The Bike Shed

Let's talk about Agile! What is it, what do we like, we do we not like? In this episode, Steph and Chris discuss: Broadly, are they fans? What makes this practice work well? What makes this practice work poorly? And also, hit specific topics and practices like Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming. Twitter Poll re: Gotime Podcast - Is Agile's Time Over? The Mortifying Ordeal of Pairing All Day The Real Story Behind Story Points Agile Manifesto & Agile Manifesto -- Principles Extreme Programming Introduction Extreme Programming Explained Ron Jeffries - What is Extreme Programming Transcript: CHRIS: I feel like we should try a couple of different byes just so we have sort of a smorgasbord of options, and then we can pick the best one. STEPH: With countdowns, [laughter] because I do so well with countdowns. CHRIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, I thought we would try maybe something a little bit different this week, a little bit more of a structured topic. In particular, I've been gathering little tidbits of information. I've been seeing conversations happen all around the topic of Agile, things that people like about Agile, things that people hate, mostly it's things that people hate about Agile. Lots of ire on the internet about Agile, but I think also some disagreement about what it actually means. And I think; generally, you and I are probably fans, so I want to talk about that. What parts do we like? What parts do we not like? What do we think Agile actually means or, at its best, maybe what it means? But yeah, let's start at the very top stuff. Steph, what do you think about Agile? STEPH: I am generally a fan. I'm with you. And yeah, the internet being full of more negative remarks and ire, that sounds very true. But generally, I am very much a fan of Agile, and the very broad scope of this is how we work, and this is how we plan our work, and this is how we collaborate as a team, and then how we reflect on the work that we have completed. I can also pick apart some of the things I don't like about Agile, but in the broad umbrella definition, I'm a big fan. I've enjoyed that approach. Granted, I've also only ever used Agile. I haven't written software using a Waterfall style, at least not purposefully. And then if I have encountered a team that was using more of a Waterfall style, then we changed it quickly. I really only have known the more Agile approach to writing software. CHRIS: I think that's largely true of me as well, where most of my work would fit somewhere under the umbrella of lowercase "a" agile, although I've tried variants of Scrum and Kanban and a bunch of other things that we'll probably chat about today. But I think in general, I find that things are most effective; things seem to move the most smoothly. And I think the software that we come out with is the best one. It's closest to those very simple ideals of Agile. And every layer of process that gets added on even though, like you, I've not done true Waterfall where it's like six months requirements gathering and then it gets handed off, and no one talks for a while. I've never done that. STEPH: I have to interject because I actually think you have in a previous life when you were an engineer. You have done the more Waterfall. Like, you have to plan very far in advance. CHRIS: I think this is one of those cases where people think "engineering" quote, unquote like mechanical engineering is one thing and it's actually...there is a little more structure, and there's a little more necessity of sequencing where you've got to figure out what you need to buy first because sometimes it takes a while to find the particular piece of metal that you need in the world. But it also has a lot of figuring out as you go and being like, well, we've got a bunch of stuff, and we're just going to figure it out. And also, this is something that as I was studying software while working as a mechanical engineer, I started to hear about this whole Agile thing, and I was like, huh, I wonder how I can bring more of that? Because I definitely saw cases where a more Waterfall-centric approach to engineering projects was leading to bad outcomes. It's like we decided upfront what we're going to do, and then we went away for six months, and we did it. And then we came back, and it turned out it was wrong. So that was solvable along the way. There were ways to build prototypes and things like that. So that is definitely a part of the mechanical engineering world. Although I think there are some true constraints, but I think there are also some occasionally self-imposed constraint

Chris gives some small updates on working with Svelte. He really likes Svelte so far. Svelte's great. Modals are complicated. He also talks about using a little JavaScript library, called Quicklink. Steph talks about sending data to a third-party system and using feature flags to help deprecate some code. Finally, they both riff on a listener question on consulting. Said listener asked, "Do you think about your work as 'consulting first' or as 'building great software first and then good experiences for your clients will follow naturally?'" Find out their take and give us your own, here on this episode of 'The Bike Shed!' Bike Shed "Nate Berkopec" Episode Svelte Quicklink Boring Rails: Skip the bullshit and ship fast mtime (File) - APIdock Transcript: STEPH: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So hey, Chris, happy Friday. How has your week been? CHRIS: Happy Friday. My week's been great, yeah. I've been writing a lot of code, moving things around, planning some features, and all that fun stuff that goes into building an app, so I'm enjoying that process. I'm also halfway through listening to your recent episode with Nate Berkopec, which was absolutely delightful, well, at least the first half that I've listened to so far. I assume the rest will continue to be absolutely delightful, but it does remain to be seen. So I'll report back next week when I've listened to the whole thing. But yeah, that's great. And I'm glad that Nate got to come on, and we got to share a little bit of his story as well. STEPH: I like how clear you are in terms of like, "The part that I've listened to so far is great, but I reserve judgment until I've heard the rest of it." [chuckles] But that's awesome. CHRIS: The thing about being a developer is it has broken my brain such that I am overly specific all the time because I just argue with a computer all day. It's what I do. So then I start talking to humans, and I'm like, wait, I should probably behave differently now. And I got to unwind some of those computer fights. But anyway, and let's see, small updates working with Svelte, really like Svelte. I'm leaning into it more and more and embracing...I think I'm starting to understand the aspects of it that I really like. And one of the things that I really like about it is that it is somewhat underpowered. And what I mean by that is working on React applications, I find that I can do some fancy stuff, and I can express it really well in TypeScript. And I can really go for it and create some components that are wildly variable and configurable and can take in any combination of props and do all sorts of things. And I can slice out tiny, little components and do all of this. When I'm doing that, I enjoy it. But in Svelte, I have a little bit less power in my control. Svelte is closer to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript fundamentally. So you can make components, and I really like that. You can bundle up the pieces of functionality and display and formatting, and all of that, but it's not quite as powerful. It's not quite as expressive. And I've actually found that to be a useful limitation, which is an interesting frame. It's not something that I thought I would say, but I'm finding that the code that I'm authoring in my editor is so much closer to the code that's actually going to be presented to the end-user. That is really useful in my mind. I find that to be really valuable. There are small things like in Svelte; you can actually say class equals when you're trying to define a class on an HTML element. It turns out I really like that one instead of having to say class name or similarly HTML for. There is a handful of them in React that you have to change the name of. So if you copy a snippet of HTML from the web, and then you dump it into your editor, if you're working in React, you have to change a bunch of stuff. It doesn't work right away. And it's a small thing, but I found that I really seem to care about it. But there's the “it's nice that it just works” version. But I feel like there's also an actually practical, meaningful edge of it is so much closer to the thing that's actually going to be in the browser, and I like that. STEPH: I liked the phrasing that you used just a moment ago where you said, "Useful limitation." Since I haven't used Svelte myself, one of my understandings is that you like the fact that it is that low JS in terms that we are introducing this framework, but it's not as heavy-handed as React or another framework that you could retour. But then you also said you&#

Chris gives the deets on that new new – (he joined a startup!) and laments about the back button being so complicated. Steph talks about extracting an untrustworthy service and likens the scenario to making a Pixar movie. You don't wanna miss this hero's journey! Eric Bailey's bunny updates Katrina Owen's Therapeutic Refactoring Talk EnjoyHQ User research platform Aurelius also a user research platform Dry Monad (part of dry-rb) Previous Bike Shed discussing dry-monads Railway Oriented Programming Bike Shed "Seeking Calm" Episode Previous Episode Discussing Multi-Step Forms Discussion thread on Inertia repo re: back button cache Transcript: STEPH: Yes, I was getting text messages from you where you were like, “Go on without me.” CHRIS: [laughs] Leave me behind! STEPH: [laughs] No developer left behind!! CHRIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I’m Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, how's your week going? STEPH: Hey, Chris. It's been a very busy week. There's been a lot going on. But the most delightful part of my week has been that Eric Bailey, another thoughtboter and also a former guest on this show, has a tiny, little baby bunny living in his backyard, and so he has been sharing updates about this little baby bunny. In fact, he's been sharing some pictures on Twitter as well. So I'll include a link in the show notes so other people can experience the joy. Also, the name of the bunny gets me every time. But they have named the bunny “Corndog.” CHRIS: Checks out. It seems like a very obvious name for a small bunny. STEPH: It gets me because that's such a big name. I don't know why it's a big name, but it feels like a big name for a little bunny. CHRIS: I can say yeah, it's a cornball. Yeah, that's a large name. And so a tiny bunny is a...it's like Little John from Robin Hood. It's perfect. STEPH: [chuckles] I kept referring to him as Corn Nugget, I guess, because of size. But yes, it’s not corn nugget; it’s Corndog. [chuckles] So watching Eric's little bunny has been delightful and a wonderful addition to the week. How about you? How has your week been? CHRIS: My week has been great. I was off on vacation last week (so you had a guest on), which was fun to just take a week off and reset the system. But actually, this week has been interesting. It was my first full-time week with a new startup that I have joined. I think, yeah, that seems to be the truth in the world. So a bit of a shift from what I've been doing for the last year and a half, almost something like that. The reason there's hesitance in my voice is because I've actually been working with this organization for six months-ish, depending on how you count it. I've been having conversations, and then it’s slowly grown over time where it was just conversations, and then it was an afternoon a week, and then one day a week, and then two, and three. And finally, we decided we think we've got an idea. We've got a thing that we want to build. And so I am the developer on this team, but we are an early-stage startup trying to build something. I'm now full-time on the project. I rotated down the other projects that I was working on from a freelance consulting perspective, and now I'm trying something new. So it's a very different vibe. Even though I'd been working with the organization for a long time, this week just felt so much more real. And there was so much more space, so much more room for activities, having a full week to actually work on things. So yeah, it's very exciting, it’s very new, it's very early stage, so all of those things are true. But there are a lot of great aspects to that, and I'm super excited about it. STEPH: That is some big news. That's a big change too. Well, I guess with consulting, there are the stresses that go into consulting and then changing projects and managing the projects that you're taking on. But then to joining a team and such an early startup team too...anytime, someone says startup life, I'm always like, well, tell me more. How calm is the startup life, or how uncalm is this startup life? CHRIS: It's somewhere between calm and uncalm, I would say, but in a, I would say purposeful and intentional way. I was looking for...this has largely been true over the entire time that I was freelancing, but freelancing was a way for me to keep the lights on, and stay engaged with tech, and continue working, and frankly, have more conversations and meet more organizations. But I was looking for something that I could engage with a bit more. I was looking for, largely, something like this. So it definitely is occupying a different space in my head than, say, any indivi

Nate Berkopec is the author of the Complete Guide to Rails Performance, the creator of the Rails Performance Workshop, and the co-maintainer of Puma. He talks with Steph about being known as "The Rails Speed Guy," and how he ended up with that title, publishing content, working on workshops, and also contributing to open source projects. (You could say he's kind of a busy guy!) Speedshop Puma The Rails Performance Workshop The Complete Guide to Rails Performance How To Use Turbolinks to Make Fast Rails Apps Sidekiq Follow Nate Berkopec on Twitter Visit Nate's Website Sign up for Nate's Speedshop Ruby Performance Newsletter Transcript: STEPH: All right. I'll kick us off with our fancy intro. Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I’m Steph Viccari. And this week, Chris is taking a break. But while he's away, I'm joined by Nate Berkopec, who is the owner of Speedshop, a Ruby on Rails performance consultancy. And, Nate, in addition to running a consultancy, you're the co-maintainer of Puma. You're also an author as you wrote a book called The Complete Guide to Rails Performance. And you run the workshop called The Rails Performance Workshop. So, Nate, I'm sensing a theme here. NATE: Yeah, make code go fast. STEPH: And you've been doing that for quite a while, haven't you? NATE: Yeah. It's pretty much been since 2015, or so I think. It all started when I actually wrote a blog post about Turbolinks that got a lot of pick up. My hot take at the time was that Turbolinks is actually a good thing. That take has since become uncontroversial, but it was quite controversial in 2015. So I got a lot of pick up on that, and I realized I liked working on performance, and people seem to want to hear about it. So I've been in that groove ever since. STEPH: When you started down the path of really focusing on performance, were you running your own consultancy at that point, or were you working for someone else? NATE: I would say it didn't really kick off until I actually published The Complete Guide to Rails Performance. So after that came out, which was, I think, March of 2016…I hope I’m getting that right. It wasn't until after that point when it was like, oh, I'm the Rails performance guy now. And I started getting emails inbound about that. I didn't really have any time when I was actually working on the CGRP to do that sort of thing. I just made that my full-time job to actually write, and market, and publish that. So it wasn't until after that that I was like, oh, I'm a performance consultant now. This is the lane I've driven myself into. I don't think I really had that as a strategy when I was writing the book. I wasn't like, okay, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to build some reputation around this, and then that'll help me be a better consultant with this. But that's what ended up happening. STEPH: I see. So it sounds like it really started more as a passion and something that you wanted to share. And it has manifested to this point where you are the speed guy. NATE: Yeah, I think you could say that. I think when I started writing about it, I just knew...I liked it. I liked the work of performance. In a lot of ways, performance is a much more concrete discipline than a lot of other sub-disciplines of programming where I joke my job is number go down. It's very measurable, and it's very clear when you've made a difference. You can say, “Hey, this number was this, and now it's this. Look what I did.” And I always loved that concreteness of performance work. It makes it actually a lot more like a real kind of engineering discipline where I think of performance engineering as clarifying requirements and the limitations and then building a project that meets the requirements while staying within those limitations and constraints. And that's often not quite as clear for other disciplines like general feature work. It's kind of hard to say sometimes, like, did you actually make the user's life better by implementing such and such? That's more of a guess. That's more of a less clear relationship. And with performance, nobody's going to wake up ten years from today and wish that their app was slower. So we can argue about the relative importance of performance in an application, but we don't really argue about whether or not we made it faster because we can prove that. STEPH: Yeah. That's one area that working with different teams (as I tend to shift the clients that I'm working with every six months) where we often push hard around feature work to say, “How can we measure this? How can we know that we are delivering something valuable to users?” But as you said, that's really tricky. It's hard to evaluate. And then also, when you add on the fact that

After the last episode where database switching was discussed, a number of listeners reached out with thoughts. In particular, one listener gave a reproducible example of how to make things better. Chris talks about why he always moves errors to the left, and Steph gives a hot take where she admits that she is not a fan of hackathons and explains why. Steph and Chris also share exciting Bike Shed show news in that we now have transcripts for each episode, and tackle another listener question asking, "How do you properly implement a multi-step form in a boring Rails way?” Chris talks about his experiences with multi-step forms and gives his own hot take on refactoring: he doesn't until he feels pain! Database Switching in Dev Mode Gist In Relentless Pursuit of REST – Derek Prior Transcript: CHRIS: Happy Friday or whatever day it happens to be in your future situation. STEPH: Happy day. [chuckles] CHRIS: Happy day or night. I'm sorry, I'm done. [laughter] STEPH: Shut up. [laughs] Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I’m Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And I’m Chris Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. Hey, Chris, happy Friday. How's your week been? CHRIS: Happy Friday to you as well. My week's been good. It's been busy. I am taking next week off for a quick vacation. So it’s that…I think I've talked about this every time before I go on a vacation on the podcast, that focusing lens that going on vacation gives you. I want to make sure everything's buttoned up and ready to hand off, and I'm not going to be blocking anyone. And so, I always like the clarity that that brings. Because a lot of times I can look at well, there are infinity things to do, how do I pick? And now I'm like, no, but really, if I'm going to be gone for a week, I must pick. And so yeah, I'm now very excited to lean into vacation mode and relax for a bit. STEPH: Yeah, that's awesome. I hear you. I always go into that same mode pre-vacation. CHRIS: But in tech news, after the most recent episode that was released where we talked about the database switching stuff, a number of listeners were very kind and reached out with some thoughts. In particular, Dan Ott is one listener who reached out not only with just some generic thoughts, but he also gave a reproducible example of how to make things slightly better. So the particular thing that a few folks honed in on was the idea that I was describing the feeling of in production; we can occasionally run into these ActiveRecord read-only errors, which is a case where you have a GET request that happens to try to create or update a record. And as a result, you're going to get this ActiveRecord read-only because you're using the follower database, which has a read-only connection. All of that is fine, but ideally, we would want to catch those before production. We want to catch them in development. And broadly, the issue that we have here is that in production, our system is running in a different way. It's running with two different database connections, one for read-only, one for writing, and that's different than in development, where we're running with a single connection. As an interesting thing, a lot of the stuff that I see on the internet is about using SQLite in development and then Postgres in production. And so that's an example of development production parity that we've really...I think thoughtbot is definitely a place that I internalize this very strongly. But you've got to have the same database, and especially because it's relatively straightforward to run Postgres locally, I'm always going to be running the same version of the database locally as in production. But in this case, I'm now getting this differentiation. And so what Dan and a handful of other folks highlighted was you can actually reproduce this functionality in development mode with a fun little trick where you end up creating a secondary connection to your development database, but you mark it as replica:true. And so, by doing that, Rails will establish a read-only connection. And then, all of the behavior that you configure for production can also be run in development. So now, as you're building out a new feature, and if you happen to implement a GET request that does some side effect in the database, that'll blow up in development as opposed to production, which is very exciting. STEPH: Yeah, that’s awesome. I love that Dan reached out and shared this example with us. I actually haven't read through all of the details just yet. In fact, I just opened it up, and I started going through it, and there's a lot of really...it looks like a lot of great notes here and a really nice example that walks you through how to have that production parity locally. So t

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris respond to a listener question about how to know if we're improving as developers. They discuss the heuristics they think about when it comes to improving, how they've helped the teams they've worked with plan for and measure their growth, and some specific tips for improving. Rails Autoscale Rubular regex playground The Pragmatic Programmer Go Ahead, Make a Mess by Sandi Metz Confident Code - Avdi Grimm Therapeutic Refactoring - Katrina Owen Refactoring, Good to Great - Ben Orenstein Transcript CHRIS: There's something intriguing about the fact that we're having this conversation, but the thing that's recorded just starts at this arbitrary point in time, and it's usually us rambling about golden roads. But, I don't know; there's something existential about that. STEPH: It's usually when someone says something very funny or starts singing [laughs], and then that's when we immediately: record, record! CHRIS: I've never sung on the mic. That doesn't sound like a thing I would do. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So Steph, how's your week going? STEPH: Hey Chris, it's going really well. Normally I'm always like, wow, it's been such an exciting week, and it's been a pretty calm, chill week. It's been lovely. CHRIS: That sounds nice actually in contrast to the "Well, it's been a week," that sort of intro of "I don't know, it's been fine. It can be really nice." STEPH: By the time we get to this moment of the week, I either have stuff that I'm so excited to talk about and have a little bit of a therapy session with you or share something new that I've learned. I agree; it's nice to be like, yeah, it's been smooth sailing this whole week. In fact, it was smooth sailing enough that I decided to take on something that I've been meaning to tackle for a while but have just been avoiding it because I have strong feelings about this, which you know but we haven't talked about yet. But it comes down to managing emails and how many emails one should have that are either unread that are just existing. And I fall into the category of where I am less scrupulous about how many unread or managed emails that I have. But I decided that I'd had enough. So I used a really nice filter in Gmail where I said I want all emails that are before 2021 and also don't have a user label, so it's has:nouserlabels because then I know those are all the emails that I haven't labeled or assigned to a particular...I want to say folder, but they're not truly folders; they just look like folders. So they're essentially like untriaged or just emails that I've left hanging out in the ether. And then I just started deleting, and I got rid of all of those that hadn't been organized up until that point. And I was just like yep, you know if I haven't looked at it, it's that old, and I haven't given a label by this point, I'm just going to move on. If it's important, it will bubble back up. And I feel really good about it. CHRIS: Wow, that is -- I like how you backed me into a corner. Obviously, I'm on the other side where I'm fastidiously managing my email, which I am, but you backed me into that corner here. So, yeah, that's true. Although the approach that you're taking of just deleting all the old email that's a different one than I would have taken [chuckles] so, I like it. It's the nuclear option. STEPH: Okay, so now I need to qualify. When you delete an email, initially, I'm thinking it's going to trash, and so it's still technically there if I need to retrieve it and go back and find it. But you just said nuclear option, so maybe they're actually getting deleted. CHRIS: They're going into the trash for 30 days; I think is the timeline. But after that, they will actually delete them. The archive is supposed to be the place where you put stuff I don't want to see you anymore. But did you archive or delete? STEPH: Oh, I deleted. CHRIS: Oh, wow. Yeah. All right, you went for it. [laughter] STEPH: Yeah, and that's cool. And it's in trash. So I basically have a 30-day window where I'm like, oh, I made a mistake, and I need to search for something and find something and bring it back into my world; I can find it. If I haven't searched for it by then in 30 days, then I say, you know, thanks for the email, goodbye. [chuckles] And it'll come back if it needs to. CHRIS: I like the approach. It would not be my approach, but I like the commitment to the cause. Although you still have...how many emails

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph share a speedy step to restart your rails server and chat about accessibility improvements and favorite a11y tools. They also dive into a tale of database switching and delight in a new Rails query method that returns orphaned records. Restart Rails server via tmp/restart.txt WebAIM: Constrast Checker IBM Equal Access Accessibility Checker axe™ DevTools AccessLint Assistiv Labs An introduction to macOS Head Pointer Rails date_select Rails strong_migrations Ruby RBS Sorbet - Ruby Type Checker Scout APM Rails 6.1 adds query method missing to find orphan records Transcript: STEPH: People put microphones in front of us. That is their fault, not ours. We just show up. Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. Hey Chris, happy Friday. CHRIS: Happy Friday. STEPH: How's your week been? CHRIS: It's been great. I did something that is wildly overdue, but I got a new chair and one day in. But it's also a very familiar chair because it's basically the same -- I think it's the same model as we had at the thoughtbot office. And it's nice to have a chair that is reasonable. And I think my old chair was maybe ten years old or something, deeply embarrassing and absurd like that for such a critical piece of infrastructure in my house. STEPH: I mean, I guess depending on if it's a good chair. I don't know what the lifespan is of a good chair. [laughs] CHRIS: I would not describe it as such. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: I think it was like $100 at Staples. It was a fine chair. It served me well for many years. I'm very slow and cautious with what I consider to be large-scale purchases. I hate the idea of having a thing that I've spent a bunch of money on, but I don't actually like. And these are very solvable problems. But I just tend to drag my feet and over-research and do all those sorts of things. And so finally I was just like, nope, we're going to get a chair, got a chair. Cool. Now I have a chair, and it's good. It's got all of the adjustments, which is what makes it very nice. I'd say Steelcase Leap is the model for anyone that's interested. STEPH: That's funny. I tend to do the same thing. I tend to drag my feet until I get desperate enough that then I'm forced to make a decision and buy something. I do have an oddly specific question. Do you like chairs with or without the arms? CHRIS: Oh, with the arms. STEPH: Really? CHRIS: Yeah. STEPH: I am team, no arms. CHRIS: Where do your arms go if there are no arms to put on the chair? STEPH: They're always on my lap or on my keyboard. So I just don't rest them on the armrest. CHRIS: Interesting. I feel like that would put -- I've definitely had small bouts of RSI strain fatigue in my forearms. And so I'm very purposeful with how I'm bracing my wrists. I have a little wrist rest that I put my hands on when I'm using my keyboard because the keyboard is slightly raised up because I have a nonsense mechanical keyboard, of course. STEPH: Delightful, not nonsense. CHRIS: Yeah, I love it. I would never trade that in, but I have to make it work and not actually sacrifice my body for a clackety keyboard. [chuckles] But yeah, I think I need some more support for my arms; otherwise, there's too much pressure on my wrists, and things are breaking at weird angles, and that's been my experience. I'm intrigued by the free-flying no arms on the chair approach that you're talking about. This particular model has nine degrees of freedom on the armrest. So I'm able to bring them in and forward and at the exact right height so that they perfectly meet my arm where it would naturally be, and that seems good. That seems like the thing that I want. STEPH: That makes a lot of sense. But yeah, I'm team no arms. Every time I have them, I can't get them at the right comfortable spot. And I like the freedom of where I can quickly get up and out of my chair and not have arms in the way, which sounds like a very small improvement in my life, but yet it's what I want. CHRIS: I just like the idea of you sitting there and being like, I need to be able to make a quick escape at any moment; who knows what's going to happen? And I need to be able to run the other way. STEPH: If there's a gnarly bug, I got to be able to run. I can run away quickly as possible. [laughs] CHRIS: But in other news, so yeah, new chair that's great. I also recently embraced something in the Rails world that I have known about I think for forever for the entire time that I've worked in Rails, but I've never really used it, which is the tmp/restart.txt file, which my understanding of it is if you touch that file, or i

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris are joined by fellow thoughtbotter, Joël Quenneville, to discuss all things debugging. Joël is helping publish a weekly debugging blog series and in this conversation they discuss how the series got started, technology agnostic debugging strategies, writing less bug-prone software, and speculate if Joël moonlights as a hockey coach. Debugging Blog Series 2021 Classical Reasoning and Debugging Monodraw An Elm debugging story Chelsea Troy - PoSD 2: What causes insidious bugs? Follow Joël Quenneville on Twitter Joël Quenneville on the thoughtbot blog post Transcript: STEPH: All right. And then who will be editing this episode will be Mandy. So as we run into blunders, which we never do, but if we do, then we can talk to Mandy and ask her to edit things for us. So I will try very hard to do that because I will likely still talk to Thom. [chuckles] CHRIS: Hello, Mandy. It is a pleasure to meet you. In the last recording that will be going through you, I was referring to you indirectly as our next producer. But now that we know your name, I'm so excited to have you on the team and to know who is on the other side of these, hopefully not too nonsensical recordings. So pleasure to meet you. STEPH: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, hey Chris, today is an extra special day as we have a guest today. Joining us is Joël Quenneville, a thoughtbot developer extraordinaire and a previous Bike Shed guest. Welcome, Joël! JOËL: Hi. CHRIS: It's a pleasure to have you. JOËL: It's good to be on the show. STEPH: So, Joël, you and I are on the same client project. And during the past few weeks, we have encountered some very challenging bugs. In fact, if I look back at my developer journal, the last five or so of my entries begin with a very cheesy mystery title that's like the case of the missing data or Harry Potter and the chamber of errors. But in addition to spending your time bug hunting with me on this project, I understand that you and other thoughtboters, Jesse Bailey and Louis Antonopoulos, have been publishing weekly blog posts specifically about debugging. JOËL: Yes, that's correct. This has been a project that we've been doing for a little while. We spent about three months doing research, conducting a bunch of interviews, and gathering a lot of material on debugging. And then, starting in April and through the middle of the summer, we are publishing an article every week on the topic of debugging and exploring different aspects of it. STEPH: I'm really curious; what prompted y'all to start talking about debugging? I'm really excited to talk about the specific topics that are included in the series. And then also you mentioned all the research. I'd love to know how you went about that research. But before we go there, what prompted this conversation and then led to the creation of the series? JOËL: Within thoughtbot, we spend a lot of time trying to improve ourselves, improve the broader community as well. And there was a conversation that got started about how we could get better at debugging. It's a thing that, as developers, we do all the time, and it's not something that's often taught explicitly. Many of us our experience with debugging has been very much just learning on the job and picking it up by osmosis and trial and error. And when you're more junior, a lot of that is just random stuff and changing random lines of code and maybe copying something from the internet and hoping things go well. And as you build experience, you tend to start becoming a little bit more methodical because you've seen what works and what doesn't. And so we wondered within thoughtbot, we have all these different people who've come up with their own experience. Can we meld that together and share the summary of all thoughtbot debugging knowledge combined and help everybody level up? Initially, we were wondering could this be just an internal workshop or something where we get together and exchange on the different ways that we've learned or different techniques that each of us uses? But then this evolved into a project that we wanted to share not just within thoughtbot but with the wider world. And so its final form, or at least its current form, has been a blog post series that's going to run over the course of three to four months. STEPH: I appreciate how you've taken the opportunity to take all of this knowledge and then turn it outward-facing, so it's available to the public as well. And it really wasn't until you were talking about the series and then I started reading the weekly blog posts that are being published how little I read about concrete st

This week Steph's taking a quick break, but while she's off, Chris is joined by a special guest - Jonathan Reinink. Jonathan is the creator of Inertia.js. Inertia.js lets you quickly build modern single-page React, Vue and Svelte apps using classic server-side routing and controllers, and listeners of the show will certainly have heard Chris rave about it on previous episodes. Chris and Jonathan dig into what makes Inertia unique as compared to frameworks like Phoenix LiveView, Laravel Livewire, and Rails' Hotwire & Turbo. They also discuss how Inertia embraces the URL, the unique "protocol" nature of Inertia, and how to consider Inertia alongside native mobile applications. Throughout the conversation, Jonathan's consistent philosophy of wanting to build robust, performant, and delightful applications shines through. Jonathan Reinink on twitter Inertia.js Eloquent Performance Patterns TailwindCSS Church Social Jonathan on Full Stack Radio Foundational blog post: Server-side apps with client-side rendering Laravel Livewire Alpine.js Phoenix LiveView Hotwire Turbo The Inertia Protocol Transcript: CHRIS TOOMEY: I am seeing what I believe to be the relevant things. JONATHAN REINIK: Let's dance. CHRIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. And this week, Steph is taking a quick break, but while she's away, I'm joined by a special guest, Jonathan Reinik. Jonathan Reinik is the creator of Inertia.js. And listeners of the show will know that that is increasingly one of my favorite frameworks and, frankly, just ways to build applications on the internet. Jonathan is also the creator of the Eloquent Performance Patterns course, which teaches the Eloquent ORM, which is the ORM in Laravel but really digs into deep performance and database things, so really covering that back end as well. Jonathan also collaborated on the development of Tailwind CSS, a utility-first CSS framework which again is something that I have spoken of in very high terms on this podcast. And lastly, Jonathan currently runs his own SaaS business called Church Social. So really, Jonathan is a bit of a quadruple threat covering back end and front end design and entrepreneurship. So pretty much everything you want to see. And frankly, I've been so impressed by the breadth and the depth of Jonathan's work and just the deep way that he is thinking about building applications. So I am absolutely thrilled to have him on the show today. So without further ado, Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me. JONATHAN: Thanks so much, Chris. That was a very kind introduction, and yeah, it's awesome to be on The Bike Shed. I've been a long-time listener, and as I've said to you, I really appreciate the support that you've given to my work over the years. So yeah, it's awesome to be here. CHRIS: That's interesting. We're measuring it in years now, but it's a very sincere thing for me. I think with Inertia, you've built something that is both very unique and a special approach to how we build things, but it's also built from very familiar pieces and allows us to reuse the deep amounts of knowledge that we have in the Rails community or the Laravel community. But actually backing up just a little bit, because we're going to dive deep on Inertia.js today, for folks that are not as familiar or have only heard me mention it in passing, there's a wonderful episode of Full Stack Radio where Jonathan and Adam Wathan talked about Inertia.js, and I think gave a very good foundational summary. So we'll link to that in the show notes in case anyone wants to dig in a little bit more. Likewise, Jonathan has a really fantastic blog post called Server-side Apps With Client-side Rendering, which, as far as I can tell, is the manifesto that began this whole journey for you. And I really love that you have done so much of the work in public, and people can see the history of how this idea has evolved and really crystallized into what now is a very production-ready framework in sort of the way to build things. But I would love to hear right now just for anyone who is not as familiar and also just to hear how you summarize it at this point in time. What does your introductory elevator pitch for Inertia.js sound like in April 2021? JONATHAN: That's a great question. So it's hard to answer this without unpacking a lot of different things. And you mentioned the podcast with Adam; I think that's good because it goes in a lot of the technical detail of how Inertia works and why I created it. But the elevator pitch these days for when I talk to someone about it, it's generally I explain it as a way of building modern web apps. And in particular, when I say modern, I mean web apps that have a lot of JavaScript, so frameworks like Vue or React or Svelte, s

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss testing webhooks, the challenges in replicating third-party data, and troubleshooting unexpected side effects. They also respond to a listener question about secrets management, touring popular solutions and discussing the trade-offs. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy webhook.site git-secret Datomic 1Password Secrets Hashicorp Vault Heroku Secure Key

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle a pair of questions -- the first dealing with how closely we might want to map an API to the underlying database schema, and the second dealing with back of the envelope math and horses (it makes more sense in context.... mostly). They also discuss the subtleties of the javascript date API across browsers, and a quick adventure in tuning database indexes for fun and profit. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Testing LiveView Inspecting Postgres Indexes Postgres Partial Indexes Postgres Create Index Concurrently

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss migrating a polymorphic relationship over to UUIDs and balancing trade-offs between data integrity vs complexity. They also touch on a new Rails feature that adds support to safely remove and add columns, GitHub Discussions, measuring team experiments, and purposeful communication. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Modeling Polymorphic Associations in a Relational Database Rails 6.1 - Add support for if_exists/if_not_exists GitHub Discussions Loom: Video Messaging

On this week's episode, Steph shares a recent performance improvement, a Postgres delight, and testing concurrency in RSpec. Chris revisits an earlier theme of "Good Idea, Bad Idea?" as he explores ways to speed up tests builds and avoid duplicate test builds. They round things out with a listener question about managing ERB partials and Vue components. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy ActiveRecord - with_lock Domain Name Sanity by Edward Loveall strong_migrations gem react-rails gem Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed

On this week's episode, Chris shares a rare airing of grievances regarding the importance of secure, encrypted websites and Steph shares a tale of time zone troubles and testing. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Time.use_zone Sidekiq Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle a listener question around the world of service objects. Where, really, should we be putting our business logic. Model concerns, "service" objects, the model files themselves? Tune in to find out. They also discuss a perilous Rails 6 upgrade deployment and the ensuing debugging session, as well as Steph's retro on her extended break from work. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy USDR (US Digital Response) Volunteer Organization 18f USDS TwiddleWakka Clearance Issue w/ LOWER email Say No To More Process Bike Shed Question Form dry-rb & dry-rb monad Bike Shed Episode discussing dry-rb Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed

On this week's episode Chris and Steph chat about upgrading to Rails 6, intercepting emails, and play a few rounds of Software Terminology Trivia. They also discuss "Deep Work" by Cal Newport and share strategies for finding and maintaining focus. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Letter Opener recipient_interceptor Spam Monty Python CAN-SPAM Act Deep Work by Cal Newport brain.fm Getting Things Done Send us your question, we would love to hear about it. Looking for your next role? thoughtbot is hiring! Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed

On this week's episode Steph and Chris discuss a listener question around managing content within an application, weighing options like an integrated CMS, headless CMS provides, proxying the content, and supporting marketing and landing pages without needing a developer for every change. They also provide an update on dead man's snitch and a preview of a rails 6 upgrade on the horizon and dreams of database switching. This episode is brought to you by SPOTcon. Tune in to Scout APM's first conference, and join for developers from around the world to meet, engage with, and learn about solutions that drive leading-edge transformation in application development by registering for free today! Dead Man's Snitch Multiple Databases with Active Record Refinery CMS ActiveAdmin Rails Admin MBTA dotcom repo Fastly thoughtbot.com proxy blog post "There's a typo on the homepage" - thoughtbot.com website redesign workshop Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed

On this week's episode, Chris adds Dead Man's Snitch to a personal project and considers "what is the app doing at runtime?" as he touches on the importance of creating observable systems. Steph shares analyzing a site's traffic and using Apache Bench for simple load testing. They also respond to a listener question about creating environment-specific data for data-intensive applications. This episode is brought to you by SPOTcon. Tune in to Scout APM's first conference, and join for developers from around the world to meet, engage with, and learn about solutions that drive leading-edge transformation in application development by registering for free today! Dead Man's Snitch Apache Bench HTTP Keep-Alive Send us your question, we would love to hear about it. Looking for your next role? thoughtbot is hiring! Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle a listener question around switching from mostly-developing, to mostly-communicating and the tactics they've used to balance these facets of their work. They also discuss the new error objects in Rails 6.1, the value of breakable toys, and the importance of keeping presentational concerns out of the data model. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Rails 6.1's ActiveModel Errors Revamp blog post from @lulalala Model error as object pull request with great conversation Previous Bike Shed episode w/ discussion about error handling with dry-rb Tell Me When It Closes Monopoly Deal Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

On this week's episode Chris and Steph discuss a new tmux feature and wvim, a script that streamlines shell command edits. They also discuss the value of taking a sabbatical and protecting downtime. Steph shares some exciting news about thoughtbot and they answer a listener question about GraphQL and whether your app really needs an API? This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy thoughtbot is hiring! Send a question to The Bike Shed! "which + vim = wvim" post GraphQL Ruby Hasura PostGraphile Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

On this week's episode Steph and Chris discuss some of characteristics and behaviors they've observed in high-performing teams, touching on pull request sizing and prioritizing code review, deploy cadence, error monitoring and response, and minimizing the number of themes being tackled by the team in parallel. They also touch on moving to Netlify and simplifying deploys, an odd edge case with 303 vs 302 status code, and the quirks of the ActiveRecord or method. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Netlify Netlify build plugins Git LFS Issue opened on Inertia for 302 vs 303s "Scoping .or clauses with common joins" post Derek Prior's Building a Culture of Code Review Charity Majors Honeycomb.io Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

In this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss the popular testing themes and questions that emerged during the RSpec training course, reflecting on which testing "rules" still apply and when to break the rules. They also chat about the results of the 2020 State of JS survey and repurposing email validations to be helpful vs strict. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy RSpec focus filter RSpec subject FactoryBot The State of JS 2020 Svelte.js Snowpack esbuild Mailcheck Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

In this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss some of their methods for helping out reviewers of their pull requests and keeping code review moving along smoothly. They also discus the shift to async communication and the tools, processes, and workflows that come with a shift to async. Does standup still have a place in an async world? Tune in to find out. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Svelte society coining an acronym GitHub now supports video uploads Recordit Giphy Capture Basecamp Telegram Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

On this week's episode, Chris shares a new favorite tool for querying JSON and Steph revisits a previous deployment issue. They also dive into the new features in Ruby 3, ponder the idea of adding types to Ruby, revisit breaking changes, and round out the conversation with a listener question about managing tmux sessions. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy fx - Command-line JSON processor jq - Command-line JSON processor Postman Insomnia Ruby 3 Release Notes Ruby 3 - Separation of positional and keyword arguments Ruby adds experimental support for end-less method definition Tmuxinator Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris revisit their discussion about testing rack rewrite redirect logic, mystery guests, DNS configuration, and trying very hard to not be too dogmatic. Steph describes her recent work trying to debug failing deploys with Concourse, Kubernetes, and Google Cloud while touching on blue-green deployment and secrets management. Finally, Chris talks about porting a svelte project to typescript and the trade-offs of adding Types upfront vs types after the fact, and the parallels to testing and TDD. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Solo Stove rack_rewrite Climate Control The Art of Code Comments talk by Sarah Drasner Concourse Kubernetes Google Cloud Platform git-crypt Rails encrypted secrets Tailwind CSS InertiaJS Svelte Rich Harris and Evan You on Undefined podcast ts-routes gem Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph reflect on their top themes and technical picks for 2020. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy ExpressVPN - Click through to can get an extra 3 months free on a one-year package. Tailwind CSS BEM CSS Styled Components css-modules BikeShed Episode: I'm a Designer Now ActiveModel Error Objects Razer Kiyo Upright Go 2 Svelte Phoenix Live View Laravel Livewire Stimulus Inertia.js

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris begin wrapping up 2020 with a review of their 2019 top 10 list. They share what's changed, what's stayed the same, and what they'd like to see more of in the coming year. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Indeed - Click through and get started with a free seventy five dollar credit for your first job post Last year's top 10 countdown list ErgoDox EZ Leopold FC750 Keybordio Atreus Prettier Prettier Ruby Elm Code Hospitality Testing Library Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

In this week's episode, Chris undertakes long-running background jobs that are performing duplicate work and adding significant load on the database. Steph shares her initial take of the book "Soul of a New Machine", a non-fiction account that chronicles the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. They also dive into the question "how can teams turn a slow, hard to maintain test suite from a liability into an asset?" and touch on how to identify highly-functioning teams. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy. HelloFresh - Visit HelloFresh and use code bikeshed80 to get $80 off including free shipping. ExpressVPN - Click through to can get an extra 3 months free on a one-year package. Sidekiq The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder Bike Shed Episode 236 - Featuring "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Cliff Stoll Hackers WarGames Labyrinth Therapeutic Refactoring by Katrina Owen Goodhart's law Drive by Daniel Pink Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

On this week's episode, Chris describes his continued explorations with Svelte specifically bringing TypeScript into the mix. Steph discusses the first cohort for the RSpec training and some related testing questions around third party APIs. They round things out with a listener question about managing permissions and roles, with a brief detour around single table inheritance vs polymorphic associations. Oh, and Steph rented goats to mow her lawn. 🐐 This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy ExpressVPN - Click through to can get an extra 3 months free on a one-year package. Elm Svelte React Redux Svelte - Writable Stores webmock Pundit EdgeDB Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

In this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss redirecting requests for various hostnames to one canonical host, creating student personas to improve educational content, and walking away from failing tests. They also embark on a Hollywood themed tour of RSpec mocks, stubs, and spies, when to use each approach, and discuss the types of tests they do (or do not) write. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Remote Works Podcast Rack Canonical Host Spring rack-rewrite Sandi Metz - The Magic Tricks of Testing Erlang Dialyzer Elixir Dialyxir Sorbet - type checker for Ruby Svelte

Steph's taking a quick break this week, but while she's away, Chris is joined by special guest Gary Bernhardt. Gary is the creator of Destroy All Software screencasts as well as his more recent venture, Execute Program. Between Execute Program, his screencasts, conference talks, and more Gary has consistently provided some of the highest quality and most impactful educational content around building great software and has been a huge inspiration to the hosts of this show. In the episode, Chris and Gary discuss Gary's recent work with TypeScript and how it compares with Gary's focus on testing, they revisit some of Gary's ideas around software architecture and how they map to his current work, Gary's thoughts around the value of knowing our tools deeply, and the trade-offs between careful upfront design and shipping early and often. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Indeed - Click through and get started with a free seventy five dollar credit for your first job post Gary Bernhardt on Twitter Destroy All Software Screencasts Execute Program Deconstruct Conf Gary's Conference Talks Gary's new video - End-to-End TypeScript: Database, Backend, API, and Frontend TypeScript Eslint tsuquyomi Vim TypeScript integration Functional Core, Imperative Shell Boundaries A Compiler From Scratch The Unix Chainsaw A Whole New World Hammock Driven Development WaniKani kanji learning app Anki - spaced repetition flashcard system Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

On this week's episode, Steph discusses the value of conducting student research when creating course content and Chris revisits a recent architecture decision to use Svelt and Inertia. They also explore the challenges developers face in acquiring their first job and share insights for those looking for their next big role. This episode is brought to you by: ExpressVPN - Click through to can get an extra 3 months free on a one-year package. ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Hunt for the Wilderpeople Wicked Svelte Inertia.js Ruby on Rails Podcast - 285: Bikeshedding with Steph Viccari Will Johnson Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

On this week's episode, Steph describes her unique new project where they're building and presenting a training course around RSpec, testing, and TDD specific to an organization's codebase. Chris then runs some architecture choices by Steph to discuss a collection of new technologies he's considering, and more generally how we think about our experimentation budget. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Indeed - Click through and get started with a free seventy five dollar credit for your first job post The Witches The Witches (2020) Addams Family Addams Family Values Practical Magic Oculus Quest 2 SuperHot Beat Saber Rocket League Sandi Metz Inertia.js Svelte Rich Harris (Svelte creator): Futuristic Web Development Bike Shed episode talking about Inertia.js Another Bike Shed episode talking about Inertia.js Write Less, Do More Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph share mixed-feelings about Spring preloader and how to use Spring just for tests. They also dive into troubleshooting an OpenSSL error, Postgres generated columns, and creating moments of contentment. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Datadog - Click through to get a free 14-day trial and a free Datadog t-shirt! Scale Your Rails App Internationally in 30 Days Spring LibreSSL OpenSSL Apple WWDC 2011 - Next Generation Cryptographic Services Postgres Generated Columns Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris chat about database transactions and job queues, building static sites with GatsbyJS and NetlifyCMS, the performance impacts of front end frameworks and static content, and lastly they catch up on Hacktoberfest and the complexities of encouraging and supporting work in open source. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Datadog. Click through to get a free 14-day trial and a free Datadog t-shirt! Sidekiq delayed_job Que (Postgres-backed job queuing system for ruby apps) Transactionally Staged Job Drains in Postgres Postgres Job Queues & Failure By MVCC Gatsby.js Netlify NetlifyCMS Middleman MDX Steph's Monster blog monster-cute blog repo Svelte Rich Harris - creator of Svelte Rich Harris on full stack radio Extensity chrome extension Hacktoberfest DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest is Hurting Open Source Hacktoberfest Update from Digital Ocean Goodhart's law Adam Wathan of Tailwind Labs Remix Run Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

On this week's episode Steph and Chris discuss the ins and outs of joining teams, building trust, and working together to improve processes and communication. They also touch on some lesser used features of bundler, and revisit a discussion around Rails maintenance periods thanks to some listener feedback. This episode is brought to you by: Indeed - Click through and get started with a free seventy five dollar credit for your first job post ExpressVPN - Click through to can get an extra 3 months free on a one-year package. Initial conversation about posible Rails downtime handling Chris' post about read-only mode for better Rails downtime Bundler options to load specific gems

Steph's taking a quick break this week, but in her absence, Chris is joined by Dave Rupert. Dave is the lead developer at Paravel, co-host of the Shop Talk Show podcast, creator of The Accessibility Project, and an all-around prolific and thoughtful maker of digital things. Chris and Dave chat about creating and sharing content like podcasts and blogs and how to get past your inner editor. They discuss the web platform and accessibility, and finally, they round out the conversation with a chat about design systems as an intersection between design and development. This episode is brought to you by: Indeed - Click through and get started with a free seventy five dollar credit for your first job post Datadog. Click through to get a free 14-day trial and a free Datadog t-shirt! ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Dave on Twitter Dave's site / blog Paravel The Accessibility Project Shop Talk Show Podcast How to Start a Podcast The Good Path (on Blogging) Jeremy Kieth Jekyll static site generator What is the Value of Browser Diversity? The WebAIM Million Project Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) The Accessibility Project Checklist Scott Hanselman The Hanselminutes Podcast Five Key Milestones in the Life of a Design System Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

On this week's episode, Chris introduces a new segment called "Good Idea, Terrible Idea?" as he considers introducing a read-only mode to avoid interrupting users during scheduled downtime. Steph has started a new project and explores the idea of merging separate, but similar, applications into one codebase. They also dive into micro-service environments to discuss the difficulties of integration testing and potential strategies. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Indeed - Click through and get started with a free seventy five dollar credit for your first job post Earth, Wind & Fire - September ActiveRecord Persistence Amazon SQS Swagger GraphQL VCR The Bike Shed VCR episode - 189: It's Gonna Work, Definitely, No Problems Whatsoever Capybara Discoball React Podcast Episode - 110: Sam Selikoff on Finding a Full Stack React Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle a listener question around composition over inheritance, especially in the context of Rails which makes regular use of inheritance. Dependency injection, OOP vs FP, frameworks vs app code -- they hit it all! They also chat about burnout and how they've dealt with it, using jq to investigate differences between json responses, refactoring tests and using let, and Steph shares her recent learnings about graphviz. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy ExpressVPN - Click through to get get an extra three months FREE on a one-year package! Getting Back to Work by Carl Reyes "If you're feeling down lately, here's a quick test to figure out why" tweet jq (command-line JSON processor) lets not graphviz Composition over Inheritance on Upcase React hooks, composition Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

On this week's episode, Chris shares a tale of performance improvements and a recent discussion about replacing a REST API with GraphQL. Steph dives into migrating a database column to restrict input and dropping database columns safely. They also discuss when to abstract code (a topic that surprisingly, they may not agree on) and running "Unused" to identify dead code. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Indeed - Click through and get started with a free seventy five dollar credit for your first job post ActiveRecord - ignore_columns strong_migrations Rails Issue - ActiveRecord enum: use validation if exists instead of raising ArgumentError Insomnia Unused Using Vim with ctags Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris tackle the thorny topic of 10X engineers. Do we think they really exist? What characteristics make an individual more effective, and more importantly, what can they do for a team? To round out the conversation, they chat about rewrites and when they do and don't make sense, Ruby 2.7 keyword argument deprecation warnings, and a listener question revisiting Ruby popularity and what languages would we learn if we couldn't write Ruby anymore. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Indeed - Click through and get started with a free seventy five dollar credit for your first job post Ruby 2.7 Deprecates Conversion Of Keyword Arguments GitHub - Upgrading GitHub to Ruby 2.7 Matz -- New 2.7/3.0 keyword argument pain point warnings gem Bike Shed 217 -- we answer "encouraging companies to use Ruby and Rails and asking how we identify ourselves as developers" Bike Shed 208 -- we answer "what makes Rails successful?" Bike Shed 234 -- we answer "the complex tradeoffs between craft, preferences, and business needs" GitHub Survey - Top Languages Stack Overflow survey - Programming Languages Google Trends - Dynamic Programming Languages 2020 Ruby on Rails Community Survey Results Ruby on Rails Podcast - 2020 Ruby on Rails Community Survey with Robby Russell Rust - Are we web yet? 10x engineer thread from 2019 Alice Goldfuss twitter thread on honesty in teams Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss a git-blame feature that supports bypassing less helpful commits. They also revisit a discussion about Dependabot PRs and recent performance adjustments, sharing which strategies worked and which ones didn't. They also discuss the dreaded three-state boolean, designing a system for cacheability, and using Ruby's magic comment to freeze string literals. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Indeed - Click through and get started with a free seventy five dollar credit for your first job post Trello Account Switching Feature Git feature: ignore-revs-file Chris's Tweet about ignore-revs-file Strong Migrations MemCachier Ruby 2.3 - magic comment to freeze string literals

On this week's episode, Steph & Chris take a deep dive into all things technical debt. How do you know when your code has reached "good enough"? When might we purposefully knowingly take on technical debt? How do we tackle existing technical debt without halting new development? How can we tell high-interest, hair on fire debt from "ehh, it's fine" debt that we can let lie? Tune in to find out! This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy FusionAuth - Use it for free today and get a free t-shirt, or upgrade to their paid editions and get 25% with promo code BIKESHED Rack::Timeout Sigterm The Art of Code Comments - Sarah Drasner | JSConf Hawaii 2020 Technical Debt Panel from thoughtbot Gary Bernhardt on Full Stack Radio Sandy Metz - The Halflife of Code Code Climate Churn vs Complexity Graph Become a Sponsor of The Bike Shed!

On this week's episode, Chris shares his recent adventures of working with a team that prioritizes async-first communication and Steph revisits a previous discussion around the use of web sockets and optimistic user interfaces. They also dive into the classically hard question "should we rewrite the app?" and share survival tips for learning to type on a split keyboard. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Indeed - Click through and get started with a free seventy five dollar credit for your first job post Telegram Phoenix Channels JavaScript client Express.js MongoDB ErgoDox Keyboard A Modern Space Cadet Atreus Keyboard Moonlander Keyboard

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris chat about the relatively new Rails view_component library from GitHub, Steph talks about her work with Storybook as part of extracting and defining a design system, and they chat about the attr_extras project with convenience helpers for ruby & Rails apps. They round out the conversation with some keyboard updates (ErgoDox onramp is steep!) and project rotation notes. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy! ErgoDox Atreus Keyboard Rails view_component Storybook.js Styleguidist attr_extras Sorbet static types for Ruby

On this week's episode, Steph celebrates passing an important test and discovers an API that returns different data than it's provided while Chris asks the important bikeshed question "What is the proper maximum line length?". They also roundup the latest listener questions and discuss establishing freelancing rates, property-based testing, and time tracking skills that help them manage competing priorities. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy! Prettier Ruby Toptal Upwork QuickCheck Hypothesis Rantly

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris have a brief chat about Snowpack, a new and ultra-speedy bundler in the front-end world, and revisit a conversation around namespacing models in Rails. The conversation then shifts to a discussion of the ins and outs of hosting a podcast and how folks might be able to dive in if they're interested in starting one themselves -- from selecting topics, to the hardware and software they use, to the guiding philosophy in how to discuss technical concepts. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Indeed - Click through and get started with a free seventy five dollar credit for your first job post "Selling Technical Debt Back to The Business" workshop Snowpack Vite React Fast Refresh Saron's tweet about questions re: starting a podcast The War of Art Fireside.fm AudioHijack ZenCastr Audio-Technica ATR2100x-USB Microphone Shure SM7Bs Foam Mic Cover (aka pop filter, aka windscreen Patreon The Ginger People

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss leveraging the Unix utility sed to search files and remove unnecessary test setup, using Vim's Arglist to create a to-do list for file edits, and budgeting time for fancy command-line scripts. They then take a deep dive into the world of utility-first CSS and TailwindCSS. This episode is brought to you by: ScoutAPM - Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy ExpressVPN - Click through to get get an extra three months FREE on a one-year package Register here to attend the free panel discussion "How to sell technical debt to the business" sed The Unix Chainsaw by Gary Bernhardt awk Vim's Arglist as a File-Centric Todo List xkcd React Podcast - 88: Adam Wathan on Making Your Own Money, Refactoring UI, and tailwindcss Tailwind CSS Tailwind Cheat Sheet Redesigning the Tuple Client UI Bourbon PurgeCSS thoughtbot dotfiles PostCSS

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss using JSONB to store survey responses and the differences between JSON and JSONB, using (or not using!) exceptions in Ruby and the fail keyword, the pros and cons of namespacing models in Rails to organize features, and a new recommendation for running tests from vim. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM. Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy! Seagull Mic Drop vim-test plugin for running tests vim-rspec thoughtbot's plugin for running specs from vim JSON types in Postgres Ruby fail keyword Avdi Grimm and Jim Weirich on exceptions The Zen of Python Idris programming language

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss the importance of using inclusive language, branching into new branch names, and strategies that encourage the use of inclusive terminology. Chris also shares his latest experience with merging two systems that were split apart back into one system, tackling conflicting foreign keys and competing auth libraries. Steph discusses using polling vs web sockets to monitor work being completed in a background job and communicating to the user the various states of success and failure. Seagulls are the Worst Angie Jones Tatiana Mac Pariss Athena Renaming factory_girl to factory_bot Juneteenth Empathy Online SlackBot - Keep Conversations Inclusive Clearance Devise Active Model Serializers Blueprinter 203: A Blessed Monkeypatch (Eileen M. Uchitelle) JWT Action Cable Akka Streams