The Bike Shed

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189: It's Gonna Work, Definitely, No Problems Whatsoever Mar 01, 2019

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On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Steph Viccari to chat about Steph's recent experience working on the Hubspot API ruby wrapper as a client project. They discuss strategies for testing third-party APIs, focusing on VCR and some of the benefits and trade-offs inherent to that style of API testing. Following that they chat about using exceptions for control flow, digging into why this seems to be a common pattern in Ruby API wrappers, what the alternatives are, and even a quick tour to React-land where this pattern is being used for interesting effect.

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188: A Function by Any Other Name Feb 22, 2019

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On this week's episode, Chris is joined by German Velasco for a conversation
that fully lives up to the name of the show with plenty of opinions and
impressively deep dives on topics that folks outside the world of programming
would never think could warrant this much discussion.

How much duplication should we have? Is there such a thing as too DRY? Is there
ever a need for code comments, really? Lest you worry that Chris & German spend
the whole episode just volleying opinions, have no fear: the episode is balanced
out with plenty of pointed suggestions and useful anecdotes to make sure
everyone will enjoy it.

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187: Convincing People Not to Build Software Feb 15, 2019

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On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Matt Sumner, development director in our Boston Studio. Chris & Matt start with a quick update on Matt's crypto adventures, and then transition to the core of the conversation as Matt describes the past few weeks of starting a new project and all the decisions that come with that.

The project kicked off with a product design sprint to help determine the initial direction for MVP. From there, Matt describes some of the thinking that went into the technology choices for the app, as well as describing his experience thus far working in a novel ecosystem for him with Scala & GraphQL.

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186: Let's Duplicate Stuff Feb 01, 2019

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On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Daniel Colson, developer in our New York studio and current maintainer of all things FactoryBot. Chris & Daniel discuss Daniel's work as maintainer of one of thoughtbot's most popular open source projects and some of the parallels to thoughtbot's consulting work. They then discuss a bit more on the specifics of FactoryBot and what's in store for upcoming versions.

To round out the conversation Daniel and Chris also dig into some of the testing related best practices and patterns common to thoughtbot projects, linting and formatting tools, and even dip into the age old discussion around single quotes vs double quotes (just a tiny bit).

Thank you to One Month for sponsoring this episode.

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185: The Transactional Fallacy (Avdi Grimm) Jan 25, 2019

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On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Ruby Hero Avdi Grimm. They discuss Avdi's history of guiding the Ruby and broader programming communities, his thoughts about where we're at with object-oriented programming, and where he's looking to next for our industry.

This conversation touches on a variety of topics both technical and personal. Avdi shares some of his thinking around where we've failed with our approaches to object-oriented programming and viewing the world as transactional, and instead offers ideas around modeling our systems as processes.

Avdi & Chris also chat about some of Avdi's my recent explorations into the world of JavaScript & React, as well as the growing "resilience engineering" mindset.

Thank you to One Month for sponsoring this episode.

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184: Fun, Interesting, and I Wouldn't Recommend It Jan 18, 2019

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On this week's episode, Chris is joined by Eebs Kobeissi, a developer in our Boston studio, for a discussion encompassing the front end, back end, and everything in between. They start by discussing Eebs' recent work with both Elm & TypeScript, and the relative merits of these two strongly typed languages for the front end. From there they move on to a discussion around the different communities and rates of change in each.

Shifting gears, Chris then asks Eebs about his experience with more distributed systems and technologies like JSON Web Tokens, ElasitcSearch, RabbitMQ, Kafka, and more.

They round out the conversation with a discussion around some recent security discussions in package managers and their collective surprise that things work at all.

Thank you to One Month for sponsoring this episode.

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183: Former Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots (Ben Orenstein) Jan 11, 2019

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On this episode of the Bike Shed, Chris is joined by former thoughtbotter Ben Orenstein. Ben & team are currently feverishly working towards launching Tuple.app, an app for remote pair programming. The conversation covers the unique technical challenges inherent to building this sort of app (WebRTC & firewalls, oh my), as well as a discussion around the merits and value of pair programming. To round out the conversation, Ben checks in on whether Chris is still "nerding out hard on Vim".

Thank you to One Month for sponsoring this episode.

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182: What's it in the Service Of? Jan 04, 2019

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Chris is joined by Eric Bailey, thoughtbot designer and champion for all things accessibility on the web. Chris & Eric chat about how Eric approaches accessibility and works to include it throughout the design process, design systems, functional CSS, CSS in JS, and more.

Eric's recent accessibility talk
Shifting Left
Vimium
Salesforce Lightning Design System
Shadow DOM
Introducing the CSS Cascade
The element
Heydon Pickering - Reluctant Gatekeeping: The Problem With Full Stack
Nicole Sulivan - Object Oriented CSS
CSS in JS
BEM CSS Methodology
Tachyons
Tailwind CSS
Sass Lang
shame.css
Reach.tech - Accessible foundation for React component design system
JAWS Screen Reader
ericwbailey.design

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181: Strong Types and a Functional Flair Dec 14, 2018

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On this episode of the Bike Shed, Chris is joined by thoughtbot CTO Joe Ferris. Chris & Joe start by talking about all things data. More and more we're building applications that need to manage medium to large data sets, combining data from multiple sources, and our approaches and frameworks need to evolve to match these needs. Joe provides the low down on how this can shape the way we build our applications.

As part of the discussion around data they dig into the idea of event logs, most notably discussing Apache Kafka and it's unique approach to capturing state by storing an immutable event log, and the resulting architecture that falls out of this.

Lastly they chat about the Scala language both in relation to data and streaming applications, but also more generally as an example of an approachable yet powerful strongly typed language.

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180: A Citizen of the Internet (John Resig) Dec 07, 2018

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On this episode of the Bike Shed, we're thrilled to welcome special guest John Resig, creator of jQuery and front-end architect at Khan Academy. The conversation begins with a discussion around John's work on jQuery, one of the most influential libraries in the history of the web. From there the discussion shifts to John's role as front-end architect at Khan Academy and how he balances feature development and paying down tech debt or exploring new technologies.

John and Chris then discuss the rate of change of front-end technologies, and John provides wonderfully pragmatic guidance distinguishing the rate of innovation from the perceived needed rate of adoption. The conversation also ventures into discussions around the trade-offs involved in open sourcing internal projects. Lastly, they touch briefly on the topic of GraphQL based on John's work at Kahn Academy, as well as his in-progress book, The GraphQL Guide.

A little bit of everything with one of the most influential web developers of
the past 15 years. What more could you ask for?

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