The Bike Shed

About the show

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.

The Bike Shed on social media

Episodes

  • 71: It's a Total Hack

    July 13th, 2016  |  42 mins 25 secs

    Inspired by Nickolas Means’ fantastic RailsConf keynote, we discuss the corollaries between Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works projects and our software development projects.

  • 70: Make Small Things (Sandi Metz)

    July 6th, 2016  |  1 hr 4 mins

    Sandi Metz joins us live from RailsConf to talk about the rules, the trouble with naming things, making the right kinds of errors, and conference speaking.

    A big thanks to everyone who came out to our live show! A video version of this episode is available on the thoughtbot YouTube Page.

  • 69: No More Drills

    June 29th, 2016  |  40 mins 31 secs

    We discuss thoughtbot's increasing use of Elixir and Phoenix and what that means for our Rails work before diving into what's new in Elixir 1.3 and Ecto 2.0.

  • 68: Mostly Undocumented

    June 22nd, 2016  |  33 mins 9 secs

    Sean runs through a Rails bug that sits at the intersection of several magical and confusing Rails features.

  • 67: Longtime Listener, First Time Caller (Rafael Franca)

    June 15th, 2016  |  39 mins 30 secs

    Leading Rails contributor Rafael Franca joins us from RailsConf to talk about taking over Sprockets, the future of the asset pipeline in Rails, managing Rails dependencies, and the hard work of software maintenance.

    Also, Sean said you'd all "definitely" have the final build of Rails 5 by now. Whoops!

  • 66: Make Ruby Scripting Great Again (Terence Lee)

    June 8th, 2016  |  39 mins 31 secs

    We talk with Terence Lee of Heroku, Bundler, and mruby-cli fame about Apache Kafka and the future of mruby scripting.

  • 65: Free as in Puppy (Katrina Owen)

    May 25th, 2016  |  45 mins 52 secs

    While at RailsConf, we talk with Katrina Owen about finding metaphors for software development, the successes and mistakes of Exercism.io, and the benefits of providing code reviews.

  • 64: Open Mic SF

    May 18th, 2016  |  55 mins 11 secs

    Open Mic is back by popular demand, this time in San Francisco. We hear from developers in thoughtbot's San Francisco office about their recent investment time projects.

  • 63: Types Are Only Good If You Use Them

    May 11th, 2016  |  38 mins 16 secs

    Derek and Sean discuss some recent issues with exciting language features like pattern matching, macros, and static types.

  • 62: Shipping is the Fastest Way to Get Somewhere

    May 4th, 2016  |  34 mins 16 secs

    Sean celebrates Diesel reaching "faster than a SQL string" status before we chat about Rails 5 blockers and the clarity of focus and priorities that only shipping can bring.

  • 61: I'm Not Telling You My Birthday

    April 27th, 2016  |  31 mins 4 secs

    "Send me an email every year for my birthday" is an easy thing for a human to understand but it can be deceptively tricky to do with computers. Also tricky for (some) computers: SELECT * FROM. Wait... what?

  • 60: Remote Control (Katherine Fellows)

    April 20th, 2016  |  38 mins 2 secs

    KF (Katherine Fellows) joins the show to chat about successful BridgeFoundry events and creating environments where remote developers, junior and otherwise, can thrive.

  • 59: I Wish They Wouldn't Do That

    April 13th, 2016  |  40 mins 59 secs

    Derek and Sean discuss the left-pad saga, how other programming communities are reacting to it, and what you should learn from it as a library or application author.

  • 58: Nobody Gets Fired For Buying IBM

    April 6th, 2016  |  45 mins 36 secs

    Should you rewrite or refactor? What should you consider as you weigh this decision and what exactly constitutes a rewrite anyway?

  • 57: Mutability Ruins the Whole Party (José Valim)

    March 30th, 2016  |  55 mins 50 secs

    We chat with José Valim about bringing light to Elixir's dark corners, the design goals of Ecto, and the future of Elixir, Ecto, and Phoenix.

  • 56: Most People Aren't Building Trello

    March 23rd, 2016  |  38 mins 53 secs

    Is ActiveRecord reinventing Sequel? If it is, does it matter? Derek and Sean discuss that and whether maybe we could all stand to tone down the JavaScript.