The Bike Shed

368: Sustainable Web Development

January 24th, 2023  |  36 mins 3 secs

Stephanie talks about hosting a "Soup Group"! Joël got nerd-sniped during the last episode and dove deeper into Maggie Appleton's "Tools for Thought."

Stephanie has been thinking a lot about Sustainable Web Development. What is sustainability? How does it relate to tech and what we do?

367: Value Objects

January 17th, 2023  |  34 mins

Joël's been traveling. Stephanie's working on professional development. She's also keeping up a little bit more with Ruby news and community news in general and saw that Ruby 3.2 introduced a new class called data to its core library for the use case of creating simple value objects.

366: Componentization and Branching Strategies

January 10th, 2023  |  38 mins 31 secs

Happy New Year! It's 2023 🎉 Joël and Stephanie chat about developer resolutions or things they'd like to do this year and then discuss componentization and branching strategies.

365: Career Progression

December 13th, 2022  |  37 mins 55 secs

Joël has been thinking a lot recently about array indexing. Stephanie started volunteering at the Chicago Tool Library, a non-profit community lending library for Chicagoans to borrow tools and equipment for DIY home projects!

It's the end of the year and often a time of reflection: looking back on the year and thinking about the next. Stephanie and Joël ponder if open source is a critical way to advance careers as software developers.

364: Constructive vs Predicative Data

December 6th, 2022  |  34 mins 7 secs

Stephanie and Joël attended RubyConf Mini, and both spoke there. They discuss takeaways and highlights from the conference.

The core idea for this episode is explained in this article: Constructive vs. Predicative Data. This came up recently in a conversation at thoughtbot about designing a database schema and what constraints could be encoded in the schema directly versus needing some kind of trigger or Rails validation to cover it.

363: Deployments

November 22nd, 2022  |  34 mins 26 secs

Joël discovered Bardcore. Stephanie planned and executed an IRL meetup for folks in the WNB.rb virtual community group in Chicago and had a consulting win.

Together, they discuss what deployment processes look like for clients in their current workloads.

362: Prioritizing Learning

November 15th, 2022  |  29 mins 40 secs

This week, Steph and Joël discuss investment time and keeping track of things they want to learn.

How do you, dear listener, keep track of things you want to learn? When investment time rolls around, what do you reach for, or how do you prioritize that list? Are there things you actively decide not to focus on when choosing where to develop deep expertise? Are there things you wish you could spend time on if you could?

361: Working Incrementally

November 8th, 2022  |  30 mins 28 secs

thoughtbotter Stephanie Minn joins The Bike Shed as co-host! 🎉

Joël and Stephanie talk about continuing on a rewrite and redesign of a legacy Rails app and working incrementally.

360: ActiveRecord Models

November 1st, 2022  |  28 mins 37 secs

Fellow thoughtboter Sarah Lima joins Joël to discuss an issue Sarah had when she was doing a code review recently: making HTTP requests in an ActiveRecord model. Her concern with that approach was that a class was having too many responsibilities that would break the single-responsibility principle, and that it would make the class hard to maintain. Because the ActiveRecord layer is a layer that's meant to encapsulate business roles and data, her issue was that adding another responsibility on top of it would be too much. Her solution was to extract a class that would handle the whole HTTP request process.

359: Serializers

October 25th, 2022  |  44 mins 10 secs

Chris Toomey is back! (For an episode.) He talks about what he's been up to since handing off the reins to Joël. He's been playing around with something at Sagewell that he enjoys. At the core of it? Serializers.

358: Class Methods

October 18th, 2022  |  40 mins 40 secs

Inspired by a Slack thread, Joël invites fellow thoughtbotter Aji Slater on the show to talk about when you should use class methods and when you should avoid them. Are there particular anti-patterns to look out for? How does this fit in with good object-oriented programming? What about Rails? What is an "alternate constructor"? What about service objects? So many questions, and friends: Aji and Joël deliver answers!

357: Notetaking For Developers

October 11th, 2022  |  30 mins 55 secs

Joël is joined by Amanda Beiner, a Senior Software Engineer at GitHub, who is known for her legendary well-organized notes. They talk about various types of notes: debugging, todos, mental stack, Zetelkasten/evergreen notes, notetaking apps and systems, and visual note-taking and diagramming too!

356: The Value of Specialized Vocabulary

September 27th, 2022  |  39 mins 20 secs

Guest and fellow thoughtbotter Stephanie Minn and Joël chat about how the idea of specialized vocabulary came up during a discussion of the Ruby Science book. We have all these names for code smells and refactors. Before knowing these names, we often have a vague sense of the ideas but having a name makes them more real. They also give us ways to talk precisely about what we mean. However, there is a downside since not everyone is familiar with the jargon.

355: Test Performance

September 20th, 2022  |  42 mins 44 secs

Guest Geoff Harcourt, CTO of CommonLit, joins Joël to talk about a thing that comes up with a lot with clients: the performance of their test suite. It's often a concern because with test suites, until it becomes a problem, people tend to not treat it very well, and people ask for help on making their test suites faster. Geoff shares how he handles a scenario like this at CommonLit.

354: The History of Computing

September 13th, 2022  |  31 mins 16 secs

Why does the history of computing matter? Joël and Developer at thoughtbot Sara Jackson, ponder this and share some cool stories (and trivia!!) behind the tools we use in the industry.

353: Mental Models

September 6th, 2022  |  38 mins 22 secs

Mental models are metaphors that help us understand complex problems we work on. They can be a simplified roadmap over an infinite area of complexity.

How does one come up with mental models? How are they useful? Are they primarily a solo thing, or can they be used to communicate with the team? What happens when your model is inaccurate? Today, Joël is joined by Eebs Kobeissi, a Developer and Dev Manager at You Need a Budget, to discuss.