The Bike Shed

Joël describes an old-school object orientation exercise that involves circling nouns in a business problem description. The purpose is determining which nouns could become entities or objects in a sy...

19 Sep 202337min

Stephanie has another debugging mystery to share. Earlier this year, Joël mentioned that he was experimenting with a bookmark manager to keep track of helpful and interesting articles. He's happy to r...

12 Sep 202331min

Joël shares he has been getting more into long-form reading. Stephanie talks about the challenges she faced in a new project that required integrating with another company's system. Together, they de...

5 Sep 202336min

Stephanie experienced bike camping. Joël describes his experience during a week when he's in between projects. Stephanie and Joël discuss the concept of code ownership, the mechanisms to enforce it,...

29 Aug 202334min

Want a cool cucumber salad? Joël's got you covered. Stephanie has evolved and found some pickles she enjoys. Experienced programmers use a lot of heuristics or "rules of thumb" about what makes their...

22 Aug 202334min

Stephanie is consciously trying to make meetings better for herself by limiting distractions. A few episodes ago, Joël talked about a frustrating bug he was chasing down and couldn't get closure on, s...

15 Aug 202342min

Joël has been fighting a frustrating bug where he's integrating with a third-party database, and some queries just crash. Stephanie shares her own debugging story about a leaky stub that caused flaky ...

8 Aug 202333min

Stephanie had a small consulting win: saying no to a client. GeoGuessr is all the rage for thoughtbot's remote working culture, which leads to today's topic of forming human connections in a virtual (...

1 Aug 202330min