The Bike Shed

Are you passionate about open source but struggling to find time amidst your daily work? Today on the podcast, Joël Quenneville sits down with Steve Polito to discuss practical strategies for making meaningful contributions to the open-source community, even when your schedule is packed. Steve is a developer with extensive experience in the open-source world seamlessly. He’s kno

How can we optimize our time and environment to do our best work as developers? In today’s episode, we are joined by Stephanie Viccari, former co-host of The Bike Shed and Senior Developer at thoughtbot, to unpack the steps for creating work conditions that enhance productivity. In this conversation, we delve into her unique communication style and approach to optimizing producti

How easy is it for a layperson to understand your systems? Jared Norman is a software consultant, speaker, and host of the Dead Code Podcast who specializes in building e-commerce applications in Ruby on Rails. This episode follows two recent talks at RailsConf and covers a theme that emerged from both of them: coupling and cohesion. Tuning in, you’ll gain insights on how to crea

It's Calls for Proposals (CFP) season, and in the process of helping our friends and colleagues flesh out their CFPs, we came up with a few questions to help them frame their proposals for success. After learning about the importance of finding your audience and angle of approach for your CFP, we dive into today's main topic – our Git and GitHub workflows. Joel and Stepha

Have you ever wondered how improvisation can revolutionize coding? In today’s episode, Stephanie sits down with Kasper Timm Hansen to discuss his innovative “riffing” approach to code development. Kasper is a long-time Ruby developer and former member of the Rails core team. He focuses on Ruby and domain modeling, developing various Ruby gems, and providing consulting service

The term ‘nil’ refers to the absence of value, but we often imbue it with much more meaning than just that. Today, hosts Joël and Stephanie discuss the various ways we tend to project extra semantics onto nil and the implications of this before unpacking potential alternatives and trade-offs. Joël and Stephanie highlight some of the key ways programmers project additional mea

Stephanie shares her newfound interest in naming conventions, highlighting a resource called "Classnames" that provides valuable names for programming and design. Joël, in turn, talks about using AI to generate names for D&D characters, emphasizing how AI can help provide inspiration and reasoning behind name suggestions. Then, they shift to Joël's interest in R

Stephanie and Joël discuss the recent announcement of the call for proposals for RubyConf in November. Joël is working on his proposals and encouraging his colleagues at thoughtbot to participate, while Stephanie is excited about the conference being held in her hometown of Chicago! The conversation shifts to Stephanie's recent work, including completing a significant client

Stephanie has a newfound interest in urban foraging for serviceberries in Chicago. Joël discusses how he uses AI tools like ChatGPT to generate creative Dungeons & Dragons character concepts and backstories, which sparks a broader conversation with Stephanie about AI's role in enhancing the creative process. Together, the hosts delve into professional growth and experience

Joël explains his note-taking system, which he uses to capture his beliefs and thoughts about software development. Stephanie recalls feedback from her recent RailsConf talk, where her confidence stemmed from deeply believing in her material despite limited rehearsal. This leads to a conversation about the value of mental models in building a comprehensive understanding of a topic