The Bike Shed

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179: We CAN Just Use a Form! Nov 30, 2018

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On this episode of the Bike Shed, Matt Sumner returns to chat with Chris about their recent adventures. They start by discussing Matt's ongoing work building an open source Ethereum implementation in Elixir and the joys of a test suite guiding your work. From there, Matt asks Chris about Chris's recent trip to speak at GraphQL Summit and his take on the current state of affairs in the GraphQL world (hint, it's good).

Matt and Chris then discussed the progress they've made on simpler form handling in React applications and consider how far they could go with this, and then discuss the recent announcement of React Hooks.

And finally, they discuss the fact that thoughtbot is hiring, and we think you should apply! Head on over to thoughtbot.com/jobs and drop us a line :)

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178: Friday is For Spikes Nov 16, 2018

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On this episode of the Bike Shed Chris is joined by Derek Prior, former
thoughtbotter and previous host of this very podcast. Derek has recently moved
on from thoughtbot to try out a new role as an engineering manager at GitHub.

During their conversation they talk about Derek's experience shipping the
"Suggested Changes" feature on github.com, and the MVP process Derek brought to
the planning and development of the feature. They also touch on the architecture
of GitHub and where services and monoliths fit in the world of larger systems
like GitHub. Lastly they discuss Chris & Derek's respective transitions into
more roles with a bit less code and a bit more management. As usual, this one
has a little bit of everything!

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177: Tricking Computers Into Doing Things Nov 09, 2018

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On this episode of the Bike Shed, Chris is joined by Christina Entcheva, developer from thoughtbot's New York studio who has been a product manager and designer previously in her career, but has since settled in to her role as a developer.

Chris & Christina share a conversation ranging from their shared love of "boring Rails apps", Christina's recent work with headless CMSs like Contentful & Prismic, and a discussion around Rails performance. Throughout the conversation they touch on theme's of keeping a focus on user needs throughout the work of developing applications.

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176: The Machines Will Learn Nov 02, 2018

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On this episode of the Bike Shed Chris is joined by George Brocklehurst, development director in thoughtbot's New York studio. The conversation starts with a discussion around progressive enhancement and the state of the modern web, and then shifts to focus on George's recent explorations of machine learning. This episode is a perfect introduction to the topic of ML, and provides a great summary of why you might want to start working with it and how to go about that.

Frameworks and Tools For Exploring Machine Learning

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175: Tell Me When It's Real Oct 26, 2018

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On this episode of the Bike Shed, Chris is joined by Josh Clayton, thoughtbot's managing director in our Boston studio. Chris and Josh spend the episode discussing the various patterns and trends they see in the world of web development. Specifically, they touch on server side frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Phoenix in the Elixir world. In addition, they discuss a variety of front end trends including the move towards typed languages like ReasonML, TypeScript, Elm, PureScript, and Scala.js, as well as frameworks like React, Ember, Angular, and Vue.js.

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174: I've Watched a Lot of Vim Courses Oct 18, 2018

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In this special crossover episode, Chris is joined by Chad Pytel, Co-founder & CEO of thoughtbot and host of Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, to discuss the content, history, and the process of making Upcase, thoughtbot's online learning platform, FREE.

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173: A Combinatoric Explosion of Nulls Oct 12, 2018

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Joël Quenneville joins Chris to discuss Elm, the strongly typed functional programming language for writing reliable client side web apps. They discuss recent changes from the 0.19 release including reduced bundle size from dead code elimination, the somewhat controversial removal of custom operators. Anecdotally, Joël and team saw a reduction from 31.5K to 16.6K in bundle size going from 0.18 to 0.19 and felt no pain from the custom operators removal, so a big net win for them with this new version.

Along the way Joël and Chris detour into the complexity of managing a project and community like Elm's and discuss Joël‘s recent work with the thoughtbot apprentice program. To round things out, Joël and Chris discuss the power of using a type system like Elm's to constrain the valid states of your application and make your apps more robust and maintainable.

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172: What I Believe About Software Oct 05, 2018

Show notes

Steph Viccari joins Chris for a conversation starting with a discussion of some deployment and orchestration issues Chris was helping out with, followed by some of Steph's recent experiences with JSONB in postgres and the relative trade-offs of unstructured data.

The heart of the conversation revolves around the core processes we use to develop software touching on sprint planning & story points, deadlines, the place for refactoring and code review in the regular cadence of development, and the often lamented retrospective meeting.

Aptible - PAAS with strong security and HIPAA compliance
Heroku Shield
Google hiding www in URLs
Auth0 - Identity management and auth as a service
ActiveStorage - Rails's built in filie attachment framework
Postgres JSON & JSONB Types
The Real Story Behind Story Points
Laurie Young Post on His Use of Story Points
Deadlines
XKCD - And Check Whether the Photo is of a Bird
Headspace meditation

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171: What If We Just Used a Form? Sep 21, 2018

Show notes

Matt Sumner joins Chris for a discussion around Matt's recent adventures with the block chain and Ethereum, as well as tackling the thorny issue of server rendered vs client side apps. They cover a bit of history, a bit of opinion, and some practical considerations to keep in mind when tackling rich client development.

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170: Less Charted Territory Sep 14, 2018

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Chris is joined by Paul Smith to discuss Crystal, a statically-typed and compiled language with a Ruby inspired syntax. Paul has spent much of the past few years exploring Crystal and building a new web framework called Lucky.

Paul's infectious enthusiasm for the Crystal language shines through in this discussion covering some of the unique features of Crystal & Lucky, but there is plenty to enjoy even if you're not specifically interested in Crystal.

With Lucky, Paul has done a great job of taking the best of what has been built in other frameworks and bring it to Crystal, drawing inspiration from Ruby & Rails, Elixir & Phoenix, and even PHP and the Laravel framework. There's something in this episode for everyone!

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