The Bike Shed

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**The Bike Shed**

On The Bike Shed, hosts Joël Quenneville, Sally Hall, and Aji Slater discuss development experiences and challenges at thoughtbot with Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and whatever else is drawing their attention, admiration, or ire this week.

Latest Episodes:

9: Monorails, For the Kids Mar 06, 2015

Show notes

Sean and Derek discuss Monoliths, Service Oriented Architecture, and the new Adapter Specific Type Registry in Rails 5.

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8: Attributes API, Relation#or, Paid Open Source Feb 20, 2015

Show notes

Derek and Sean discuss what the Attributes API enables, the addition of Relation#or and paid open source.

Sean's attributes API is "finished"
Attributes API documentation
PostGIS ActiveRecord Adapter
composed_of
Yehuda's RailsConf Keynote on the power of shared abstractions.
Ernie Miller's RailsConf talk on the consequences of Rails' abstractions.
load_schema makes sense now.
DelegateClass
Steve Klabnik tweets about companies not giving back significantly to Ruby open source
Sean speeds up &block on MRI and jRuby

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7: At the Car Wash Jan 30, 2015

Show notes

Derek and Sean talk trade schools, sneaky bugs, bad method names, before_filters, and the Superbowl.

Turing School and Metis trade schools.
"Car Wash" by Rose Royce
Sean introduces accessed_fields to the ActiveRecord Attributes API.
Peek for insights into your rails app.
Bullet for hunting down N+1 queries and unused eager loading.
What does Faraday middleware look like?
The Clearance redirect loop Derek introduced and fixed.
before filter and its friends have been deprecated in Rails 5.0
The various ways people set instance variables in Rails controllers.
read_attribute_before_typecast
problems from _before_type_cast
dirty checking causes errors
RangeError s are hard (Sean's solution to the test placement problem was to not commit the test)

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6: Shh! Library Under Maintenance Jan 16, 2015

Show notes

Sean and Derek discuss thoughtful deprecations, backwards compatibility, and other joys of library maintenance.

Trailblazer
Clearance
Ember 2.0 - Stability without Stagnation
Ruby 2.2 on Rails 3.2. Now merged, but unreleased.
The original removal of ARel type casting
Narrowing the scope - a less impactful ARel deprecation
Rails changes to accompany the ARel API changes.
An example of an issue these refactorings solve.

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5: Rails is Not Your Architecture Dec 31, 2014

Show notes

Derek and Sean discuss various ways of taking the Rails out of your Ruby on Rails application, what folder to put your files in, and the difficulties and rewards of learning new programming languages.

Rails Does Not Define Your Application Architecture
What the hell is a service object?
Fuzzy file finding with ctrl-p
Query Objects
Uncle Bob's Clean Architecture
Form Objects
Scala Play forms
Haskell Yesod Forms
But Pointfree Has More Points!

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4: Put Everything on the Front End Dec 12, 2014

Show notes

Derek and Sean discuss hunting Rails performance regressions and techniques for improving performance in your web applications.

Speeding Up Rails 4.2
StackProf
Flame Graphs
5 Reasons to Use Protocol Buffers Instead of JSON For Your Next Service
Key Frames
Binary Search Algorithm
Writing Fast Ruby from Erik Micahels-Ober
The select and pluck methods
Fragment Caching
Exposing CSRF token refresh in the jQuery UJS public API.
Postgres Explain Plans
Implementing Multi-Table Full Text Search with Postgres in Rails
Creating database views in Rails with Scenic
Tweet us @_bikeshed or send us email

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3: Flipping the Script Nov 28, 2014

Show notes

Sean and Derek take a fresh look at the tradeoffs in writing CoffeeScript and whether we should be using an ES6 transpiler instead.

destructiring assignment in JavaScript
function currying in CoffeeScript
The existential operator in CoffeeScript
Stockholm syndrome
CoffeeScript writes better JavaScript than you
ES5 Compatibility Chart: When can I use map, reduce and forEach?
Underscore.js removes fallbacks to native ES5 array functions
Safari's LLVM-optimized FTL JIT Compiler
ES6 Transpilers traceur and ESNext
ES6 Features
A plethora of JavaScript build tools
ES5 strict mode
Sprockets road map for source maps support

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2: Rails 4.2 Nov 17, 2014

Show notes

Derek and Sean discuss Sean's commit access to Rails, what's coming in Rails 4.2, and how to go about making Rails code better.

Ylan Segal wrote us to raise a clarification on one of Sandi's rules discussed in episode #1.
Ernie Miller's RailsConf Talk
The Rails 4.2 release notes.
Sean's work on the attributes API.
Aaron Patterson explains Adequate Record
Aaron Patterson discusses adequate record, rails, and other topics on Giant Robots #100.
Active Job
Global Id
Web Console
Foreigner and Immigrant are a good foreign key combination today with Foreigner subsumed by 4.2.
transform_values
Responders
Derek's unDRY Rails Commit.
Thanks to Rachel Cope and Reda Lemeden for our great artwork.