The Bike Shed

328: Terrible Simplicity

March 1st, 2022  |  52 mins 36 secs

Chris is helping with efforts to introduce security, practices, and policies at Sagewell. Right now, they are refining the usage of 1Password to standardize passwords and secure information. He also shares (what he believes) is a terrible idea around fixing inconsistencies around symbols and strings.

Steph shares an update around factories.

Also, at Sagewell, Chris is helping to build mobile apps, one for iOS and one for Android, and is considering pursuing having them be all native. Good idea? Terrible idea? Chris and Steph riff on that a bit.

327: Estimate Crafting

February 22nd, 2022  |  42 mins 33 secs

Steph joins Chris in trying new things! For her, it's a new email client – the Newton email client – because she really wants to love her inbox. She also talks about implementing a suggestion from Chris on improving CI speed.

Chris continues his search for the perfect to-do list app. (It's not going great.) But he has made hiring progress and is excited to move on to the next step: onboarding.

Together they answer a listener question who asked for advice on crafting project estimates for clients.

326: Dongle Life

February 15th, 2022  |  41 mins 2 secs

Chris is making hiring progress and loves asdf and M1 laptops. Steph is anticipating the arrival of one dongle to rule them all and talks about moving away from having a lot of Bluetooth connections.

Two other big things on Steph's mind are education around factories because they're v important and shared examples and how they can be overused. She and Chris agree that it is better to tell stories in tests instead.

325: Pranting

February 8th, 2022  |  35 mins 12 secs

Steph is super excited about changing her schedule to dedicate a full day to focus on being a great team lead. Chris talks about his continued adventures in the world of hiring.

Together they answer a listener question about what they consider a “large” table in a database and how they review schema changes.

324: Coding Time!

February 1st, 2022  |  41 mins 23 secs

Chris updates us on his new window manager of choice, Moom, and tells us what's good with it. He's also giving yet another task manager a go: OmniFocus. (Sorry Things.) Steph talks about defining test classes in RSpec and readdresses flaky tests to improve CI build time.

Chris is worried about productivity. He's still not coding as much as he'd like to be. Steph lends an ear, and together, they discuss potential ways Chris could gain back a little bit of coding time at work.

323: Doing Things

January 25th, 2022  |  45 mins 43 secs

Steph talks about winter storms and thoughts on name pronunciation features. Chris talks about writing a query to add a new display of data in an admin panel and making a guest appearance on the Svelte Radio Podcast.

Finally, Chris decided that his productivity to-do list system was failing him. So he's on the search now for something new. He asks Steph what she uses and if she's happy with it. How do you, dear Listener, keep track of all your stuff in the world?

322: Toxic Traits

January 18th, 2022  |  35 mins 21 secs

Happy New Year (for real)! Chris and Steph both took some end-of-year time off to rest and recharge.

Steph talks about some books she enjoyed, recipes she tried, and trail-walking adventures with her dog, Utah. Chris' company is now in a good position to actually start hiring within the engineering team. He's excited about that and will probably delve into more around the hiring process in the coming weeks.

Since they aren't really big on New Year's Eve resolutions, Steph and Chris answer a listener question regarding toxic traits inspired by the listener question related to large pull requests and reflect on their own.

321: Leaving Breadcrumbs

January 11th, 2022  |  40 mins 20 secs

Steph tells a cute story about escape artist huskies, and on a technical note, shares a journey in regards to class variables and modules inheritance.

Chris talks about how he's starting to pursue analytics and one of the things that he's struggling with that he's always historically struggled with is the idea of historical data. He's also noticed a lack of formalization of certain things and is working with his team to remedy that.

320: Remember The Fun: 2021 Recap

December 21st, 2021  |  34 mins 2 secs

Steph and Chris recap their favorite things of 2019 and 2020 and share their 2021 list. Happy Holidays, y'all!

319: Wins & Losses

December 14th, 2021  |  35 mins 20 secs

Steph started a new project and shares details about the new tools she's using, including working on a remote dev environment. Chris shares a journey with Lograge and Rails flash messages as he strives to capture user-facing errors.

They also discuss "silencing" flaky tests, using Graphviz to visualize data dependencies, and porting Devise views to use Inertia and Svelte. It's also interesting how different their paths have been this year!

318: Successful Skills with Edward Loveall

December 7th, 2021  |  44 mins 5 secs

Fellow thoughtboter Edward Loveall joins Steph to cohost and talk about alternative frontends and his own that he created: scribe.rip: an alternative frontend to Medium, learning about what it's like to be a manager/non-IC, and helps answer a listener question re: how do you think about empathy in your work?

317: Burn The Ships!

November 30th, 2021  |  41 mins 41 secs

Steph gives an update about RSpec focus and how she often forgets to remove the focus feature from tests. She figured out two solutions: one using Rubocop, and the other from a Twitter user, suggesting using a GitHub gist. She also suggests that if you're one of those people who misses being in an office environment, you check out soundofcolleagues.com for ambient office noise selection.

Chris has been struggling to actually do any coding and is adjusting to doing more product management and shares some strategies that have been helping him.

They answer a listener question about dealing with large pull requests and how it's hard to recognize a good seam to break them up when you are in the thick of one.

316: Constrain and Refactor

November 16th, 2021  |  39 mins 33 secs

Chris finally got his new computer! 🎉 🎉 🎉 He gives his initial review. He's also super excited that GitHub announced a beta for pull requests merge queue, and even more excited that multiple people who listen to this show very kindly pointed that out to him on Twitter!

Steph discovered something that is quite niche, but she's excited to tinker with it more, called CookLang. It's a markup language that's designed for cooking and recipe management so you can store recipes and text files and there's no database required; making it easy to have control over recipes versus storing them in a separate application.

Then they answer a listener question about refactoring murky legacy code.

315: Emotions Are A Pendulum

November 9th, 2021  |  41 mins 23 secs

Steph talks about starting a new project and identifying "focused" tests while Chris shares his latest strategy for managing flaky tests. They also ponder the squishy "it depends" side of software and respond to a listener question about testing all commits in a pull request.

314: Communication, Testing, and Accountability

October 26th, 2021  |  40 mins 55 secs

Chris regains several of his developer merit badges and embarks on a perilous CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) adventure. Steph shares highlights from Plucky, a management training course, including ways we can "click" and "break apart" from our current role, and how to have hard conversations.

They also discuss how software development processes change at different team sizes, processes that break down as teams grow, and processes that are resilient at any team size.

313: Forty-Seven Percent

October 19th, 2021  |  42 mins 5 secs

Steph talks about binging a few Things Worth Learning podcast episodes and particularly enjoyed an episode that featured one of thoughtbot's design directors, Sameera Kapila. Sam shared her expertise about management and inclusion, and Steph shares her favorite parts.

Chris shares the story of a surprising error and the resulting journey through database transactions and Sidekiq that eventually resolved the issue. He also shares some follow up on the broken build and the merging process changes they introduced (spoiler, the process changes have been rolled back).