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
May 23, 2023 • 24 mins
Joël is joined by thoughtbot Software Developer and Dirt Jumper Daniel Nolan. Dirt jumping is BMX-style riding 🏍️ with really enormous dirt jumps.
But for a person who loves excitement in his spare time, for Daniel at work, it's not the new and shiny that interests him. When he dives into something, the "boring" parts of tech are what he finds most fulfilling. He wants to know the "why," and in this conversation, he explains how i...
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May 16, 2023 • 37 mins
Joël gives a recap after attending RailsConf 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia (and yes, there was karaoke! 🎤 🎶). Stephanie plugs the The Tightly Coupled Book Club Podcast from friends and fellow thoughtboters Aji and Mina Slater where they're reading The Rails Guides from cover to cover and treating it like a book club and having a discussions about the documentation as they read it together.
Stemming from a Twitter thread by Joël (http...
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May 9, 2023 • 43 mins
Engineering manager at Vox Media and author Nicole Zhu joins Stephanie on today's episode to discuss her writing practice.
nicoledonut is a biweekly newsletter about the writing process and sustaining a creative life that features creative resources, occasional interviews with creative folks, short essays on writing and creativity, farm-to-table memes and TikToks, and features on what Nicole is currently writing, reading, and watc...
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May 2, 2023 • 36 mins
Joël has been integrating a third-party platform into a testing pipeline...and it has not been going well. Because it's not something she usually keeps up-to-date with, Stephanie is excited to learn about more of the open-source side of things in Ruby, what's new in the Ruby tooling world, and what folks are thinking about regarding the future of the language.
Today's topic is inspired by an internal thoughtbot Slack thread about w...
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April 25, 2023 • 40 mins
It's gardening season! Stephanie swaps seeds with friends and talks about her Chicago garden. Joël recently started experimenting with a dedicated bookmark manager.
They discuss the aspirational (and sometimes dogmatic) sides of TDD and explore when to test: first or after.
How does that affect the tests?
How does that affect the code?
How does that affect workflow?
Are you a "better" programmer because you 100% TDD?
This episo...
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April 18, 2023 • 32 mins
Joël has been working on his RailsConf talk about various aspects of discrete math useful in day-to-day work as a developer and going deep on some concepts from propositional logic and Boolean algebra, particularly DeMorgan's Laws, which explain how to negate a compound condition. Stephanie attended a meeting with a fun "Spicy Takes" topic. She gave a short talk on how frictionless technology may not be the best path forward and tr...
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April 11, 2023 • 41 mins
Joël submitted a last-minute submission to RailsConf discreet math, which got picked up! 🎉 He'll be speaking at RailsConf 2023 in Atlanta at the end of April about why it's relevant to developers and all the different practical ways he uses it daily.
Stephanie recommends headlamps for in-bed reading sessions and sets up the feature flags topic for today based on a project that must be released to the public in one go.
This episode...
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April 4, 2023 • 38 mins
Today's episode is "Old News"! Stephanie shares her ergonomic desk setup. Joël talks about the pyramids.
Another old thing is the Bike Shed episode two weeks ago about success and fulfillment. Stephanie and Joël realized off-mic that one area they didn't really talk about so much is impact, and that is something that is very fulfilling for both of them. Today, they talk about impact and leadership as individual contributors because...
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March 28, 2023 • 45 mins
Joël is a mentor for RailsConf and got matched with a speaker. Stephanie has been having trouble stepping away from her work. It's frustrating when chasing down a bug because something's gone wrong, and you spend a whole afternoon figuring out where it is. Joël and Stephanie discuss error handling as a possible solution.
This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast...
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March 21, 2023 • 41 mins
Stephanie has a win and a gripe from her client project this week. In a previous episode, Joël talked about his work exploring how to model dependent side effects, particularly D&D dice rolls. He went from the theoretical to the practical and wrote up a miniature D&D damage dice roll app that you put in a few inputs. Then it will roll all the dice necessary and tell you did you successfully hit your target and, if so, how much dama...
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March 14, 2023 • 31 mins
thoughtbot had an in-person Summit in the UK! Joël recalls highlights. Stephanie is loving daily sync meetings on a new project.
The idea of deleting code has been swimming around in Stephanie's brain recently because she's been feeling nervous about it. Together, Joël and Stephanie explore ways of gaining confidence to delete code while feeling good about it.
This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_cam...
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March 7, 2023 • 30 mins
Joël is joined by a very special guest, Sara Jackson, a fellow Software Developer at thoughtbot.
A few episodes ago, Stephanie and Joël talked about "The Fundamentals" (https://www.bikeshed.fm/371) and how many of the fundamentals of web development line up with a Computer Science degree. Joël made a comment during that episode that his pick for the most underrated CS class that he thinks would benefit most devs is a class called
...
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February 28, 2023 • 42 mins
Stephanie is joined today by a very special guest, Andrea Goulet. Andrea founded Empathy In Tech as part of writing her book Empathy-Driven Software Development (https://empathyintech.com/). She's also the founder of the community Legacy Code Rocks (https://www.legacycode.rocks/) and the Chief Vision Officer of two companies: Corgibytes (https://corgibytes.com/) and Heartware (https://www.heartware.dev/) (which provides financial s...
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February 21, 2023 • 37 mins
Stephanie raves about more software development-related zines by Julia Evans. Joël has been thinking about the mechanics of rolling dice.
Stephanie also started on a new client project that Joël has already been working on for many months. They talk about onboarding.
This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visi...
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February 14, 2023 • 36 mins
Joël has been fighting autoloading in a Rails app recently, and it's been really unpleasant. Stephanie has been experimenting with how she interacts with Slack.
What are "the fundamentals"? People often argue for the value of Computer Science classes for the jobbing programmer because we need "the fundamentals." But what are they? And does CS really provide that for us?
This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.i...
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February 7, 2023 • 38 mins
Stephanie shares that she's been taking an intro to basket weaving class at a local art studio, and it's an interesting connection to computer science. Joël eats honeycomb live on air and shares a video that former Bike Shed host Steph Viccari found from Ian Anderson. It's a parody to the tune of "All I Want For Christmas Is You," but it's all about the Ruby 3.2 release.
In this episode, Stephanie and Joël shift away from literatur...
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January 31, 2023 • 50 mins
Joël has been pondering another tool for thought from Maggie Appleton: diagramming. What does drawing complex things reveal? Stephanie has updates on how Soup Group went, plus a clarification from last week's episode re: hexagons and tessellation.
They also share the top most impactful articles they read in 2022.
This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&ut...
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January 24, 2023 • 36 mins
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?
This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medi...
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January 17, 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.
This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_mediu...
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January 10, 2023 • 38 mins
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.
This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack.
Joël's Elm Mee...
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