The Bike Shed

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269: Things are Knowable (Gary Bernhardt) Nov 17, 2020

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Steph's taking a quick break this week, but while she's away, Chris is joined by special guest Gary Bernhardt. Gary is the creator of Destroy All Software screencasts as well as his more recent venture, Execute Program. Between Execute Program, his screencasts, conference talks, and more Gary has consistently provided some of the highest quality and most impactful educational content around building great software and has been a huge inspiration to the hosts of this show.

In the episode, Chris and Gary discuss Gary's recent work with TypeScript and how it compares with Gary's focus on testing, they revisit some of Gary's ideas around software architecture and how they map to his current work, Gary's thoughts around the value of knowing our tools deeply, and the trade-offs between careful upfront design and shipping early and often.

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268: Getting Your First-Through-N Jobs Nov 10, 2020

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On this week's episode, Steph discusses the value of conducting student research when creating course content and Chris revisits a recent architecture decision to use Svelt and Inertia. They also explore the challenges developers face in acquiring their first job and share insights for those looking for their next big role.

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267: Shiny New Things Nov 03, 2020

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On this week's episode, Steph describes her unique new project where they're building and presenting a training course around RSpec, testing, and TDD specific to an organization's codebase. Chris then runs some architecture choices by Steph to discuss a collection of new technologies he's considering, and more generally how we think about our experimentation budget.

This episode is brought to you by:

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266: Spring is My Least Favorite Season Oct 27, 2020

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On this week's episode, Chris and Steph share mixed-feelings about Spring preloader and how to use Spring just for tests. They also dive into troubleshooting an OpenSSL error, Postgres generated columns, and creating moments of contentment.

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265: There Are No Free Lunches Oct 20, 2020

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On this week's episode, Steph and Chris chat about database transactions and job queues, building static sites with GatsbyJS and NetlifyCMS, the performance impacts of front end frameworks and static content, and lastly they catch up on Hacktoberfest and the complexities of encouraging and supporting work in open source.

This episode is brought to you by:

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264: How to Win Friends and Influence Processes Oct 13, 2020

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On this week's episode Steph and Chris discuss the ins and outs of joining teams, building trust, and working together to improve processes and communication. They also touch on some lesser used features of bundler, and revisit a discussion around Rails maintenance periods thanks to some listener feedback.

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263: Keeping The Night Brain At Bay (Dave Rupert) Oct 06, 2020

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Steph's taking a quick break this week, but in her absence, Chris is joined by Dave Rupert. Dave is the lead developer at Paravel, co-host of the Shop Talk Show podcast, creator of The Accessibility Project, and an all-around prolific and thoughtful maker of digital things.

Chris and Dave chat about creating and sharing content like podcasts and blogs and how to get past your inner editor. They discuss the web platform and accessibility, and finally, they round out the conversation with a chat about design systems as an intersection between design and development.

This episode is brought to you by:

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262: Good Idea, Terrible Idea? Sep 29, 2020

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On this week's episode, Chris introduces a new segment called "Good Idea, Terrible Idea?" as he considers introducing a read-only mode to avoid interrupting users during scheduled downtime. Steph has started a new project and explores the idea of merging separate, but similar, applications into one codebase.

They also dive into micro-service environments to discuss the difficulties of integration testing and potential strategies.

This episode is brought to you by:

ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy
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261: A Jenga Tower of Lets and Context Sep 22, 2020

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On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle a listener question around composition over inheritance, especially in the context of Rails which makes regular use of inheritance. Dependency injection, OOP vs FP, frameworks vs app code -- they hit it all!

They also chat about burnout and how they've dealt with it, using jq to investigate differences between json responses, refactoring tests and using let, and Steph shares her recent learnings about graphviz.

This episode is brought to you by:

ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy
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Getting Back to Work by Carl Reyes
"If you're feeling down lately, here's a quick test to figure out why" tweet
jq (command-line JSON processor)
lets not
graphviz
Composition over Inheritance on Upcase
React hooks, composition

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260: N+1s For Days Sep 15, 2020

Show notes

On this week's episode, Chris shares a tale of performance improvements and a recent discussion about replacing a REST API with GraphQL. Steph dives into migrating a database column to restrict input and dropping database columns safely. They also discuss when to abstract code (a topic that surprisingly, they may not agree on) and running "Unused" to identify dead code.

This episode is brought to you by:

ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy
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