33 mins 45 secs

Stephanie just got back from a smaller regional Ruby Conference, Blue Ridge Ruby, in Asheville, North Carolina. Joël started a new project at work.

Review season is upon us. Stephanie and Joël think about growth and goals and talk about reviews: how to do them, how to write them for yourself, and how to write them for others.

388: Empowering Other Departments Within a Company

June 13th, 2023  |  34 mins 11 secs

Joël has a bike shorts update; Stephanie has a garden one.

Often, power is centralized within the dev team. This is usually because they are the only ones able to execute. Sometimes this ends up interfering with team processes and workload. Joël is a fan of empowering other teams to do things themselves.