The Bike Shed

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! Suggested Changes feature GitHub Universe GitHub Actions Project Papercuts at GitHub Are Services the New Rewrite Bike Shed Episode GitHub Scientist Be Plucky Manager Training Support The Bike Shed

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. Contentful Prismic Essential Scala book Nate Berkopec The Complete Guide to Rails Performance Mark/Compact GC in MRI - Aaron Patterson Benchmark module in Ruby Postgres Table Partitioning Getting Real book by Basecamp It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work Upcase is now Free! Testing Interaction with 3rd-party APIs on Upcase Composition Over Inheritance on Upcase Support The Bike Shed

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. Does Progressive Enhancement Have a Place in Today's Web? Vue.js Electron React Native React Native for Desktop Frameworks and Tools For Exploring Machine Learning NumPy SciPy Jupyter Notebook Pandas scikit-learn Natural Language Toolkit (NLKT) spaCy gensim Getting Started with Machine Learning: Intro to Machine Learning Workshop What is Machine Learning? Named Entity Recognition Recommending blog posts with machine learning Support The Bike Shed

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. Bike Shed 20 w/ Josh Clayton: Intentionally Excruciatingly Painful Google Lighthouse Beyond React 16 by Dan Abramov - JSConf Iceland AirBnB Moving Away from React Native Josh Steiner - Elm native UI in production Announcing Purple Train ReasonML Elm TypeScript PureScript Scala.js Software disenchantment blog post 166: Are Services the New Rewrite? Apollo Client Vue.js Thoughtworks Technology Radar Parcel Bundler Terser javascript minifier Rufo - Ruby autoformatter Support The Bike Shed

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. Giant Robots Podcast Upcase Test Driven Rails Mastering Git Fundamentals of TDD SOA on The Bike Shed Onramp to Vim thoughtbot Purpose Statement Chad on Twitter Support The Bike Shed

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. Elm - A delightful language for reliable webapps. Elm 0.19 Release Notes Webpacker Elm 0.19 - Dead Code Elimination Scala.js The reasoning behind removing user-defined operators Minesweeper for JavaScript Equality WebAssembly Linus Torvalds - "I am going to take time off and get some assistance..." Also Linus, on the importance of "trivial patches" as entry points for new kernal developers Derek Prior - Implementing a Strong Code-Review Culture thoughtbot code review guidelines thoughtbot apprentice program How Elm Slays a UI Antipattern "Making Impossible States Impossible" talk by Richard Feldman "Working with Maybe" talk by Joël Quenneville "Confident Code" talk by Avdi Grimm "Nothing is Something" talk by Sandi Metz The Zen of Python Breakable Toys Joel’s many posts on the Giant Robots blog Stop Coding and Start Drawing Support The Bike Shed

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 Support The Bike Shed

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. Ethereum Ethereum Proof of Stake Browser History APIs including pushState SOAP Ember's heroic focus on the URL & Routes GraphQL TypeScript Vimium Boston React Conference Support The Bike Shed

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! Crystal If You Gaze Into nil, nil Gazes Also Into You Elm Scala Elixir Elixir Phoenix Laravel Laravel Mix Lucky on GitHub Render HTML pages in Lucky Actions and Routing in Lucky Browser tests with LuckyFlow Dusk selectors Guido Van Rossum, Python BDFL, Stepping down VS Code BikeShed episode w/ German Velasco disucssing Elixir Support The Bike Shed

Chris is joined by Kane Baccigalupi, development director from thoughtbot's San Francisco office to discuss Kane's history in government working for 18F and California State and how those experiences have informed Kane's work since. Throughout the conversation Chris and Kane discuss their shared desire to hide all implementation details and their love of Ruby for how it allows us to do that, testing vs test driven development, and approaches for refactoring large untested systems. 18F - A consulting team within the government helping to introduce modern software development practices. Kane's tweet about the enjoyment of the refactoring and design parts of the process. Sarah Mei on The Bike Shed Uniform Access Principle Observations on the testing culture of Test Driven Development - TDD article that introduces the phrase "calling the shot" for the practice of TDD. Convenience class methods on service objects Testing Pyramid - A way to think about the cost and value of the various types of tests. Therapeutic Refactoring by Katrina Owen Katrina Owen on The Bike Shed Strangler Pattern - A systematic approach to refactoring and decomposing large-scale The encasement strategy: on legacy systems and the importance of APIs Martin Fowler on the Strangler Pattern Support The Bike Shed