The Bike Shed

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. Netlify Middleman Pragmatic Programmer Apollo CLI - codegen "Duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction" - Sandi Metz German's Post on Writing a Good Commit Message German's Post on Git Blame Elixir first class documentation doctag Doctest in elixir Doctest in python Support The Bike Shed

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. Product Design Sprint Design Sprint - 5 Phase Breakdown Swift GraphQL GraphQL Ruby Pro Pundit CanCanCan Scala Eslint Typescript Sangria GraphQL Play Web Framework Http4s Doobie Postgres enums Administrate All the Little Things by Sandi Metz "Squint Test" Support The Bike Shed

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). factory_bot factory_bot_rails How to be an open source gardener Mystery Guest Let's Not "What's the most painful thing you've ever had to do with RSpec?" Standard - Ruby style guide, linter, and formatter Prettier - opinionated code formatter Rufo Speed Up Tests by Selectively Avoiding Factory Girl Thank you to One Month for sponsoring this episode.Support The Bike Shed

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. Ruby Rouges Podcast Confident Code Avdi's Keep Ruby Weird Keynote Alan Kay - Creator of Object Oriented Programming Actor Model Kafka Ruby Tapas - Avdi's Weekly Ruby Screencast Series Greater Than Code Podcast Mastering the Object Oriented Mindset Pair Program With Me Avdi - Ruby Duck Sessions Avdi and Jess stumble through modern web development Glitch TypeScript Australian Disaster Resilience Conference Chaos Monkey from Netflix avdi.codes Thank you to One Month for sponsoring this episode.Support The Bike Shed

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. chruby asdf Matz replies to post around Ruby moving slowly TypeScript Elm TypeScript Growing Popularity on State of JS 2018 JSON Web Tokens (JTW) RSA Public Key Cryptography OAuth RabbitMQ ElasitcSearch Postgres Full Text Search Kafka Event Sourcing Details about the event-stream incident Heartbleed Transcendence and the Future of React with Laurie Voss Thank you to One Month for sponsoring this episode.Support The Bike Shed

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". Giant Robots Art of Product Podcast Tuple App WebRTC Tuple - Pair Programming Guide Infamous Hacker News Comment about the initial version Dropbox Let's Encrypt Red Hat - Enterprise Linux fzf - generic fuzzy finder VS Code Mastering the Vim Language @r00k - Ben on twitter Thank you to One Month for sponsoring this episode.Support The Bike Shed

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 Support The Bike Shed

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. Kafka Redux Flink Spark Postgres Write-Ahead Log "Turning the database inside out with Apache Samza" by Martin Kleppmann Big Data or Pokemon Datomic RabbitMQ AMQP Event Sourcing Python typing — Support for type hints Sorbet - gradual type annotations for Ruby from Strip Support The Bike Shed

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? jQuery Khan Academy Removing jQuery from GitHub.com frontend React hooks Webpack Aphrodite styling library from Khan Academy Event Stream NPM Package Security Issue The GraphQL Guide Sangria GraphQL Framework in Scala John's personal site John on twitter Support The Bike Shed

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 :) Mana - ethereum Heroku SSH Erlang OTP GraphQL Summit 2018 GraphQL Foundation Apollo GraphQL Prisma Graph.cool Falcor (Netflix GraphQL-like library) JSON Graph Lee Byron Nick Schrock Shopify GraphQL Design Tutorial Chris Toomey: React & GraphQL – Bringing Simplicity to Client Side Development video CodeSandbox Proof of Concept - Simple React Form Handling Formik & Yup React -- Introducing Hooks React Hooks RFC (now merged) Support The Bike Shed