The Bike Shed

In this episode, Steph and Chris talk about things they've changed their minds about over the course of their careers as software developers. Steph talks about as it turns out, arm chair rests are good, feature flags and comments are also good, she's changed her mind about how teams structure the work that each person is doing at once, and believes strongly in representation in the field. Chris is not a fan up upgrading his operating system and when he first started out, he gravitated towards learning dynamic languages, and since then, much prefers functional languages, static typing or more broadly, static analysis. He also no longer believes in the 10x engineer, and also very much believes that URLs matter on the internet. So basically, don't call them single-page applications; call them client-side applications instead! Arq Karabiner-Elements Kent C. Dodd’s Epic React Course The Art of Code Comments by Sarah Drasner Gary Bernhardt: Functional Core, Imperative Shell Steph's Standing Desk - curved top - 55x28 Transcript: CHRIS: I still have dreams that I missed an entire semester of math class, and now it's time for the final. I don't know that I'm ever going to grow out of that. STEPH: That's wild. CHRIS: You don't experience that? It's a mixture of I'm in elementary school, but it's a college final. Like, the physical school that I'm in is my elementary school, but it's a calculus college course that I missed. And now it's time for the final, and I won't graduate college as a result. But it's also high school at the same time. Just every part of education sort of melded together into this nightmare scenario. Do you not experience that? I thought this was normal. STEPH: [chuckles] Not in a very long time, not since I was in college. But I'm imagining this very cute, young Chris showing up with a backpack to the calculus final like, "Oh no." [laughs] CHRIS: Yeah, pretty much, yeah. I really thought I would grow out of it at some point. But it shows...I think it manifests when I have anxiety about something else in the world, and then I have a math terror dream. STEPH: That's your stress sign. That's your terror dream. CHRIS: Apparently. 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. Hey, Chris, how's your week going? CHRIS: Oh, it's going fine. Yeah, I'll go with fine. I had to upgrade my operating system. Enough things had stopped working or seemed to be pestering me about it regularly, which normally I'm going to ignore that for as long as I can. That's sort of where I'm at in the world these days. Like, I don't want to upgrade because I don't know what's going to break and whatnot, but then things had broken already. Text messages were no longer showing up on my computer. And it turns out that the primary way that I interact with text messages is by replying to them through my computer. I don't want to type on my phone, that's not a thing. I'm already grumpy enough about text messages, to begin with, that I will regularly respond switching to email, and then I'll go off from there. But yeah, they stopped working, it stopped connecting. And then I got this really weird message from Apple when I tried to sign in. And I was like, I feel like I should at least try to upgrade to the new operating system, which I think has been out for a long time, and I've just been ignoring it. But then I had the added problem of I didn't have enough space on my computer to install it, which I tried once before. So I downloaded the installer, but the installer downloader doesn't check whether or not you have enough space to do the install. So it's just like, hey, so you know how you didn't have enough space? Well, we took up the remainder of it, and now you can't do anything about it. And the installer is hidden somewhere in the computer. So at one point, it just went away, and then suddenly had a lot of space on my computer. But finally, I decided to bite the bullet. I found a bunch of caches on my computer. So there was a cache for my backup utility, which is called Arq, A-R-Q, which was a lot of space. It was like 20 gigs or something like that. So it was like, sorry, you have no more cache. I'm pretty sure my computer's going to light on fire the next time it tries to do a backup because it has no cache to rely on, and it's got to try a lot harder, pull a lot more data down. I don't know what it does, but whatever. It's going to do that. And then, I found the more general application caches on the computer. Spotify had like six gigs of cache. Well, what are you doing? Aren't you streaming from

This week Chris talks about Bifunctor optics and introduces an app he's been liking recently called CleanShot X, which is a replacement for the built-in screenshot utilities on OSX. Steph talks about her experience using New Relic Browser Stats to troubleshoot a slow page and burnout. Who's feeling it? (Raise your hand.) How do we identify it? What do we do about it? Svelte Is Beloved! - Stack Overflow Survey Bifunctors CleanShot X Next.js Image Transcript: CHRIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. And we're off the rails already, everybody. It's going to be a good one. 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. We talked recently that I have a new laptop. So I have been migrating the things that I'm accustomed to over to my new laptop, but I also love that clean, fresh start. So as part of that fresh start, I was like, what if I use Safari? What if I just switch? I'm a Chrome user, for the record. I'm pretty sure you know that, but just to share that. I was like, well, what if I just switched and I try out Safari for a while? So that was the thing. CHRIS: So I heard the words try and the phrase that was the thing, but I'm going to probe a little deeper. How'd that go? Was it good, great, not so great? STEPH: Honestly, it was fine. I did enjoy being in a new environment to see how Safari handles bookmarks and then also the inspector. So it was novel to be in a different browser where I really don't spend much time in a different browser other than when I need to test this specific UI bug or things like that. But the reason that I ended up migrating back to Chrome was frankly for Chrome profiles because I really like that I can have this clear separation now between my work life and my personal life, and then it also keeps me signed in. So my personal email versus my thoughtbot one versus before the Chrome profiles, which I'm not sure how recent of an addition that is where Chrome introduced that feature. But before, I just always had to be signed into both, and it was just all together in one spot. But now I really like that I can separate. And it's more intentional where I'm like, oh, I'm going into work mode, so I just want that profile versus I do need to hop over to my personal side for a while. So that was the thing that brought me back. CHRIS: Interesting. I don't take advantage of that at all. I know of the feature, but it's never really called to me. And if anything, I do the opposite. So specifically, this doesn't work in the browser, but on my phone, I use the iOS Gmail client, and I use the unified inbox. So I just have everything come together. And I subscribe to the idea of, I don't know, it's all work and stuff. And hopefully, people aren't sending me a lot on the weekends, and I will defer and snooze and all of that. But that holistic view pulls me in. And so it's interesting that you're just on the other side of that. It totally makes sense. I actually think I'm wrong here. I think I'm doing the wrong, bad thing. But it's interesting just the way we're on the two sides of that. STEPH: I can see the merits for your approach where it all goes to one place. So you have one place to go and triage, and I think that makes total sense. I haven't triaged my personal life well enough that I want it to come into my work life. And that's the one that needs the more immediate response typically. So I want to prioritize all of my work emails and focus on that and then have my personal ones more like, okay, I've got some time, and I want to check on this. But I don't want to blend those together. Because frankly, I need to do some more triage on the personal side if I'm just going to bring it all into one space. CHRIS: Interesting. Yeah, I would almost view it from the other point of view of I want to protect my personal space, and this is obviously not what I do based on what I just said but protect my personal time so that when it's evenings or weekends or whatever, that I'm not seeing work emails in there. I do my best to snooze them and get them out of the way. But if they are coming in, maybe there's something I need to respond to or, I don't know, maybe it's FOMO in a certain way, FOMO but professional FOMO. I don't really know. It's interesting that that's the feature that brought you back. But overall, how was your experience using Safari? I have heard loosely that now most of the browsers are evergreen; even Edge has reall

This is the sweeps week episode, the epic crossover episode, the mega episode! We have a very special episode as Chris, and Steph teamed up with the hosts of three other podcasts to bring you one giant, mega Ruby episode! In this episode, you'll hear from the hosts of Remote Ruby, Rails with Jason, and Brittany Martin, the host of the Ruby on Rails podcast. They cover the origins of their shows, their experiences as hosts, and why podcasting is so important in keeping the Ruby community thriving. Remote Ruby Rails with Jason Ruby on Rails podcast *Transcript: * STEPH: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. This week we have a very special episode as Chris, and I teamed up with the hosts of three other podcasts to bring you one giant, mega Ruby episode! In this episode, you'll hear from the hosts of Remote Ruby, Rails with Jason, and Brittany Martin, the host of the Ruby on Rails podcast. This episode was so much fun to record, and we have Brittany Martin to thank as she organized and moderated this special event. So without further ado, here is the mega Ruby episode. BRITTANY: Welcome, everyone. We have a whopping seven podcast hosts recording today. So, listeners, you are in for a treat. This is the sweeps week episode, the epic crossover episode, the mega episode. We're going to need our editor to insert some epic sound effects right here. Announcer: The mega episode. BRITTANY: So let's go ahead and introduce the crew today. I am Brittany Martin from the Ruby on Rails Podcast. CHRIS OLIVER: I'm Chris Oliver from Remote Ruby. JASON CHARNES: I am Jason Charnes, also from Remote Ruby. ANDREW: I am Andrew Mason, also from Remote Ruby. STEPH: And I'm Stephanie Viccari from The Bike Shed. CHRIS TOOMEY: I'm Chris Toomey from The Bike Shed. JASON SWETT: And I'm Jason Swett from Rails with Jason BRITTANY: Today, we're going to cover the origins of our shows, our experiences as hosts, and why podcasting is so important in keeping the Ruby community thriving. Now I know personally, I really enjoy the origin story behind Remote Ruby. So, Chris Oliver, could you kick us off with that? CHRIS OLIVER: Yeah, we can go back maybe to the first time that Jason and I met, which was Jason emailed me out of the blue and was like, "Hey, are you going to be at RailsConf?" And I wasn't planning on it, but it was over in Kansas City, like four hours away from me. I was like, "No, I'm not going, but I'll meet you." So we went and drove over there and met and have been friends ever since. And Jason had the idea of doing an online meetup. And I'll let him explain where that started and turned into the Remote Ruby Podcast. JASON CHARNES: I thought it would be a good idea. There weren't any online meetups. This was pre even the idea of shutting down the world for a pandemic. And maybe I was just too soon because I got Chris to speak at the first one, and we had 40, 50 people. I spoke at the next one, and there were 20. And by the third one, there were five of us. So it wasn't really a super sustainable thing for me to do. So Chris and I got together and said, "What if we tried podcasting?" Chris, you hadn't really done your own podcast at that point, had you? CHRIS OLIVER: No, I don't think so. And you and I were just having calls every week or whatever just to hang out and chat. And we were like, why don't we just record that and publish that as a podcast? And here we are. JASON CHARNES: Yeah. So we've been doing that. I think we started in 2018, so yeah, three years in June, and somehow people still keep listening to us talk but probably because we brought along our friend, Andrew. ANDREW: Wow. Okay. No, that's not true. But yes, I was a guest on Remote Ruby before I joined as a host. And not to get into the details, but I was on another podcast, and something went down, and I no longer was on that podcast anymore. And Chris and Jason were like, "Do you want to come hang out with us?" And I was like, [chuckles] "Absolutely." So I started doing that, and at the same time, I also started The Ruby Blend with Nate Hopkins and Ron Cooke. And so we were doing that for a while until that had to tragically shut down. But I'm still here with Jason and Chris. I guess I should also mention that Jason Swett gave me my start in podcasting a month or two after I started full-time as a Rails developer on a now archived show called The Ruby Testing Podcast. BRITTANY: Which is the perfect segue because Jason Swett was also my first opportunity to guest on a podcast. So I was already hosting, but I hadn't guested, which is kind of the opposite order. So, Jason, do you want to tell the origin of where Rails with Jason came from? JASON SWETT: Sure. I'd been involved with podcasting since around 2016. I somehow ended up

Chris gives a DB sessions update and talks bifunctors & command objects. Steph shares the coolness of a gem she's been using called after_party, and excitedly gushes about her new laptop. (Chris is hoping to hold off on replacing his until the end of the year and then they can compare!) The two then answer a listener question on retrospectives and how they've seen productive ones run, while giving some of their own helpful opinions on dos and don'ts. They're talking to you, Grumpy Goose! dry-monads gem attr_extras gem after_party gem What Went Well? - Bike Shed 123 What I Believe About Software - Bike Shed 172 Is Agile Over? - Bike Shed 299 Running a Retrospective - Upcase Transcript: STEPH: Cool. [laughter] CHRIS: Good. No, I like what you did there. STEPH: Yeah, I feel like we can get rambling on that one. CHRIS: It's been great. This is what the Bike Shed is at its best. It's the two of us just rambling and being like, well, what about this? And if it's this, then that, then these, and it depends. And it's complicated and it's nuanced. And what about the humans? That's the story of The Bike Shed right there. [laughs] 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. Hey, Chris, how's your week? CHRIS: My week has been good. I have some updates actually on some topics from previous episodes. One of the things that I can update on is the discussion around the cookie versus the database store. So I had posed this as a thing that I was going to be doing in the app for a handful of reasons. Most notably, I wanted the ability to invalidate sessions from the server-side, wanted to have a little more control over that. And so that's a dream that the database-backed session store can do. Eventually, I have to make that actually work in the way that I want. But I was asking the question in that episode, which we can include a link to the specific episode, but I was asking the question of why don't we just do this all the time? The database-backed sessions seem better in all these ways. It's a lower overhead per request because you're just sending the session ID and the cookie instead of the whole payload of the session. You actually can have more data stored in it, a bunch of things that seemed really great. And then right after I introduced it, I figured out the thing. I figured out the secret. It's not a big issue, and we're going to stick with database session stores. But we have to be purposeful because it turns out they are essentially plain text in the database. And so if there's anything that you are putting into the session like say a social security number or an authentication token or other things which naturally I might have done if it was in a cookie that lives on the user's browser and never actually lives on the server, persists on the server, that seems fine to me. But now these things are getting stored in the database and that really changes the calculus, especially because if I'm not purposeful, they'll just stick around for forever. So social security is probably the most pointed example of this. If you happen to have a form in the app that accepts a social security number and you want that to persist through some number of other steps, not actually going to store the social security number in the database because that's a thing that I have actively chosen not to do. I need to send it off to some other system, but I do need to hold onto it for a few minutes. The session is a perfect place to put that unless the session gets stored in my database. STEPH: That's such a great point. I'm so glad you discovered that. And in our recent conversation, we were trying to think of the reasons why this isn't the default case. You may be headed in this direction, but this may also be timely, the fact that you're discovering this issue but also the fact that Rail 6.0 now has encrypted columns. Is that where you're headed with the fact that you can still keep session data in a database? CHRIS: That is a great question, and it is an intriguing option. But it's not the one that I'm going with here. I think broadly, my hope is to completely avoid ever persisting this data in the database, this truly sensitive user-specific PII or PCI or social security numbers or any of these other fancy acronyms that get collected together under the umbrella of I probably don't want that on my server. For those, I'm just opting to push them back into a cookie. So I'm using particularly a...In rails, it's fun because they have a fluent interface where you can just chain together things, so it's cookies.signed.encrypted.whatever, and then you go from there

Tune in as Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, an observability platform, Charity Majors joins Chris to drop some knowlege bombs such as: Thinking of observability as being about the unknown unknowns: Allowing for high cardinality, high dimensionality, ad hoc queries at any point in time. Comparing instrumentation to a muscle: It's a habit that needs to be developed and fostered. Sincere continuous deployment: 15 minutes or bust. And bunches more, since y'all know you hear her name come up at least once during every other episode! Honeycomb.io o11ycast Charity's blog (charity.wtf) Charity on twitter Charity's post on cost of not doing continuous deployment Charity's post - The Engineer Manager Pendulum Transcript: 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 was joined by a special guest, Charity Majors. Now, folks who've been listening to the show lately will know I've been mentioning one idea or another from Charity almost every episode these days. Charity's work spans from the deeply technical through to the deeply human. And across all of it, she brings such a wealth of experience in pragmatism while consistently providing grounded, actionable advice about how we can improve all aspects of our work. And to give a bit more context for those who aren't as familiar with Charity's work, she is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, which is an observability platform that we talk about more in the episode. Charity is also a prolific blogger, tweeter and speaker, and general leaver of digital breadcrumbs for the rest of us to hopefully follow. And Charity is also one of the hosts of the o11ycast podcast. That's observability, o11y podcast. And in fact, in the intro to the first o11ycast episode, Charity provides a beautiful summary of her approach to the varied work that we do. Quote, "I'm someone who's always been drawn to where the beautiful theory of computing meets the awkward, messy reality of actually trying to do things." And that quote rang so deeply true to me when I heard it and really encompassed what I see across the variety of work that Charity has shared with us. And frankly, I've been so impressed with the quality and quantity of wonderful content that Charity has shared over the years. I was really just thrilled to get the chance to sit down and talk with her directly. So without further ado, here's our conversation with Charity Majors. Thanks so much for joining us today, Charity. CHARITY: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. CHRIS: As I've mentioned on many an episode, I've been following your work for a while now. And at this point, I would say that just about every Bike Shed episode has a reference to you and some piece of work that you have put out into the world, whether it be a tweet or a blog post, or a conference talk or something. So I'm so grateful for all the work that you put out into the world and for taking the time to chat with us today. CHARITY: That's so exciting. Yay. I feel right at home here then. [chuckles] CHRIS: Fantastic. Well, I want to dive in. I think it's sort of the core of some of the conversation that we'll be having, which is around instrumentation and observability, and observability as a newer, noveler form of how we think about this space. But to give a bit of context, I was hoping you might be able to give just the quick summary for anyone who might not be as familiar with observability as a concept and what that means now, and Honeycomb as a product and how it offers affordances around observability and pushes that envelope forward. CHARITY: Yeah, I think of the observability as being about the unknown unknowns. For a long time, all of the complexity was really bound up in the app. You had the load balancer, you had the app, and the database. And all the complexity you could just attach to a debugger and step through it if you had to. But then we kind of blew up the app, the monolith, and now it's in services scattered to the winds, and you can't just trace it. And so observability is a way of passing that context along hop by hop so that you can actually slice and dice in real-time. And the hardest problem is not usually debugging the code. It's finding out wherein the system is the code that you need to debug. And observability, if you accept my definition, which is it's about unknown unknowns, that you should be able to ask any question of your systems, understand any internal state just by observing it from the outside, well, then a lot of things proceed from that, in my opinion. Like, you need to be able to handle high cardinality, high dimensionality. You need to be able to string together a lot of these high cardinality dimensions. You need to

What do you get when you mix a worm and a hammerhead shark? Also ants. Steph made some cool new discoveries in bug-land. She also talks about deploys versus releases and how her and her team has changed their deploy structure. Two words: feature flags. Chris talks about cookies: cookie sessions, cookie payloads, cookie footprints, cookie storing. Mmm cookies! The convo wraps up with lamenting over truthiness in code. Truthy or falsy? What's your call? Flipper Bike Shed - Ask a Question Form Transcript: STEPH: At the top of my notes for today, I have marauder ants and hammerhead worms. [laughs] CHRIS: I'm sorry, what? I lost you there for...not lost you, but I stopped following. I...what? 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 good week. It's been busy, lots has been happening. I learned about a new creature that's in our backyard. They're called hammerhead worms. Have you ever heard of those? CHRIS: I've heard of hammerhead and worms, but not together. The combination is new and novel for me. STEPH: Cool. Cool. So take a hammerhead shark and a worm and combine the two and then you have a hammerhead worm. And it rained really heavily here recently because there's a tropical storm that's making its way up the East Coast. And when I was outside on the porch, I noticed that there were these new worms or worms that I'd never seen before on the back porch. And so I had to Google them to understand because they had the interesting hammer-shaped head. And I found out that they're called hammerhead worms. They're toxic worms that prey on earthworms. And they're basically immortal because if you cut them into multiple pieces, each section can regenerate into a fully developed organism within a few weeks, which is bananas. And a lot of people online highly recommend that you should kill them because they are a toxic predator and they prey on earthworms, which you want in your garden and in your yard. But I didn't, but I learned about them. CHRIS: Wow. That's got some layers there, toxic, intense worms that you can cut in half. And so does their central nervous system just spread throughout their whole body? Where's their brain? How does it...I don't have any real thoughts here. That's just a bunch of stuff, and it's awesome. Thank you for sharing. STEPH: I will warn you. I wouldn't read about hammerhead worms right before bed. Otherwise, you might have some nightmares because the way that they do prey and consume earthworms or other creatures that they prey on is the stuff of horror movies, which I find happens so much in nature, but them especially they fall into that category. So just be aware if you're reading about hammerhead worms and how they consume their food. Now I feel like everybody's going to go read. But as long as you have that warning, I feel safe sending you in that direction. CHRIS: Yeah, first thing in the morning on a very sunny morning, that is the time to do this research. STEPH: Exactly. He got it. I also learned about marauder ants because apparently, this is the day that I'm having. I'm learning about all these creatures. But I won't go into that one, but they're really interesting. And this one's thanks to someone on Twitter who shared, specifically @Rainmaker1973 is their Twitter handle if you want to go see what they shared about marauder ants. So I'll just leave that one for those that are curious. I won't dive into that one because I don't want to take us in the direction of that we're all about worms and ants now. CHRIS: Not all about worms and ants but definitely some. STEPH: But in technical news, I've got some stuff to share, but I was so excited about worms and ants that now I have to figure out which is the thing that I want to share from the week. So there's a couple of interesting things that I'd love to chat about with you, one of them, in particular, is there's been some interesting conversations going on with my client team around deploys versus releases and how we have changed our deploy structure, and then how that has impacted the rest of the team as they are communicating to customers as to what features are available. And there have been some interesting conversations around how to migrate this process forward. So to provide a bit of context, we were previously having very strict, rigid deploys. So we would plan our deploys typically every Tuesday. It was usually once a week. And then we would make sure that everything had been through QA, things had been reviewed and tested. And then we would have one of those more like grand

The big "Three Oh Oh!" What a milestone for this podcast! Aside from celebrating that the show has made it this far, Chris gives some followup on some Inertia.js issues he had been having, and talks about open source licenses and legality and testing against external APIs. Steph has thoughts on mozzarella sticks and what makes good ones; particularly the cheese to bread ratio... They then, together, answer a listener question re: knowledge silos: Jan asked, "Our team (3 pairs) is currently working on two different projects due to that fact we are creating information silos. Now we are looking into ways how we can minimize those information silos. Do you have any ideas how we could achieve this?" With switching pairs they are unsure about it as it can be difficult for new pairs to get up to speed. inertia-rails thread safety Rails Cache-Control no-store fix Transcript: STEPH: I have no shame. CHRIS: That's important in this industry. STEPH: [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 learned along the way. Hey, Chris. So today's an exciting day. It's a rather momentous day, at least in my world, because today is our 300th episode. CHRIS: 300? That is incredible. STEPH: That's an incredible amount of episodes. And it made me pause and reflect on how many episodes I have been a part of. And I've realized it's over 100. I think it's around 104 or something like that, and I can't believe it. Time flies when you're behind the mic. CHRIS: Time does fly, yeah. So yeah, fully a third of these you've been involved in. I don't know what the number is. And I'm just so grateful to Derek Prior and Sage Griffin, who started this whole process. And then to Thom Obarski, who was the producer for so long, and Mandy Moore, who recently joined us and has been doing a wonderful job of carrying that forward and to you, Steph, because this has just been such a joy to work on. Yeah, it's just a joy to be on the show and to get to chat with you each week and share some things. And frankly, learn from folks writing in questions and sharing pointers with us, and it really is such a delight. And yeah, 300 is pretty momentous. STEPH: The listener questions and feedback have undoubtedly been a highlight for me. That is one of the areas that I love the most. I love the questions. I also love when people provide helpful answers to us, and then they help us out in return and also, all the incredible guests that we've had on the show. It has been phenomenal. I'm also very thankful to have been part of this journey and appreciate everyone that has got us here today. I wonder what the fourth iteration of The Bike Shed looks like. I consider this the third iteration because the first iteration was Sage Griffin and Derek Prior. The second iteration was where you took over The Bike Shed, and then you were hosting a number of incredible guests on the show. And then the third iteration is the iteration that we're living, so I wonder what the fourth will look like. CHRIS: Oh, that is an interesting question. Hopefully, you and I get to hang out for a good bit longer. But at some point, much like the Green Lantern, this will get passed on, and someone else will take up the mantle and tell some stories. But, yeah, hopefully, that's not too soon because I certainly enjoy hanging out with you. STEPH: Oh, I agree. I certainly enjoy this, and I'm in no rush to leave The Bike Shed. But I think it's just fun thinking about the next people that will carry this journey forward. CHRIS: And determine the color of The Shed. STEPH: And determine. I mean, that is their right. As host and co-host, they get to determine the color of The Shed. CHRIS: 300 episodes in, and we still haven't figured it out. So I guess we got to keep trying. STEPH: Oh, I have. I already know what color it is. CHRIS: Is it yellow? STEPH: It's yellow. CHRIS: Yeah. Okay. [laughs] STEPH: I like how we said yellow at the same time, you know. [laughs] CHRIS: I do, although I feel like it's wrong to have a color in mind, or at least I want to dig in and talk about it for a while just to be in keeping with the show, but... STEPH: One must first argue before deciding and then argue again. But to not continue bikeshedding on The Bike Shed, what's new in your world? CHRIS: My week has been good. Actually, I have two quick updates on various Inertia things that I've shared in previous weeks. So we can include a show notes link for the two different episodes where I talked about these respective things. But there was one weird issue that I ran into with Inertia where it could start clicking a button that would delete, was behaving weirdly and occasionally, intermittently

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!