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The Bike Shed: Daily Summaries Delivered
by thoughtbot
On The Bike Shed, hosts Joël Quenneville, Sally Hall, and Aji Slater discuss development experiences and challenges at thoughtbot with Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and whatever else is drawing their attention, admiration, or ire this week.
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- 3 weeks ago36 min
510: Technical Debt is Technically Risk
Debt metaphors abound! In this week’s episode of The Bike Shed, Aji and Joel ponder the question, what are risks in a code base? From looking at technical risk as a different lens on the idea of technical debt, to the perils inherent with introducing debt into a system, this is certainly the episode to listen to if you don’t want your own projects to blow up in your face. — Your hosts for this episode have been thoughtbot’s own Joël Quenneville and Aji Slater. Don't forget you can now also watch the show over on our YouTube channel! If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page, or check out our website. Got a question or comment about the show? Write to our hosts: hosts@bikeshed.fm This has been a thoughtbot podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - YouTube - LinkedIn - Mastodon - BlueSky © 2026 thoughtbot, inc.
- Oct 6, 202623 min
509: Bringing Back Rails Generators with Rachel Wright-Munn
Joël takes Bike Shed out onto the conference floor at RailsWorld as he interviews programer and streamer Rachael Wright-Munn, aka ChaelCodes. Rachael talks about her efforts to index all ruby events around the world with RubyEvents.org, how she augments her workflows with years old generators rather than LLMs, the rising cost of tokens and why AI may not always be your best solution to a problem. — Keep up to date with all things Ruby conferences, past and future, with Rachael’s index at RubyEvents.org Read more about the SPIDR approach Rachael mentioned. Our guest for this episode was Rachael Wright-Munn, connect with her on LinkedIn or check out her website to follow along with her work. Your host for this episode has been thoughtbot’s own Joël Quenneville. Don't forget you can now also watch the show over on our YouTube channel! If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page, or check out our website. Got a question or comment about the show? Write to our hosts: hosts@bikeshed.fm This has been a thoughtbot podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - YouTube - LinkedIn - Mastodon - BlueSky © 2026 thoughtbot, inc.
- Sep 29, 202642 min
508: The Wonders of Static Analysis
In this week’s episode of The Bike Shed, Aji and Joël dive into the distrust around the phrase ‘programmer discipline’, why you cannot just rely on willpower, and how Static Analysis tools can help with not crossing boundaries. From competing priorities and team member changeovers to documentation not being read, things can still fall through the cracks, so having a tool that can check the ones and zeroes that you send into GitHub. So what makes Static Analysis so different to other forms of analysis? Well, you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out! — Mentioned in this episode: Joel’s talk at Rails World - ‘Harness Engineering on Rails’ Justin Searle’s Standard.rb talk - ‘Let’s Standardize Rails, Once and For All!’ Your hosts for this episode have been thoughtbot’s own Joël Quenneville and Aji Slater. Don't forget you can now also watch the show over on our YouTube channel! If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page, or check out our website. Got a question or comment about the show? Write to our hosts: hosts@bikeshed.fm This has been a thoughtbot podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - YouTube - LinkedIn - Mastodon - BlueSky © 2026 thoughtbot, inc.
- Sep 15, 202644 min
507: Stacked Vertical Slices
The Bike Shed is BACK! Aji and Joel kick off this week’s episode with a fantastic combination of component bugs and how much headspace they take up, historic heraldry vs ChatGPT’S anchoring bias, before diving into the latest big development of the Dev world, Github’s release of stacked PR’s. — Read more about Joël’s adventure in Europe with ChatGPT, and how to structuring conditionals when working with multi-step forms. Your hosts for this episode have been thoughtbot’s own Joël Quenneville and Aji Slater. Don't forget you can now also watch the show over on our YouTube channel! If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page, or check out our website. Got a question or comment about the show? Write to our hosts: hosts@bikeshed.fm This has been a thoughtbot podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - LinkedIn - Mastodon - BlueSky © 2026 thoughtbot, inc.
- Jul 14, 202638 min
506: The Muppet Software Team
It’s time to play the music, it’s time to… get Aji and Sally together again. This week’s episode is a radical one, and a listener suggestion no less; let’s Muppet-cast a software development team! Who would you hire as the content designer? Which of the Muppets would do their best work as the QA? And the most important question of all - which role would be played by the human?! — Your hosts for this episode have been thoughtbot’s own Sally Hall and Aji Slater. Don't forget you can now also watch episodes of The Bike Shed over on YouTube! If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page, or check out our website. Got a question or comment about the show? Write to our hosts: hosts@bikeshed.fm This has been a thoughtbot podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - YouTube - LinkedIn - Mastodon - BlueSky © 2026 thoughtbot, inc.
- Jul 7, 202634 min
505: What is a “principal” or “staff” engineer?
Sally and Joël join forces to discuss the different ways to interpret the role of a ‘principle’ or ‘staff’ engineer, and the handwaving around what those titles mean in terms of the gradation. Whilst Joël dives into career progression within the industry, what a staff engineer does and the different archetypes within it, Sally talks about the importance of having principle engineers in the room during AI discussions, and her previous positive experiences working with principle engineers. — Joel used the Staff Archetypes page from staffeng.com during this episode’s discussion. Your hosts for this episode have been thoughtbot’s own Joël Quenneville and Sally Hall. Don't forget you can now watch every episode of The Bike Shed over on YouTube! If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page, or check out our website. Got a question or comment about the show? Write to our hosts: hosts@bikeshed.fm This has been a thoughtbot podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - YouTube - LinkedIn - Mastodon - BlueSky © 2026 thoughtbot, inc.
- Jun 30, 202632 min
504: AI Ethics (with guests!)
Aji is joined by thoughtbot’s own Tess Griffin and Jimmy Thigpen, two members of the recently established AI Ethics Taskforce, to talk about what kind of conversations are going on in the company around AI. With AI becoming an omnipresent entity in the industry, Tess and Jimmy take a deep dive into how and why the taskforce got started, figuring out what thoughtbot’s stance is around AI in terms of ethics and workflows, and how it relates to their clients. — As mentioned in the episode: Blastoff Rails June 11 - 12, 2026 (past) Albuquerque, New Mexico Freddy discovers America during the World Cup Your guests for this episode have been Tess Griffin and Jimmy Thigpen and your host was thoughtbot’s own Aji Slater. If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page, or check out our website. Got a question or comment about the show? Write to our hosts: hosts@bikeshed.fm This has been a thoughtbot podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - YouTube - LinkedIn - Mastodon - BlueSky © 2026 thoughtbot, inc.
- Jun 23, 202641 min
503: Seeing the Graph for the Trees
Aji and Joël join forces to discuss graph and tree structures, and their connection to the emergent properties, attributes and qualities you can find from a largely connected group of data. Joël dives into their recent graphs and tree work through a contracting system, whilst Aji looks back at when he previously tried to serialise a graph or tree to a database. — Watch Joël’s Blue Ridge Ruby talk here, or Matheus’ Ruby Internal talk from last year here. There’s still time to secure your place at thoughtbot’s upcoming UK meet ups over the next month. London Tech Leader Meetup - Tuesday June 23rd Brighton Tech Leader Meetup - Wednesday June 24th Brighton Ruby - Thursday June 25th Evolve - Friday June 26th Your hosts for this episode have been thoughtbot’s own Joël Quenneville and Aji Slater. If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page, or check out our website. Got a question or comment about the show? Write to our hosts: hosts@bikeshed.fm This has been a thoughtbot podcast. Stay up to date by following us on social media - YouTube - LinkedIn - Mastodon - BlueSky © 2026 thoughtbot, inc.
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About The Bike Shed
On The Bike Shed, hosts Joël Quenneville, Sally Hall, and Aji Slater discuss development experiences and challenges at thoughtbot with Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and whatever else is drawing their attention, admiration, or ire this week.
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