The Bike Shed

On this episode of the Bike Shed, Chris is joined by thoughtbot CTO Joe Ferris. Chris & Joe start by talking about all things data. More and more we're building applications that need to manage medium to large data sets, combining data from multiple sources, and our approaches and frameworks need to evolve to match these needs. Joe provides the low down on how this can shape the way we build our applications. As part of the discussion around data they dig into the idea of event logs, most notably discussing Apache Kafka and it's unique approach to capturing state by storing an immutable event log, and the resulting architecture that falls out of this. Lastly they chat about the Scala language both in relation to data and streaming applications, but also more generally as an example of an approachable yet powerful strongly typed language. Kafka Redux Flink Spark Postgres Write-Ahead Log "Turning the database inside out with Apache Samza" by Martin Kleppmann Big Data or Pokemon Datomic RabbitMQ A

On this episode of the Bike Shed, we're thrilled to welcome special guest John Resig, creator of jQuery and front-end architect at Khan Academy. The conversation begins with a discussion around John's work on jQuery, one of the most influential libraries in the history of the web. From there the discussion shifts to John's role as front-end architect at Khan Academy and how he balances feature development and paying down tech debt or exploring new technologies. John and Chris then discuss the rate of change of front-end technologies, and John provides wonderfully pragmatic guidance distinguishing the rate of innovation from the perceived needed rate of adoption. The conversation also ventures into discussions around the trade-offs involved in open sourcing internal projects. Lastly, they touch briefly on the topic of GraphQL based on John's work at Kahn Academy, as well as his in-progress book, The GraphQL Guide. A little bit of everything with one of the most influential web developers of the past 15 years.

On this episode of the Bike Shed, Matt Sumner returns to chat with Chris about their recent adventures. They start by discussing Matt's ongoing work building an open source Ethereum implementation in Elixir and the joys of a test suite guiding your work. From there, Matt asks Chris about Chris's recent trip to speak at GraphQL Summit and his take on the current state of affairs in the GraphQL world (hint, it's good). Matt and Chris then discussed the progress they've made on simpler form handling in React applications and consider how far they could go with this, and then discuss the recent announcement of React Hooks. And finally, they discuss the fact that thoughtbot is hiring, and we think you should apply! Head on over to thoughtbot.com/jobs and drop us a line :) Mana - ethereum Heroku SSH Erlang OTP GraphQL Summit 2018 GraphQL Foundation Apollo GraphQL Prisma Graph.cool Falcor (Netflix GraphQL-like library) JSON Graph Lee Byron Nick Schrock Shopify GraphQL Design Tutorial Chris Toomey: React & Graph

On this episode of the Bike Shed Chris is joined by Derek Prior, former thoughtbotter and previous host of this very podcast. Derek has recently moved on from thoughtbot to try out a new role as an engineering manager at GitHub. During their conversation they talk about Derek's experience shipping the "Suggested Changes" feature on github.com, and the MVP process Derek brought to the planning and development of the feature. They also touch on the architecture of GitHub and where services and monoliths fit in the world of larger systems like GitHub. Lastly they discuss Chris & Derek's respective transitions into more roles with a bit less code and a bit more management. As usual, this one has a little bit of everything! Suggested Changes feature GitHub Universe GitHub Actions Project Papercuts at GitHub Are Services the New Rewrite Bike Shed Episode GitHub Scientist Be Plucky Manager Training

On this episode of the Bike Shed, Chris is joined by Christina Entcheva, developer from thoughtbot's New York studio who has been a product manager and designer previously in her career, but has since settled in to her role as a developer. Chris & Christina share a conversation ranging from their shared love of "boring Rails apps", Christina's recent work with headless CMSs like Contentful & Prismic, and a discussion around Rails performance. Throughout the conversation they touch on theme's of keeping a focus on user needs throughout the work of developing applications. Contentful Prismic Essential Scala book Nate Berkopec The Complete Guide to Rails Performance Mark/Compact GC in MRI - Aaron Patterson Benchmark module in Ruby Postgres Table Partitioning Getting Real book by Basecamp It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work Upcase is now Free! Testing Interaction with 3rd-party APIs on Upcase Composition Over Inheritance on Upcase

On this episode of the Bike Shed Chris is joined by George Brocklehurst, development director in thoughtbot's New York studio. The conversation starts with a discussion around progressive enhancement and the state of the modern web, and then shifts to focus on George's recent explorations of machine learning. This episode is a perfect introduction to the topic of ML, and provides a great summary of why you might want to start working with it and how to go about that. Does Progressive Enhancement Have a Place in Today's Web? Vue.js Electron React Native React Native for Desktop Frameworks and Tools For Exploring Machine Learning NumPy SciPy Jupyter Notebook Pandas scikit-learn Natural Language Toolkit (NLKT) spaCy gensim Getting Started with Machine Learning: Intro to Machine Learning Workshop What is Machine Learning? Named Entity Recognition Recommending blog posts with machine learning

On this episode of the Bike Shed, Chris is joined by Josh Clayton, thoughtbot's managing director in our Boston studio. Chris and Josh spend the episode discussing the various patterns and trends they see in the world of web development. Specifically, they touch on server side frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Phoenix in the Elixir world. In addition, they discuss a variety of front end trends including the move towards typed languages like ReasonML, TypeScript, Elm, PureScript, and Scala.js, as well as frameworks like React, Ember, Angular, and Vue.js. Bike Shed 20 w/ Josh Clayton: Intentionally Excruciatingly Painful Google Lighthouse Beyond React 16 by Dan Abramov - JSConf Iceland AirBnB Moving Away from React Native Josh Steiner - Elm native UI in production Announcing Purple Train ReasonML Elm TypeScript PureScript Scala.js Software disenchantment blog post 166: Are Services the New Rewrite? Apollo Client Vue.js Thoughtworks Technology Radar Parcel Bundler Terser javascript minifier Rufo - Ruby autoform

In this special crossover episode, Chris is joined by Chad Pytel, Co-founder & CEO of thoughtbot and host of Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, to discuss the content, history, and the process of making Upcase, thoughtbot's online learning platform, FREE. Giant Robots Podcast Upcase Test Driven Rails Mastering Git Fundamentals of TDD SOA on The Bike Shed Onramp to Vim thoughtbot Purpose Statement Chad on Twitter

Joël Quenneville joins Chris to discuss Elm, the strongly typed functional programming language for writing reliable client side web apps. They discuss recent changes from the 0.19 release including reduced bundle size from dead code elimination, the somewhat controversial removal of custom operators. Anecdotally, Joël and team saw a reduction from 31.5K to 16.6K in bundle size going from 0.18 to 0.19 and felt no pain from the custom operators removal, so a big net win for them with this new version. Along the way Joël and Chris detour into the complexity of managing a project and community like Elm's and discuss Joël‘s recent work with the thoughtbot apprentice program. To round things out, Joël and Chris discuss the power of using a type system like Elm's to constrain the valid states of your application and make your apps more robust and maintainable. Elm - A delightful language for reliable webapps. Elm 0.19 Release Notes Webpacker Elm 0.19 - Dead Code Elimination Scala.js The reasoning behind removing u

Steph Viccari joins Chris for a conversation starting with a discussion of some deployment and orchestration issues Chris was helping out with, followed by some of Steph's recent experiences with JSONB in postgres and the relative trade-offs of unstructured data. The heart of the conversation revolves around the core processes we use to develop software touching on sprint planning & story points, deadlines, the place for refactoring and code review in the regular cadence of development, and the often lamented retrospective meeting. Aptible - PAAS with strong security and HIPAA compliance Heroku Shield Google hiding www in URLs Auth0 - Identity management and auth as a service ActiveStorage - Rails's built in filie attachment framework Postgres JSON & JSONB Types The Real Story Behind Story Points Laurie Young Post on His Use of Story Points Deadlines XKCD - And Check Whether the Photo is of a Bird Headspace meditation

Matt Sumner joins Chris for a discussion around Matt's recent adventures with the block chain and Ethereum, as well as tackling the thorny issue of server rendered vs client side apps. They cover a bit of history, a bit of opinion, and some practical considerations to keep in mind when tackling rich client development. Ethereum Ethereum Proof of Stake Browser History APIs including pushState SOAP Ember's heroic focus on the URL & Routes GraphQL TypeScript Vimium Boston React Conference

Chris is joined by Paul Smith to discuss Crystal, a statically-typed and compiled language with a Ruby inspired syntax. Paul has spent much of the past few years exploring Crystal and building a new web framework called Lucky. Paul's infectious enthusiasm for the Crystal language shines through in this discussion covering some of the unique features of Crystal & Lucky, but there is plenty to enjoy even if you're not specifically interested in Crystal. With Lucky, Paul has done a great job of taking the best of what has been built in other frameworks and bring it to Crystal, drawing inspiration from Ruby & Rails, Elixir & Phoenix, and even PHP and the Laravel framework. There's something in this episode for everyone! Crystal If You Gaze Into nil, nil Gazes Also Into You Elm Scala Elixir Elixir Phoenix Laravel Laravel Mix Lucky on GitHub Render HTML pages in Lucky Actions and Routing in Lucky Browser tests with LuckyFlow Dusk selectors Guido Van Rossum, Python BDFL, Stepping down VS Code BikeShed e

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

Chris is joined by Rachel Mathew to discuss Rachel's recent experiences with Scala on a handful of client and side projects. They discuss the benefits of working within a type system, learning to work with a compiler, and the process of getting to know a new language and paradigm. Along they way they dip into the complexity of twitter as a platform for discussion and making improvements to development workflows. Scala Scala implicits Kotlin Four stages of competence Scala Play - Full-featured Scala web framework, comparable to Rails http4s - Lower level Scala web framework SOAP - An approach to building APIs popular before the focus on REST APIs WSDL - Schemas in the land of SOAP Sangria - Scala GraphQL library neo4j - An example of a graph database Are Services the New Rewrite? - recent Bike Shed episode discussion microservice architecture 283: Overcoming Awkward Data (Joe Ferris) - Recent Giant Robots episode with Joe Ferris discussing "awkward data" GraphQL Code Generation Purple Train App

Chris is joined by German Velasco for a discussion ranging from German's recent transition to remote working to the wonders of the Elixir language and the Erlang platform, blockchain, Ethereum, TypeScript, the Language Server Protocol, and more! tmate - shared terminal sessions via a special build of tmux Sneak - Human contact for remote teams (persistent video chat for teams) Ryan Tomayko - Your team should work like an open source project - great post with actionable advice for teams adopting the remote life How to Create a Distributed Work Culture 5 Things that Suck about Remote Work Taking the Pain Out of Video Conferences thoughtbot.com/jobs - Come work with us! Elixir - The language German loves! Pattern matching in Elixir Hindley–Milner type system dialyzer - Erlang static analysis Erlang OTP - a set of Erlang libraries & principles that carry over to Elixir Erlang "Let It Crash" Blockchain Ethereum Proof of Authority GraphQL VS Code Language Server Protocol TypeScript 3.0

Chris & Derek discuss the world of services, exploring the various forms SOA can take, the oft stated benefits, and some of the pitfalls they commonly see in the wild. The discussion ranges from alternative architectures, guidelines for how to think about services within your platform, and even includes an anecdote about thoughtbot's foray into the world of SOA on Upcase. Things You Should Never Do, Part I The Entity Service Antipattern The Past, Present, and Future of GraphQL Native - Nick Schrock Netflix - Chaos Monkey Goodbye Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstar (Segment) Upcase

Chris & Derek talk about beginnings and ends, borrowing from their consulting mindset for a conversation spanning CI, deployment, communication, team structure, and everything in between. bin/setup ActiveStorage confi on heroku Rails encrypted "Credentials" 12 Factor App Semisonic- Closing Time Suspenders changes moving to per-topic generators Ruby bug Methods with more than 32 keyword arguments with default values have some of the arguments set to default despite being passed in.

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After Sean confronts some breaking changes to Diesel, we discuss what we like about Visual Studio Code and how changing your tools can change your perspective. Visual Studio Code Language Server Protocol Vim-LSP Seamlessly Navigate Vim and tmux Splits rcm: rc file (dotfile) management Add facility for syncing VSCode extensions How to exit the Vim editor? Have you evaluated your toolchain recently? Tuple

Sam Phippen joins us to discuss the maintenance burden of supporting old Rubies, service oriented architecture, and explorations of GraphQL and graph databases. Sam Phippen on Twitter RFC: rspec-rails versioning strategy Mix deps documentation NP-hardness bundle update --conservative docs Use create_or_find_by to avoid race condition in Rails 6.0 Dgraph — A Distributed, Fast Graph Database 100: Nouns You Can Verb | The Bike Shed - Sam's previous discussion of GRPC on the podcast PostgreSQL: WITH Queries (Common Table Expressions) Work at DigitalOcean Jobs - thoughtbot Careers and Jobs at Shopify