The Bike Shed

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).

312: Spooky Stories

October 12th, 2021  |  38 mins 50 secs

Chris evaluates the pros and cons between using Sidekiq or Active Job with Sidekiq. He sees exceptions everywhere.

Steph talks about an SSL error that she encountered recently. It's officially spooky season, y'all!

311: Marketing Matters

October 5th, 2021  |  37 mins 37 secs

Longtime listener and friend of the show, Gio Lodi, released a book y'all should check out and Chris and Steph ruminate on a listener question about tension around marketing in open-source.

310: Schedule Shut Down, Complete

September 28th, 2021  |  39 mins 16 secs

Chris talks feature flags featuring Flipper (Say that 3x fast!), and Steph talks reducing stress by a) having a work shutdown ritual and b) the fact that thoughtbot is experimenting with half-day Fridays. (Fri-yay?)

309: Naming the Change

September 21st, 2021  |  35 mins 28 secs

Steph talks about a new GitHub feature and Twitter account (@RubyCards) she's really excited about and Chris talks about his new job as a CTO of a startup and shifting away from writing code regularly.

308: That’s Picante

September 14th, 2021  |  48 mins 5 secs

You know what really grinds Chris' gears? (Spoiler Alert: It's Single-Page Applications.)

Steph needs some consulting help. So much to do, so little time.

307: Walking Contradictions

September 7th, 2021  |  36 mins 56 secs

On this episode, Chris talks about testing external services and dissects a tweet on refinements for Result. Steph talks about thoughbot's recent improvement to their feature flag system.

306: If You Want To Go Far, Go Together

August 31st, 2021  |  45 mins 14 secs

In this episode, Steph and Chris talk about things they've changed their minds about over the course of their careers as software developers. Steph talks about as it turns out, arm chair rests are good, feature flags and comments are also good, she's changed her mind about how teams structure the work that each person is doing at once, and believes strongly in representation in the field.

Chris is not a fan up upgrading his operating system and when he first started out, he gravitated towards learning dynamic languages, and since then, much prefers functional languages, static typing or more broadly, static analysis. He also no longer believes in the 10x engineer, and also very much believes that URLs matter on the internet. So basically, don't call them single-page applications; call them client-side applications instead!

305: Burnout & Bugs

August 17th, 2021  |  50 mins 2 secs

This week Chris talks about Bifunctor optics and introduces an app he's been liking recently called CleanShot X, which is a replacement for the built-in screenshot utilities on OSX.

Steph talks about her experience using New Relic Browser Stats to troubleshoot a slow page and burnout. Who's feeling it? (Raise your hand.) How do we identify it? What do we do about it?

304: MEGA Crossover Episode (The Bike Shed x Rails with Jason x Remote Ruby x Ruby on Rails Podcast)

August 11th, 2021  |  34 mins 38 secs

This is the sweeps week episode, the epic crossover episode, the mega episode! We have a very special episode as Chris, and Steph teamed up with the hosts of three other podcasts to bring you one giant, mega Ruby episode!

In this episode, you'll hear from the hosts of Remote Ruby, Rails with Jason, and Brittany Martin, the host of the Ruby on Rails podcast. They cover the origins of their shows, their experiences as hosts, and why podcasting is so important in keeping the Ruby community thriving.

303: Dear Mr. Grumpy Goose

August 3rd, 2021  |  45 mins 45 secs

Chris gives a DB sessions update and talks bifunctors & command objects. Steph shares the coolness of a gem she's been using called after_party, and excitedly gushes about her new laptop. (Chris is hoping to hold off on replacing his until the end of the year and then they can compare!)

The two then answer a listener question on retrospectives and how they've seen productive ones run, while giving some of their own helpful opinions on dos and don'ts. They're talking to you, Grumpy Goose!

302: Observability with Charity Majors

July 27th, 2021  |  38 mins 53 secs

Tune in as Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, an observability platform, Charity Majors joins Chris to drop some knowlege bombs such as:

• Thinking of observability as being about the unknown unknowns: Allowing for high cardinality, high dimensionality, ad hoc queries at any point in time.
• Comparing instrumentation to a muscle: It's a habit that needs to be developed and fostered.
• Sincere continuous deployment: 15 minutes or bust.

And bunches more, since y'all know you hear her name come up at least once during every other episode!

301: Ants in the Cookie Store

July 20th, 2021  |  42 mins 17 secs

What do you get when you mix a worm and a hammerhead shark? Also ants. Steph made some cool new discoveries in bug-land. She also talks about deploys versus releases and how her and her team has changed their deploy structure. Two words: feature flags.

Chris talks about cookies: cookie sessions, cookie payloads, cookie footprints, cookie storing. Mmm cookies! The convo wraps up with lamenting over truthiness in code. Truthy or falsy? What's your call?

300: Mozzarella Sticks & Knowledge Silos

July 13th, 2021  |  45 mins 8 secs

The big "Three Oh Oh!" What a milestone for this podcast! Aside from celebrating that the show has made it this far, Chris gives some followup on some Inertia.js issues he had been having, and talks about open source licenses and legality and testing against external APIs. Steph has thoughts on mozzarella sticks and what makes good ones; particularly the cheese to bread ratio...

They then, together, answer a listener question re: knowledge silos:

Jan asked, "Our team (3 pairs) is currently working on two different projects due to that fact we are creating information silos. Now we are looking into ways how we can minimize those information silos. Do you have any ideas how we could achieve this?" With switching pairs they are unsure about it as it can be difficult for new pairs to get up to speed.

299: Is Agile Over?

July 6th, 2021  |  46 mins 15 secs

Let's talk about Agile! What is it, what do we like, we do we not like?

In this episode, Steph and Chris discuss:

• Broadly, are they fans?
• What makes this practice work well?
• What makes this practice work poorly?

And also, hit specific topics and practices like Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming.