The Bike Shed

Latest Episodes:

259: That's Not How Numbers Work Sep 08, 2020

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On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle the thorny topic of 10X engineers. Do we think they really exist? What characteristics make an individual more effective, and more importantly, what can they do for a team?

To round out the conversation, they chat about rewrites and when they do and don't make sense, Ruby 2.7 keyword argument deprecation warnings, and a listener question revisiting Ruby popularity and what languages would we learn if we couldn't write Ruby anymore.

This episode is brought to you by:

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Ruby 2.7 Deprecates Conversion Of Keyword Arguments
GitHub - Upgrading GitHub to Ruby 2.7
Matz -- New 2.7/3.0 keyword argument pain point
warnings gem
Bike Shed 217 -- we answer "encouraging companies to use Ruby and Rails and asking how we identify ourselves as developers"
Bike Shed 208 -- we answer "what makes Rails successful?"
Bike Shed 234 -- we answer "the complex tradeoffs between craft, preferences, and business needs"
GitHub Survey - Top Languages
Stack Overflow survey - Programming Languages
Google Trends - Dynamic Programming Languages
2020 Ruby on Rails Community Survey Results
Ruby on Rails Podcast - 2020 Ruby on Rails Community Survey with Robby Russell
Rust - Are we web yet?
10x engineer thread from 2019
Alice Goldfuss twitter thread on honesty in teams

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258: Digital Gardeners Sep 01, 2020

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On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss a git-blame feature that supports bypassing less helpful commits. They also revisit a discussion about Dependabot PRs and recent performance adjustments, sharing which strategies worked and which ones didn't. They also discuss the dreaded three-state boolean, designing a system for cacheability, and using Ruby's magic comment to freeze string literals.

This episode is brought to you by:

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257: How Late On a Friday Can You Deploy? Aug 18, 2020

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On this week's episode, Steph & Chris take a deep dive into all things technical debt. How do you know when your code has reached "good enough"? When might we purposefully knowingly take on technical debt? How do we tackle existing technical debt without halting new development? How can we tell high-interest, hair on fire debt from "ehh, it's fine" debt that we can let lie? Tune in to find out!

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256: Rational Pessimism Aug 11, 2020

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On this week's episode, Chris shares his recent adventures of working with a team that prioritizes async-first communication and Steph revisits a previous discussion around the use of web sockets and optimistic user interfaces. They also dive into the classically hard question "should we rewrite the app?" and share survival tips for learning to type on a split keyboard.

This episode is brought to you by:

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255: Aiming for 'Capable' Aug 04, 2020

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On this week's episode, Steph and Chris chat about the relatively new Rails view_component library from GitHub, Steph talks about her work with Storybook as part of extracting and defining a design system, and they chat about the attr_extras project with convenience helpers for ruby & Rails apps. They round out the conversation with some keyboard updates (ErgoDox onramp is steep!) and project rotation notes.

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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254: Listener Mailbag Roundup Rodeo Jul 28, 2020

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On this week's episode, Steph celebrates passing an important test and discovers an API that returns different data than it's provided while Chris asks the important bikeshed question "What is the proper maximum line length?".

They also roundup the latest listener questions and discuss establishing freelancing rates, property-based testing, and time tracking skills that help them manage competing priorities.

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!

Sponsored By:

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253: Find Yourself Through The Art of Podcast Jul 21, 2020

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On this week's episode, Steph and Chris have a brief chat about Snowpack, a new and ultra-speedy bundler in the front-end world, and revisit a conversation around namespacing models in Rails. The conversation then shifts to a discussion of the ins and outs of hosting a podcast and how folks might be able to dive in if they're interested in starting one themselves -- from selecting topics, to the hardware and software they use, to the guiding philosophy in how to discuss technical concepts.

This episode is brought to you by:

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252: I'm a Designer Now Jul 14, 2020

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On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss leveraging the Unix utility sed to search files and remove unnecessary test setup, using Vim's Arglist to create a to-do list for file edits, and budgeting time for fancy command-line scripts. They then take a deep dive into the world of utility-first CSS and TailwindCSS.

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251: Absent-Minded Whistling Jul 07, 2020

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On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss using JSONB to store survey responses and the differences between JSON and JSONB, using (or not using!) exceptions in Ruby and the fail keyword, the pros and cons of namespacing models in Rails to organize features, and a new recommendation for running tests from vim.

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!

Seagull Mic Drop
vim-test plugin for running tests
vim-rspec thoughtbot's plugin for running specs from vim
JSON types in Postgres
Ruby fail keyword
Avdi Grimm and Jim Weirich on exceptions
The Zen of Python
Idris programming language

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250: To Infinity and Beyond Jun 30, 2020

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On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss the importance of using inclusive language, branching into new branch names, and strategies that encourage the use of inclusive terminology. Chris also shares his latest experience with merging two systems that were split apart back into one system, tackling conflicting foreign keys and competing auth libraries. Steph discusses using polling vs web sockets to monitor work being completed in a background job and communicating to the user the various states of success and failure.

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