

The Bike Shed
thoughtbot
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.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Mar 31, 2020 • 28min
238: All the Single Quotes
In this week's episode, Chris shares details about his new greenfield project, implementing static pages with high voltage, opting for just-in-time architecture decisions and working with various admin libraries. Steph discusses various ways to advocate for change across larger engineering teams, recognizing when it's important to push for change vs letting go of strong opinions, and how to gain buy-in from your team.
Enroll in our free online-workshop on going remote Being Human in the Absence of Humans: A Live Q&A for Product Teams
Rock & Roll with Ember.js
suspenders
high voltage
active admin
rails admin
administrate
dependabot
thoughtbot guides
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Mar 17, 2020 • 39min
237: I Love The Squiggles
On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss the pros and cons of memoization, Chris revisits the discussion around the value of react snapshot tests as well as his continued explorations with Inertia.js while Steph updates us on living in a schema-less world, and they round out the conversation with a listener question about pairing tools, setup, and approaches.
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memoization
Jest snapshot tests
RSpec custom matchers
ActiveRecord columns_hash
Inertia.js
Tuple
VSCode Live Share
tmate
Tomato Timer
Effective Pairing Checklist
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Mar 10, 2020 • 44min
236: What's GNU With You?
On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss recent challenges associated with upgrading React Router and uploading files to Amazon S3. Steph also shares her latest reading adventure in cybersecurity and Chris reflects on his time at thoughtbot, how his approach to web development has shifted over the past seven years, and what he plans to do next.
The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll
GNU
UNIX
POSIX
PAX
React Router
Enzyme
React Testing Library
Amazon S3
FTP
Inertia.js
New Pepperjuice Track!
*Correction - The Cuckoo's Egg helped pioneer cybersecurity techniquesSupport The Bike Shed

Mar 3, 2020 • 44min
235: Take a Deep Breath
On this week's episode, Steph and Chris dig into their shared love of refactoring. How do they think about it, have they ever reverted a refactor, thoughts on deferred refactoring, and more.
They also discuss some positive team habits, snapshot testing, the importance of keeping your testing as close to production as possible, and finally, Chris shares some big personal news.
Snapshot tests
styled-components
rollup
react-testing-library
"Don't worry about this tech debt, we'll clean it up next sprint."
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Feb 25, 2020 • 34min
234: No More Weird Stuff
On this week's episode, Chris and Steph respond to a listener question about the complex tradeoffs between craft, preferences, and business needs. They also revisit Steph's recent work with mirage factories, Chris's struggles with test failures, and discuss Steph's recent use of the acts_as_paranoid gem.
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Mirage.js
Creating Ember Data models on the client with Mirage
FactoryBot
Sam Selikoff
Babel
Browserlist
acts_as_paranoid
Default scopes in Rails
Braintree hosted fields
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Feb 18, 2020 • 43min
233: Software Development in Ancient Rome (Joël Quenneville)
On this week's episode, Steph is joined by Joël Quenneville. It's the season for CFPs (call for proposals) and Joël shares insights about his past conference talk submissions, both the accepted and rejected. They also discuss writing habits that help increase blogpost frequency and helping teams upgrade their Rails application.
Joël's "Rolling Random Romans" talk
Steph's "Building Compliant Health Tech Products" Workshop
Joël's "Working with Maybe" talk
Joël and Rachel's "Beyond the Whiteboard" talk
elm-conf
Joël's "Conference talk proposal examples"
Sarah Mei "What Your Conference Proposal Is Missing"
Noel Rappin's "What I Learned from Reading 429 Conference Proposals"
Supercharge your product with a Code Audit
Addressing technical debt
Strong parameters gem
Blogposts by Joël
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Feb 11, 2020 • 36min
232: I'm Not Allowed to Play With Other Shells
On this week's episode, Chris and Steph celebrate the new Bike Shed website and logo!
Steph finds a new way to optimize her keyboard happiness and Chris dabbles with Zsh auto-suggestions. They also explore the team and technical trade-offs in the pursuit of clean code and respond to a listener question about building products that meet strict security policies.
This episode is brought to you by Clubhouse. Click through to get 2 free months on any paid plan.
Karabiner-Elements
Oh My Zsh
Fish shell
zsh-autosuggestions
Steve Losh - Shift Key Training Wheels
Learn Vimscript the Hard Way
Grammarly
Dan Abramov - Goodbye, Clean Code
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin
99 Bottles of OOP
Steph's "Building Compliant Health Tech Products" Workshop
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Feb 4, 2020 • 32min
231: Fun and Useful
On this week's episode, Steph shares more of her Ember adventures, specifically sharing some of her work with the Mirage API mocking and prototyping library, and her search for factories and more ergonomic data in tests.
Chris shares some struggles he's had recently with automation and tooling around deployment and releasing packages, and they discuss the inherent trade-offs that we have to consider when automating anything.
Lastly they touch on Twitter's alt text accessibility features, and answer a listener question about using React without having an API, and instead just using it as a more dynamic view layer.
Mirage.js
RSpec instance doubles
Semantic release
Heroku Review Apps
Netlify pull request builds
Twitter alt text accessibility
Basecamp 3 for iOS: Hybrid Architecture
Inertia.js
Vue.js
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Jan 28, 2020 • 42min
230: The Broken Road
On this week's episode, Chris and Steph revisit the long-lived feature branch Chris has been working on and chat about adventures with Yalc. They also dive into the common questions and concerns associated with coding bootcamps, thoughtbot's exciting new partnership with Resilient Coders, and what it would be like to "start over".
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yalc
thoughtbot + Resilient Coders
Bless the Broken Road
Railscasts
Destroy All Software
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Jan 21, 2020 • 53min
229: Nothing but Positive Fire
On this week's episode, Steph and Chris catch up in their first recording of 2020. They discuss git workflows and the surprisingly strong opinions often associated with them, testing at all levels of your application, Steph gives a quick summary of her Ember adventures, and they round out the discussion with some new years systems building and Star Wars reviews.
This episode is brought to you by Clubhouse. Click through to get 2 free months on any paid plan.
Ember Documentation
JSON Schema
Pretender
Apollo GraphQL
React Testing Library
Write good commit messages by blaming others (German's blog post)
Prettier
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