The Bike Shed
On The Bike Shed, hosts Joël Quenneville, Sally Hall, and Aji Slater discuss development experiences and challenges at thoughtbot with Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and whatever else is drawing their attention, admiration, or ire this week.
Episodes
January 6, 2026 • 30 mins
Aji and Joël talk all things hackerthons and why taking the time to have a little having fun with your work every now and then is important for developers.
Our hosts reflect on their shared experience at a previous RailsConf where they entered a mini hackerthon, why playing around in a creative sandbox is crucial to honing your skills as a dev, and how programming on the fly can teach you a lot about your own strengths and weakness...
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December 30, 2025 • 37 mins
Joël contributes some thoughts on working with custom attributes as he follows up on last week’s discussion about ActiveModels with Sally.
Joël breaks down how he transforms various strings and objects when working with ActiveModels to simplify more advance workloads, as Sally queries their different use cases and how best to utilise them for her own workflow.
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Catch up on Sally and Aji’s episode from last week on ActiveModels bef...
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December 23, 2025 • 27 mins
Aji and Sally join forces to discuss the different ways they utilise active models in their workflows.
Aji describes a new system for working with active models they’ve been using recently, Sally recalls a project where active models could have saved her a lot of time, before putting their heads together to think of new creative ways to utilise rails’ tools toolset to build other active models.
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Discover more of The Magic of Rail...
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December 16, 2025 • 40 mins
Joël and Aji kick off a new season by discussing the best use cases for HTTP basic auth and talking all things security.
The pair ask when and why you would use basic auth over standard HTTPS, it’s pros, cons and vulnerabilities over other forms of security, and provide some advice to help decide on what form of security you could implement on your site.
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Thanks to our sponsors for this episode Judoscale - Autoscale the Right Wa...
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November 25, 2025 • 36 mins
Our Bike Shed trio check back in with one another to follow up on some topics that caught their attention over the course of season 1.
Sally covers her time working with React over the last few months and the challenges it still presents to her workflow, Joël goes back over typescripts and the benefits he’s found when debugging, and the cast reflect on the first season as a whole, what they liked, what went well and what they’d ...
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November 19, 2025 • 38 mins
Joël and Sally compare various note taking styles as they set out to find which ones work best for them.
The pair break down the different ways of formatting their notes and what they’re used for, Sally explains her struggles with note taking in general and the work arounds she’s found to achieve similar results instead, and Joël provides a small update on his book as he examines the different use cases for all his notes.
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Thanks...
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November 11, 2025 • 43 mins
Joël and Sally analyse their job titles as they try to figure out exactly which borrowed labels best define their work at thoughtbot.
Together they break down the components of commonly used titles such as engineer, architect and consultant to see which element reflects their work best, how they would describe their roles at thoughtbot, which industries they’d draw from if they came up with their own titles, and what does Lil Wayn...
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November 4, 2025 • 43 mins
Joël and Sally grab a flashlight to share some scary dev stories with each other to celebrate spooky season.
Sally tales the tale of the missing production database, Joël flees from some corrupted data, and each recall instances of haunted code and heart stopping moments from projects gone wrong.
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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 ...
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October 28, 2025 • 33 mins
Aji gets their priorities straight as they 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 ...
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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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