The Bike Shed

Inspired by a Slack thread, Joël invites fellow thoughtbotter Aji Slater on the show to talk about when you should use class methods and when you should avoid them. Are there particular anti-patterns ...

18 Okt 202240min

Joël is joined by Amanda Beiner, a Senior Software Engineer at GitHub, who is known for her legendary well-organized notes. They talk about various types of notes: debugging, todos, mental stack, Zete...

11 Okt 202230min

Guest and fellow thoughtbotter Stephanie Minn and Joël chat about how the idea of specialized vocabulary came up during a discussion of the Ruby Science book. We have all these names for code smells a...

27 Sep 202239min

Guest Geoff Harcourt, CTO of CommonLit, joins Joël to talk about a thing that comes up with a lot with clients: the performance of their test suite. It's often a concern because with test suites, unti...

20 Sep 202242min

Why does the history of computing matter? Joël and Developer at thoughtbot Sara Jackson, ponder this and share some cool stories (and trivia!!) behind the tools we use in the industry. This episode...

13 Sep 202231min

Mental models are metaphors that help us understand complex problems we work on. They can be a simplified roadmap over an infinite area of complexity. How does one come up with mental models? How are...

6 Sep 202238min

As developers, we care a lot about code quality. How do we know how good is good enough? When do we stop improving code? Alternatively, when working on code that's really bad, how much do you improve ...

30 Aug 202232min

It's Joël's first episode as host of The Bike Shed! 👋 Joël has fellow thoughtbotter Steve Polito join him to talk about the benefits and drawbacks of "learning in public" and how there are many, man...

23 Aug 202237min