The Bike Shed

298: Jawsification

29 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 usin...

297: We’re Making A Pixar Movie!

22 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

296: Speedy Performance with Nate Berkopec

15 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Nate Berkopec is the author of the Complete Guide to Rails Performance, the creator of the Rails Performance Workshop, and the co-maintainer of Puma. ...

295: To the Left, to the Left

07 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

After the last episode where database switching was discussed, a number of listeners reached out with thoughts. In particular, one listener gave a rep...

294: Perfect Duplication

25 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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...

293: Sportstaphors

18 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 t...

292: Debugging with Joël Quenneville

11 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris are joined by fellow thoughtbotter, Joël Quenneville, to discuss all things debugging. Joël is helping publi...

291: All Things Inertia.js with Jonathan Reinink

04 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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...

290: Can You See My Secrets?

27 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss testing webhooks, the challenges in replicating third-party data, and troubleshooting unexpected side ...

289: Have You Ever Ridden a Horse?

20 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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...

288: 10x Puppy

13 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss migrating a polymorphic relationship over to UUIDs and balancing trade-offs between data integrity vs ...

287: Turn it up to Eleven

30 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph shares a recent performance improvement, a Postgres delight, and testing concurrency in RSpec. Chris revisits an earlier...

286: Time After Time

23 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 tim...

285: Tell a Cohesive, Testable Story

16 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle a listener question around the world of service objects. Where, really, should we be putting our busine...

284: Lovely, Wonderful Spam

09 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode Chris and Steph chat about upgrading to Rails 6, intercepting emails, and play a few rounds of Software Terminology Trivia. The...

283: Who's The User?

02 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode Steph and Chris discuss a listener question around managing content within an application, weighing options like an integrated ...

282: What is Normal?

23 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris adds Dead Man's Snitch to a personal project and considers "what is the app doing at runtime?" as he touches on the impo...

281: Finding That Middle Ground

16 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle a listener question around switching from mostly-developing, to mostly-communicating and the tactics th...

280: Stable New New

09 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode Chris and Steph discuss a new tmux feature and wvim, a script that streamlines shell command edits. They also discuss the value...

279: Seeking Calm

02 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode Steph and Chris discuss some of characteristics and behaviors they've observed in high-performing teams, touching on pull reque...

278: Beliefs in the Firmware

26 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss the popular testing themes and questions that emerged during the RSpec training course, reflecting on ...

277: Making Communication Easier

19 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss some of their methods for helping out reviewers of their pull requests and keeping code review moving ...

276: Ride-Along Files

12 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris shares a new favorite tool for querying JSON and Steph revisits a previous deployment issue. They also dive into the new...

275: In Search of An Acronym

05 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris revisit their discussion about testing rack rewrite redirect logic, mystery guests, DNS configuration, and try...

274: Top 10 Review for 2020

29 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph reflect on their top themes and technical picks for 2020. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM (https:/...

273: Revisiting 2019, A Top 10 Review

22 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris begin wrapping up 2020 with a review of their 2019 top 10 list. They share what's changed, what's stayed the s...

272: Hacking the Gibson

15 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In this week's episode, Chris undertakes long-running background jobs that are performing duplicate work and adding significant load on the database. ...

271: Is That Your Final Answer?

08 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris describes his continued explorations with Svelte specifically bringing TypeScript into the mix. Steph discusses the firs...

270: Both Nothing and Deeply Special

01 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss redirecting requests for various hostnames to one canonical host, creating student personas to improve...

269: Things are Knowable (Gary Bernhardt)

17 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Steph's taking a quick break this week, but while she's away, Chris is joined by special guest Gary Bernhardt. Gary is the creator of Destroy All Soft...

268: Getting Your First-Through-N Jobs

10 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph discusses the value of conducting student research when creating course content and Chris revisits a recent architecture...

267: Shiny New Things

03 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph describes her unique new project where they're building and presenting a training course around RSpec, testing, and TDD ...

266: Spring is My Least Favorite Season

27 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph share mixed-feelings about Spring preloader and how to use Spring just for tests. They also dive into troubles...

265: There Are No Free Lunches

20 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris chat about database transactions and job queues, building static sites with GatsbyJS and NetlifyCMS, the perfo...

264: How to Win Friends and Influence Processes

13 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode Steph and Chris discuss the ins and outs of joining teams, building trust, and working together to improve processes and commun...

263: Keeping The Night Brain At Bay (Dave Rupert)

06 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Steph's taking a quick break this week, but in her absence, Chris is joined by Dave Rupert (https://daverupert.com/). Dave is the lead developer at Pa...

262: Good Idea, Terrible Idea?

29 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris introduces a new segment called "Good Idea, Terrible Idea?" as he considers introducing a read-only mode to avoid interr...

261: A Jenga Tower of Lets and Context

22 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle a listener question around composition over inheritance, especially in the context of Rails which makes...

260: N+1s For Days

15 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris shares a tale of performance improvements and a recent discussion about replacing a REST API with GraphQL. Steph dives i...

259: That's Not How Numbers Work

08 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle the thorny topic of 10X engineers. Do we think they really exist? What characteristics make an individu...

258: Digital Gardeners

01 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss a git-blame feature that supports bypassing less helpful commits. They also revisit a discussion about...

257: How Late On a Friday Can You Deploy?

18 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph & Chris take a deep dive into all things technical debt. How do you know when your code has reached "good enough"? When ...

256: Rational Pessimism

11 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris shares his recent adventures of working with a team that prioritizes async-first communication and Steph revisits a prev...

255: Aiming for 'Capable'

04 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris chat about the relatively new Rails viewcomponent library from GitHub, Steph talks about her work with Storybo...

254: Listener Mailbag Roundup Rodeo

28 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph celebrates passing an important test and discovers an API that returns different data than it's provided while Chris ask...

253: Find Yourself Through The Art of Podcast

21 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris have a brief chat about Snowpack, a new and ultra-speedy bundler in the front-end world, and revisit a convers...

252: I'm a Designer Now

14 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss leveraging the Unix utility sed to search files and remove unnecessary test setup, using Vim's Arglist...

251: Absent-Minded Whistling

07 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss using JSONB to store survey responses and the differences between JSON and JSONB, using (or not using!...

250: To Infinity and Beyond

30 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss the importance of using inclusive language, branching into new branch names, and strategies that encou...

249: What Would You Say You Do Here?

23 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris trade some consulting and everyone comes out a winner. Steph talks about a win and a loss on the battlefield o...

248: Here Be Dragons

16 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph shares a keyboard confession and interest in migrating to a split keyboard layout. Chris dives into creating static erro...

247: Acronyms By Moonlight

09 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss potential approaches to a complex client-side workflow, Chris shares the highs and lows of his recent ...

246: A True Movement (Pariss Athena)

02 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

We are pausing our normal tech-talk this week in support of the ongoing protests and to re-share the #BlackTechTwitter episode with Pariss Athena from...

245: Developer Therapy (German Velasco)

27 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph is joined by thoughtbotter German Velasco. German and Steph chat about remote work and the rewards and challenges of the...

244: Existential JavaScript

19 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph troubleshoots a mysterious Ember test failure that can't find a visible element, and Chris recounts an exciting three-ac...

243: I'm Not a Couch Worker

12 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris shares his recent explorations of railway oriented programming (hint: not what you think!) while doing his best to avoid...

242: As Few Consonants as Possible

05 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week’s episode, Chris and Steph share their excitement for Roam Research and formatting Ruby with Prettier Ruby. They also discuss writing t...

241: What If We Just Put a Phone Number?

28 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode Steph and Chris dig into MVP thinking and asking how we can write as little code as possible before finding out if any user wil...

240: A Framework in Motion Tends to Stay in Motion

21 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss troubleshooting a race condition, trusting your intuition and pessimistic locks. They also touch brie...

239: Admins All the Way Down

07 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss what it really means to make a project "open source". Is it just about making the code publicly availa...

238: All the Single Quotes

31 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In this week's episode, Chris shares details about his new greenfield project, implementing static pages with high voltage, opting for just-in-time ar...

237: I Love The Squiggles

17 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss the pros and cons of memoization, Chris revisits the discussion around the value of react snapshot tes...

236: What's GNU With You?

10 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss recent challenges associated with upgrading React Router and uploading files to Amazon S3. Steph also ...

235: Take a Deep Breath

03 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris dig into their shared love of refactoring. How do they think about it, have they ever reverted a refactor, tho...

234: No More Weird Stuff

25 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph respond to a listener question about the complex tradeoffs between craft, preferences, and business needs. The...

233: Software Development in Ancient Rome (Joël Quenneville)

18 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph is joined by Joël Quenneville. It's the season for CFPs (call for proposals) and Joël shares insights about his past c...

232: I'm Not Allowed to Play With Other Shells

11 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph celebrate the new Bike Shed website and logo! Steph finds a new way to optimize her keyboard happiness and Ch...

231: Fun and Useful

04 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph shares more of her Ember adventures, specifically sharing some of her work with the Mirage API mocking and prototyping l...

230: The Broken Road

28 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph revisit the long-lived feature branch Chris has been working on and chat about adventures with Yalc. They also...

229: Nothing but Positive Fire

21 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris catch up in their first recording of 2020. They discuss git workflows and the surprisingly strong opinions oft...

228: Friends and Food (George Brocklehurst)

14 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph is joined by George Brocklehurst, a Development Director in the NYC thoughtbot office. Steph and George chat about the v...

227: Hacks and Cheats

07 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss their recent holiday hackathon efforts building a game in Elm. They discuss their experiences with Elm...

226: Bespoke Nonsense

31 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, in celebration of the new year, Thom shares the 2019 blooper reel! Words are hard and here's the audio to prove it. Listen to ...

225: Pepper in Some Security

10 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph gets Chris to share his biggest developer regrets over the years. They also revisit a favorite topic of estimation and s...

224: The One Manhattan Rule

03 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris catches us up on his latest keyboard adventures and Steph shares her first impression of working with Ember.They also di...

223: Terrible and Easy

26 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss identifying refactoring opportunities by highlighting overly coupled code and Chris announces that he ...

222: That Eureka Moment

12 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris dive into the world of crafting pull requests for optimal code review, as well as the flip side of providing c...

221: An Informed Opinion

05 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph catch up on recent client adventures, revisit their feelings on using let in rspec, and spend a bit of time ou...

220: Adequately Fun

29 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph chat about their new client projects, VimScript, and ways to automate refreshing materialized views in tests. ...

219: Seeking That Middle Option

22 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph catches us up on her ever-growing collection of mechanical keyboards, Chris talks about his recent purchase of an apple ...

218: Finesse in Quitting (Brittany Martin)

15 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph is joined by Brittany Martin, an avid Rubyist and the host of the Ruby on Rails Podcast. They discuss Brittany's passion...

217: A Vote For Reasonableness

08 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph shares an update on her mechanical keyboard adventures and provides a summary for the Ruby pipeline operator being rever...

216: I'm Not the Best Criminal

01 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph recounts an issue with an email client that lowercases URLs and Chris ponders the art of logging and using structured lo...

215: Start With People

24 Sep 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph returns from vacation and Chris makes some noise about a fantastic new button. They discuss Steph's continued adventures...

214: Have You Tried Refreshing the Page?

17 Sep 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Matt Sumner guest stars to discuss his recent adventures on a project that uses React, TypeScript and GraphQL. Along the way, ...

213: Admins Matter Too

10 Sep 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph discusses a mini design sprint she led to help validate an internal admin tool while Chris muses on the merits of net ne...

212: Award Winning Sheds

04 Sep 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris share the news that The Bike Shed won the Best Dev Podcast on the Hackernoon Noonies awards! After a bit of ce...

211: I'm Not a Lawyer, But...

27 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss their preferred strategy when building an admin portal (spoiler: it's not using a client-side technolo...

210: Stop Trying to Make Fetch Happen

20 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss mechanical keyboards, combating error fatigue, the joy of admin features and respond to two listener q...

209: We Will Never Know Enough (Michael Chan)

13 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode Chris is joined by Michael Chan aka @chantastic, host of the React Podcast and prolific maker and sharer throughout the interne...

208: Goldilocks and the Three Monitors

06 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph weigh-in on curved monitors, discuss how pairing improves productivity and team morale, and respond to two lis...

207: Very-Bad, Or Just Normal-Bad?

30 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss a handful of utilities that help with their workflows and GitHub, and then dive into a handful of Acti...

206: No-One Wants to be the Canary

23 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss working with Django, Angular, and explore the new features released in Ruby 2.7.0-preview1! They also ...

205: Won't Somebody Think of The Jokes (Aaron Patterson)

09 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris is joined in a live recording from RailsConf by the one and only Aaron Patterson. They discuss Aaron's many RailsConf ke...

204: I Don't Like Rest

02 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss ways to unplug and protect personal downtime, RESTful sorting, altering production data within a Rails...

203: A Blessed Monkeypatch (Eileen M. Uchitelle)

25 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, we revisit RailsConf 2019 for another live recording, this time with Eileen M. Uchitelle, GitHubber and rails core team member...

202: I Left it All on The Dance Floor

18 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss how working with typed-languages influences their work with dynamic languages. They also chat about th...

201: Artisanally Indented Code (Kevin Deisz)

11 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Kevin Deisz, CTO of CultureHQ, live from RailsConf. They discuss Kevin's RailsConf talk on preevalution in ...

200: FOMO for Hallway Track (200th Episode!)

29 May 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this very special Bike Shed, Steph and Chris celebrate reaching the 200th episode. They discuss the origins of the show and thank some of the wonde...

199: Pave That Path

21 May 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris talk about PR sizing, load testing (the weird way), and ponder the merits and pitfalls of personal style in co...