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
October 28, 2025 • 33 mins
Aji gets his priorities straight as he talks with fellow thoughtboter Jared Turner about his recent article titled The President’s Doctor (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/the-presidents-doctor).
Jared breaks down the thought process behind the president’s doctor and the wasted time we accrue when working on a project, where we can minimise pauses and delays in our workflows, and why watching cat videos while you wait may actually be t...
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October 21, 2025 • 33 mins
Aji and Sally set out to crack the problems surrounding remote working as they share their thoughts on the various aspect of working from home.
Together they discuss their time at the recent thoughtbot summit in Amsterdam, how they felt about working in-person again, what they took away from the experience, the best remote solutions they’ve found to recreate that in-person feeling (https://www.gather.town/), and what friction poin...
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October 14, 2025 • 37 mins
Aji and Sally sit down to discuss their struggles with ADHD and the systems they have in place to stay focused at work.
They each share the note taking systems (https://www.goodnotes.com/blog/zettelkasten-method) and tools they use to navigate a normal working day, how they came to fully understand and manage their ADHD, and Sally reminds us all why it’s very important to use a slash in your Slack reminders.
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This episode of th...
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October 7, 2025 • 44 mins
Time to plan an upgrade as Joël and Aji talk about the hurdles involved with various change management in their projects.
The pair lay out some different approaches to protecting your data when planning a migration, the risks of code and data changes, the elements that will and won’t be affect in the process, and Joël gives his experience on a tough migration project and what he learnt from it.
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If you’ve not used Merge before yo...
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September 30, 2025 • 36 mins
Joël and Sally sit down to discuss their green and red flags when it comes to PR review.
Joël breaks down the different ways humans review code vs AI, how they both break down large projects into smaller digestible PRs and clarifying your reasoning for certain decisions, as well as discussing the most common red flags they’ve encountered when looking over code.
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Take a break from coding to brush up on your Roman History (https:/...
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September 23, 2025 • 38 mins
Sally and Aji discuss their experiences with invisible mentorship when it comes to code review.
Together they question when is the right time to have conversations with your team in a bid to chase improvement, the importance of understanding your co-workers perspectives, as well as the best ways to initiate a mentoring moment.
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Check out some of the things mentioned in this episode - The Coding Train (https://thecodingtrain.com)...
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September 16, 2025 • 41 mins
It’s board game night at the Bike Shed as Joël and Aji crack out the game pieces to assess how their work as programmers influences strategy when playing some of their favourite games.
As they make their way round the board they discuss the cycle of setbacks and iteration, finding the optimal solution to a puzzle, as well as the key skills that best links their programming work to board games.
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Thanks to our sponsors for this epi...
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September 9, 2025 • 44 mins
Joël prepares to write his new book by asking Sally some fundamental questions about Web browsers.
Together they look to answer the deceptively simple question of what is a browser, examining what they are at their core, what they’re capable of beyond basic functions, the nuances of programming for the web across different systems and devices on the front and back end (https://radanskoric.com/articles/hotwire-or-frontend-framework...
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September 2, 2025 • 41 mins
Sally and Joël kick off a new season of the Bike Shed by asking the question, what exactly is it that we as developers even do around here?
Together they discuss their roles as developers, how their workflows and skills have changed over time, the value of context and experience when evaluating different solutions to a problem, why so much of their work revolves around googling error codes, (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/indiana-jon...
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August 26, 2025 • 42 mins
Joël is joined by some familiar faces in today’s episode of the Bike Shed to help reveal some exciting changes to the show as he asks his new co-hosts, what’s new in your world?
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Thanks to our sponsors for this episode Judoscale - Autoscale the Right Way (https://judoscale.com/bikeshed) (check the link for your free gift!), and Scout Monitoring (https://www.scoutapm.com/).
Joining Joël Quenneville (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe...
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August 19, 2025 • 40 mins
Joël talks with Adam McCrea, founder of Judoscale (https://judoscale.com/), about the best ways to manage your queues and autoscaling.
Adam discusses some tough lessons he learnt recently during a technical outage at Judoscale (https://judoscale.com/blog/upscaling-broken-post-mortem), what exactly autoscaling is and how it works, the best signals to assess when working with an autoscaler, and provides some simple tips to better or...
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August 12, 2025 • 38 mins
Joël and fellow thoughtbotter Jimmy Thigpen assess their AI workflows and question whether LLM partners really are as helpful as they claim to be.
Joël points out the blindspots AI can have when processing certain requests, they each share the ways they utilise AI into their workflow and pros and cons of doing so, as well as looking at some of the areas of improvement they would each like to see made to various AI agents in the fu...
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July 22, 2025 • 41 mins
Joël sits down with Tess Griffin as they take a moment to recap the very last RailsConf together.
The pair discuss their favourite moments from final conference, how their love of D&D has crossed over to shape their experiences attending RailsConf, and the future of the show as a whole.
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Thanks to our sponsors for this episode Judoscale - Autoscale the Right Way (https://judoscale.com/bikeshed) (check the link for your free gif...
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July 1, 2025 • 41 mins
Joël continues his preparations for the last RailsConf as he talks with Matheus about how to make the most of your time at the conference.
Hear their tips to connect and communicate with other attendees, the different ways to take notes at the various talks you can attend, what to do when your discussions have a lull, as well as how to draw inspiration from others talks and using it to your advantage.
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Don’t miss out on the fin...
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June 24, 2025 • 43 mins
As the final RailsConf draws near Joël and Aji Slater sit down to discuss its varied and interesting history of keynote presentations.
The pair reminisce on their previous trips and talks at RailsConf, share some tips on creating the perfect keynote, as well as discussing the strong community that’s rallied behind RailsConf for so many years and how to best connect with others at similar cons as an audience member.
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Don’t miss o...
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May 27, 2025 • 37 mins
Elaina Natario returns to talk with Joël about what makes good quality product design and the priorities that shape development.
The pair discuss the importance of certain elements such as security and accessibility, maintaining certain standards throughout development, as well as judging the practical applications of prototypes within a project and the broad role they play.
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The Sponsor for this episode has been Judoscale - Auto...
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May 20, 2025 • 42 mins
Joël and Rémy draw inspiration from the stars as they discuss Rémy’s new open source Ruby gem, Astonoby (https://github.com/rhannequin/astronoby).
Rémy reveals the challenges he faced in taking on this project, the scientific translation work that went into making it accessible for everyone, as well as the key lessons he learnt from modelling the cosmos.
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The Sponsor for this episode has been Judoscale - Autoscale the Right Way ...
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May 13, 2025 • 36 mins
Joël strikes up a dialogue with fellow thoughtboter Elaina Natario about the various use cases of modals.
Together they discuss their pros and cons, the dos and don’ts, their functionality and accessibility to the end user as well as the subtle differences you'll notice when compared to dialogs.
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The Sponsor for this episode has been Judoscale - Autoscale the Right Way (https://judoscale.com/bikeshed). Check out the link for your...
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May 6, 2025 • 42 mins
Joël and Steve sit down to discuss the ins and outs of decomposition within their respective workflows and how they use it to their advantage when working on certain projects.
Together they look at working with vertical slices over other decomposition methods, when and how to break down code as efficiently as possible, and Joël lays out his three key principles that help him write code dubbed “The Triangle of Separation”.
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The Sp...
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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.
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The Sponsor for this ep...
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