The Bike Shed

The Bike Shed

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.

Episodes

461: Writing new vs existing code with Sara Jackson

April 29, 2025 • 42 mins
Joël talks with fellow thoughtboter Sara about the different ways developers can help one another across the various stages of an app’s lifecycle. They highlight the importance of utilising notes early on to clarify your work for others who may need it later down the line, how tooling can aid with this at all stages of development, and what lessons can be learnt from coding decisions made by someone else. — The Sponsor for this ep...
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460: Programer Productivity with Valerie Burzynski

April 22, 2025 • 36 mins
Start taking notes in this episode as Joël and Valerie discuss the different ways in which they structure their note taking systems to improve their workflows. Together they cover the best ways to get started with serious note taking, how to best map out your thoughts so they make the most sense when you come back round to them, as well as examining the different use cases they have for them both over the course of a working day. ...
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459: Paper Data Structures with Sally Hall

April 15, 2025 • 42 mins
Joël and thoughtbot colleague Sally Hall set out to find an answer to the question, what exactly are the differences between paper data structures and digitals ones? They compare the different ways humans store and access data, from rolodexs to the dewey decimal system, browsing a system vs searching it, and how the digital age has changed the way we assess and look at data stored in those systems. — Change your organisational work...
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458: Learning Typescript with Aji Slater

April 8, 2025 • 42 mins
Joël and fellow thoughtboter Aji Slater examine the unfamiliar world of Typescript (https://www.typescriptlang.org/) and various ways of working within it’s system. They lay out the pros and cons of Typescript over other environments such as Ruby and Elm and discuss their experience of adopting LLM partners to assist in their workflows. Using ChatGPT and Claude to verify code and trim down syntax, all while trying to appease the t...
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457: Time Zones with Sally Hall

March 18, 2025 • 46 mins
Joël enlists the help of thoughtbot colleague Sally Hall as they dive into the complex world of time zones, daylight savings, measurements and coding. Together they discuss their struggles with daylight savings throwing off their recent project reporting, the constant struggles of writing for different time zones and why writing your own code is never worth the hassle, and the similar battle of writing for different units of measur...
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456: Typescript with Jimmy Thigpen

February 25, 2025 • 37 mins
Joël turns to fellow thoughtboter Jimmy Thigpen as he looks to expand his knowledge about the wide world of Typescripts. Together they discuss the differences between Typescript and other common systems such as Elm and Javascript, how to best handle their edge cases and error flags, as well as the benefits of using Zod as your typescript library. — Just starting out in Typescript? Try enabling Strict Mode! (https://www.typescriptl...
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455: Noisy Animals Kata with Fritz Meissner

February 18, 2025 • 46 mins
Joël talks with fellow thoughtboter Fritz Meissner about the thinking process behind his latest kata project and the vast world of coding problems. Fritz explains why he developed the noisy animals kata and how it helped to better understand and streamline his code, the best ways to break down conditionals and how to clean them up efficiently within your workflow, as well as knowing where the limits of improvement are in each proje...
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454: Workshop design with Aji Slater

February 4, 2025 • 37 mins
Joël is joined by fellow thoughtboter Aji Slater as they discuss their previous experiences in designing content for workshops. Learn how to best structure your workshop for an audience, the benefits of a workshop over a talk and vice versa, as well as how to tackle the different hurdles your audience might face when working through your presentation. — Try your hand at Joël’s recommendation of visualising your Git Branching (https...
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453: The Bike Shed Wrapped 2024

December 31, 2024 • 31 mins
Happy New Year from The Bike Shed! Tune in to the one wrapped edition that really matters this holiday season, The Bike Shed Wrapped! Recap the year with Joël and Stephanie as they reminisce over their favourite moments of 2024. The pair discuss ways they’ve stepped outside their comfort zone to gain a different perspective on their work, the growth they’ve each achieved as a result, and their ambitions for 2025 and beyond. Discov...
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452: Hotwire Essentials with Steve Polito

December 24, 2024 • 28 mins
Stephanie is joined by follow thoughtbot-er Steve Polito as they discuss his latest GitHub resource, Botcasts (https://github.com/thoughtbot/botcasts). Find out why Steve was so keen to make the app, what he learnt about Hotwire in the process and why he thinks you should stop listening to the show in your current pod-catcher and pick it up in Botcasts instead! -- Try building Botcasts for yourself over on Github (https://github...
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451: Making Time for and Managing Focus

December 17, 2024 • 29 mins
It’s officially the holidays at the Bike Shed! Defrag your hard drives and take a break with Joël and Stephanie as they breakdown different ways to manage your focus during the day. The pair discuss separating coding time from thinking time when working, the pros and cons of blocking out time for different tasks and clever ways to move seamlessly from one project to the next without losing momentum. Joël has some more timezone f...
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450: Javascript-Driven Development?

December 10, 2024 • 39 mins
Joël and Stephanie go back to fundamentals as they pick apart some recent conversations they’ve been having around the office. Together they discuss the advantages of GraphQL over a REST API, how they utilise JSONB over a regular column or table, and the use-cases for and against a frontend framework like React. But what’s the theme that ties all these conversations together? — The article mentioned in this episode was Why I’m ov...
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449: Evergreen skills for new-ish developers

December 3, 2024 • 37 mins
One of the most challenging things about starting out as a developer is how much you need to master all at once. And with so much to learn, it can be difficult for experts to guide fresh developers and advise them on where to focus first. Luckily, some skills will always be useful, no matter what language you’re coding in. In today’s episode, Stephanie and Joël tackle this topic by unpacking several key evergreen skills that will a...
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448: Other Uses for Tests

November 26, 2024 • 33 mins
How can tests serve beyond just catching bugs in code? In this episode, Stephanie and Joël dive into the various roles that tests can play in a developer's toolkit. Covering all the fundamentals, from aiding knowledge transfer and documentation to ensuring accountability in code reviews, they explore the unexpected ways that tests support developer workflows. They also explain the balance between writing detailed tests for document...
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447: How to (not) implement impersonation

November 19, 2024 • 37 mins
For developers, impersonation can be a powerful tool, but with great power comes great responsibility. In today’s episode, hosts Stephanie and Joël explore the complexities of implementing impersonation features in software development, giving you the ability to take over someone’s account and act as the user. They delve into the pros and cons of impersonation, from how it can help with debugging and customer support to its prime d...
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