The Bike Shed

On this week's episode Steph and Chris dig into MVP thinking and asking how we can write as little code as possible before finding out if any user will actually want the thing we're building. They also tackle a listener question around Vim and the general ROI on honing our developer tools, discuss some of the subtleties of HTTP and forms as well as the difficulties when half of our UI is in React and the other half Rails, and lastly chat a bit about their adaptation to full-time remote work. VS Code (https://code.visualstudio.com/) Mastering the Vim Language talk by Chris (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlR5gYd6um0) Bogdan Gusiev's Rails issue describing the select multiple behavior (https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/1552) postgres check_constraint (https://www.postgresqltutorial.com/postgresql-check-constraint/) Formik (https://formik.com/) react-hook-form (https://react-hook-form.com/) Balsamiq Mockups (https://balsamiq.com/) 7 Tips for Better User Interviews with Jaclyn Perrone (https://www.userintervie

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss troubleshooting a race condition, trusting your intuition and pessimistic locks. They also touch briefly on TailWind CSS before diving deep into first impressions of Inertia.js. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN (https://www.expressvpn.com/bikeshed). Click through to get three months for free. ActiveRecord::Locking::Pessimistic#with_lock (https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Locking/Pessimistic.html#method-i-with_lock) Derek Prior's blog post - "Validation, Database Constraint, or Both?" (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/validation-database-constraint-or-both) TailWind CSS (https://tailwindcss.com/) Inertia.js (https://inertiajs.com/)

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss what it really means to make a project "open source". Is it just about making the code publicly available, or should we be considering licenses and responsibility to update? They also discuss the need for breaks and structure now that everyone is working from home, revisit previous discussions around building functionality for admin users and the various admin systems out there, and they round out the conversation with a discussion around doubles vs spies in testing. Note - No snakes were harmed as Steph found them a new home

In this week's episode, Chris shares details about his new greenfield project, implementing static pages with high voltage, opting for just-in-time architecture decisions and working with various admin libraries. Steph discusses various ways to advocate for change across larger engineering teams, recognizing when it's important to push for change vs letting go of strong opinions, and how to gain buy-in from your team. Enroll in our free online-workshop on going remote Being Human in the Absence of Humans: A Live Q&A for Product Teams (https://info.thoughtbot.com/being-human-in-the-absence-of-humans?utm_source=BikeShed&utm_medium=Podcast) Rock & Roll with Ember.js (https://www.balinterdi.com/rock-and-roll-with-emberjs/) suspenders (https://github.com/thoughtbot/suspenders) high voltage (https://github.com/thoughtbot/high_voltage) active admin (https://github.com/activeadmin/activeadmin) rails admin (https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin) administrate (https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate) dependabot (ht

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss the pros and cons of memoization, Chris revisits the discussion around the value of react snapshot tests as well as his continued explorations with Inertia.js while Steph updates us on living in a schema-less world, and they round out the conversation with a listener question about pairing tools, setup, and approaches. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN (https://www.expressvpn.com/BIKESHED). Click through to get three months for free. memoization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoization) Jest snapshot tests (https://jestjs.io/docs/en/snapshot-testing) RSpec custom matchers (https://relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-expectations/v/2-3/docs/custom-matchers/define-matcher) ActiveRecord columns_hash (https://apidock.com/rails/ActiveRecord/Base/columns_hash/class) Inertia.js (https://inertiajs.com/) Tuple (https://tuple.app/) VSCode Live Share (https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/11/15/live-share) tmate (https://tmate.io/) Tomato Timer (https://tomato-timer

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss recent challenges associated with upgrading React Router and uploading files to Amazon S3. Steph also shares her latest reading adventure in cybersecurity and Chris reflects on his time at thoughtbot, how his approach to web development has shifted over the past seven years, and what he plans to do next. The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll (https://amzn.to/3aqoWJM) GNU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU) UNIX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix) POSIX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX) PAX (https://www.paxsite.com/) React Router (https://github.com/ReactTraining/react-router) Enzyme (https://github.com/enzymejs/enzyme) React Testing Library (https://github.com/testing-library/react-testing-library) Amazon S3 (https://aws.amazon.com/s3/) FTP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol) Inertia.js (https://inertiajs.com/) New Pepperjuice Track! (https://soundcloud.com/encorebroderskab/bomlowpromo/s-bty8u) *Correction - The Cuckoo's Egg helped pioneer cybe

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris dig into their shared love of refactoring. How do they think about it, have they ever reverted a refactor, thoughts on deferred refactoring, and more. They also discuss some positive team habits, snapshot testing, the importance of keeping your testing as close to production as possible, and finally, Chris shares some big personal news. Snapshot tests (https://jestjs.io/docs/en/snapshot-testing) styled-components (https://www.styled-components.com/) rollup (https://rollupjs.org/) react-testing-library (https://github.com/testing-library/react-testing-library) "Don't worry about this tech debt, we'll clean it up next sprint." (https://twitter.com/markdalgleish/status/1219174509309087744)

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph respond to a listener question about the complex tradeoffs between craft, preferences, and business needs. They also revisit Steph's recent work with mirage factories, Chris's struggles with test failures, and discuss Steph's recent use of the actsasparanoid gem. This episode is brought to you by Clubhouse (http://go.thoughtleaders.io/1658420200225). Click through to get 2 free months on any paid plan. Mirage.js (https://miragejs.com/) Creating Ember Data models on the client with Mirage (https://www.ember-cli-mirage.com/docs/testing/integration-and-unit-tests#creating-ember-data-models-on-the-client-with-mirage) FactoryBot (https://github.com/thoughtbot/factory_bot) Sam Selikoff (https://twitter.com/samselikoff/) Babel (https://babeljs.io/) Browserlist (https://github.com/browserslist/browserslist) actsasparanoid (https://github.com/ActsAsParanoid/acts_as_paranoid) Default scopes in Rails (https://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_querying.html#applying-a-default-sc

On this week's episode, Steph is joined by Joël Quenneville. It's the season for CFPs (call for proposals) and Joël shares insights about his past conference talk submissions, both the accepted and rejected. They also discuss writing habits that help increase blogpost frequency and helping teams upgrade their Rails application. Joël's "Rolling Random Romans" talk (https://youtu.be/YxGWQdFo2Yc) Steph's "Building Compliant Health Tech Products" Workshop (https://info.thoughtbot.com/building-compliant-health-tech-products-recording) Joël's "Working with Maybe" talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43eM4kNbb6c) Joël and Rachel's "Beyond the Whiteboard" talk (https://youtu.be/8FkkMkeJKU8) elm-conf (https://twitter.com/elmconf) Joël's "Conference talk proposal examples" (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/conference-talk-proposal-examples) Sarah Mei "What Your Conference Proposal Is Missing" (http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2014/04/07/what-your-conference-proposal-is-missing/) Noel Rappin's "What I Learned from Reading 429 C

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph celebrate the new Bike Shed website and logo! Steph finds a new way to optimize her keyboard happiness and Chris dabbles with Zsh auto-suggestions. They also explore the team and technical trade-offs in the pursuit of clean code and respond to a listener question about building products that meet strict security policies. This episode is brought to you by Clubhouse (http://go.thoughtleaders.io/1658320200211). Click through to get 2 free months on any paid plan. Karabiner-Elements (https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/) Oh My Zsh (https://ohmyz.sh/) Fish shell (https://fishshell.com/) zsh-autosuggestions (https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions) Steve Losh - Shift Key Training Wheels (https://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/a-modern-space-cadet/#s16-shift-key-training-wheels) Learn Vimscript the Hard Way (https://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/) Grammarly (https://www.grammarly.com/) Dan Abramov - Goodbye, Clean Code (https://overreacted.io/goodbye-clean-code/) C

On this week's episode, Steph shares more of her Ember adventures, specifically sharing some of her work with the Mirage API mocking and prototyping library, and her search for factories and more ergonomic data in tests. Chris shares some struggles he's had recently with automation and tooling around deployment and releasing packages, and they discuss the inherent trade-offs that we have to consider when automating anything. Lastly they touch on Twitter's alt text accessibility features, and answer a listener question about using React without having an API, and instead just using it as a more dynamic view layer. Mirage.js (https://miragejs.com/) RSpec instance doubles (https://relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-mocks/v/3-2/docs/verifying-doubles/using-an-instance-double) Semantic release (https://github.com/semantic-release/semantic-release) Heroku Review Apps (https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/github-integration-review-apps) Netlify pull request builds (https://www.netlify.com/tags/pull-request/) Twitter alt tex

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph revisit the long-lived feature branch Chris has been working on and chat about adventures with Yalc. They also dive into the common questions and concerns associated with coding bootcamps, thoughtbot's exciting new partnership with Resilient Coders, and what it would be like to "start over". This episode is brought to you by Clubhouse (http://go.thoughtleaders.io/1658220200124). Click through to get 2 free months on any paid plan. yalc (https://github.com/whitecolor/yalc/) thoughtbot + Resilient Coders (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot/status/1216812506716557313) Bless the Broken Road (https://youtu.be/lZp6pmgbZyU) Railscasts (http://railscasts.com) Destroy All Software (https://www.destroyallsoftware.com)

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris catch up in their first recording of 2020. They discuss git workflows and the surprisingly strong opinions often associated with them, testing at all levels of your application, Steph gives a quick summary of her Ember adventures, and they round out the discussion with some new years systems building and Star Wars reviews. This episode is brought to you by Clubhouse (http://go.thoughtleaders.io/1658120200117). Click through to get 2 free months on any paid plan. Ember Documentation (https://emberjs.com/learn/) JSON Schema (https://json-schema.org/) Pretender (https://github.com/pretenderjs/pretender) Apollo GraphQL (https://www.apollographql.com/) React Testing Library (https://testing-library.com/docs/react-testing-library/intro) Write good commit messages by blaming others (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/write-good-commit-messages-by-blaming-others) (German's blog post) Prettier (https://prettier.io/)

On this week's episode, Steph is joined by George Brocklehurst, a Development Director in the NYC thoughtbot office. Steph and George chat about the variety of projects and technologies that caught their attention during thoughtbot's recent internal hackathon. They also dive into Gitsh, a dedicated shell for Git commands, as they chat about preferred git workflows and George shares his recent adventure in updating Gitsh to support tab completion. FirebaseFlowGitsh - An interactive shell for gitUpcase - Learn Gitsh

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss their recent holiday hackathon efforts building a game in Elm. They discuss their experiences with Elm and the broader prospects of using Elm in more production applications. They also discuss the new git subcommands "git switch" and "git restore", and round things out with a listener question concerning FactoryBot and "minimum viable factories".Git new commands (git switch & git restore)Live playable version of the hackathon gameReaction Game RepoLessons Learned: Avoiding Primitives in ElmPrevious Bike Shed discussions about deleting migrationsFactories Should Be The Bare MinimumFactoryBot.lintFactoryBot build_stubbed

On this week's episode, in celebration of the new year, Thom shares the 2019 blooper reel! Words are hard and here's the audio to prove it. Listen to all of the silly mishaps, goofs, and general nonsense captured in between the moments of "professional podcasting". Chris and Steph also reflect on their top themes of 2019 and discuss New Year Systems vs New Year Resolutions.Karabiner-ElementsRailsConf 2016 - The Guest: A Guide To Code Hospitality by Nadia OdunayoAtomic Habits: James Clear

On this week's episode, Steph gets Chris to share his biggest developer regrets over the years. They also revisit a favorite topic of estimation and story points, and round out the conversation with some details from the world of application security.ActiveSupport securecompare and fixedlengthsecurecomparethoughtbot's Application security guidePepper (cryptography)How did this complicated RegEx come to be? (Derek's tweet)Vim RFactoryWhat I Believe About Software - Bike Shed episode 172Say No To More Process blog post

On this week's episode, Chris catches us up on his latest keyboard adventures and Steph shares her first impression of working with Ember.They also dive into Chris's experience triaging errors Sentry, their love for Elm, how teams achieve a consistent velocity, and Steph's upcoming workshop on how to stay agile when building a healthcare product. To bring it home, they respond to a listener who's wondering when is it a good idea to convert a loose data structure (e.g.: hash) into a class?PrettierSentryFree Workshop - How to stay agile when building compliant health tech productsIf you're enjoying The Bike Shed, we'd love it if you could give it a rating or review on iTunes. Thanks!

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss identifying refactoring opportunities by highlighting overly coupled code and Chris announces that he has advanced his vim setup into the 21st century by making the switch to Neovim. Types of CouplingHuskyConquer of Completion PluginDive Into Neovim on UpcaseMastering the Vim LanguageOnramp to VimPostgres Check Constraints

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris dive into the world of crafting pull requests for optimal code review, as well as the flip side of providing code review. How can we make it easy for reviewers, and as reviewers, how can we make it easy for our teammates to incorporate our suggestions?They also discuss the world of testing, from integration to visual to unit testing, and some of the tools an practices they use at each level.Lastly, they discuss Steph's continued pairing adventures and possibly finding her max on the pairing front, a quick update on mechanical keyboards, and Steph shares a teaser of an upcoming workshop she'll be hosting around how to stay agile when building health tech products.This episode of The Bike Shed is sponsored by Honeybadger.XKCD - Crazy Straws Fractal SubgroupsKeyboard MaestroBrett Terpstra - Hyper KeyBrett Terpstra - A Useful Caps Lock KeyVimium chrome extensionTuple apptestcafeCypressPercy.ioJest screenshotsReact Testing LibraryEnzymeReact hooksthoughtbot Health Tech Onlin