The Bike Shed

Derek and Laila discuss Derek's excitement for Elixir and Phoenix. Is Elixir as fun to write as Ruby? Is Phoenix a better Rails?

We enjoy a wide-ranging discussion with Steve Klabnik on the importance of good documentation, the sometimes cloudy definition of a breaking change, the politics of open source contributions, and work/life balance or boundaries.

It's Open Mic day at The Bike Shed. We hear from other thoughtbot designers and developers about what they're excited to be spending their investment time on lately.

How can an ORM be faster than a SQL String? Laila and Sean discuss the latest happenings in Diesel and why it is that a systems language needs an ORM, anyway.

Software is broken. In this episode, Derek and Sean discuss why exactly it's broken, and what we can do to make it better.

Ruby 2.3 is out! What are we looking forward to trying and what do we think of &. and try? Stick around after the credits for spoiler-filled discussion of Star Wars: The Force Awakens

We discuss the maintenance burden of ActionCable and its dependencies on Rails 5, follow-up on Scenic issues, and discuss implementing migrations anew in Diesel.

Derek shipped Scenic 1.0, which spurs a conversation about semantic versioning and the value of the 1.0 milestone. We discuss what the bar for breaking changes in a library should be and look at some specific changes on tap for Scenic and whether they will or should carry a major version bump.

Sean has shipped early versions of Diesel, an ORM for Rust! We discuss its semantic versioning, the ergonomics of use versus the complexities of implementation, early issues with the API and the road to Diesel 1.0.

We talk about lessons learned from teachable moments both in the moment and decades later.

We speak to Grayson Wright about building Administrate, an open source Rails framework for administrative interfaces. What makes Administrate different than existing solutions and what are the challenges in maintaining high-level dependencies.

Derek and Sean talk about Derek's exploration into Elixir and Phoenix, when and how performance matters, and ways to keep your Rails app fast from day 1.

The ActiveRecord update API is a mess of methods that confuse even ActiveRecord’s maintainer. What are the problems and is there any hope for a solution?

We talk with Yehuda Katz about how much risk is right for you and your app, the sharp tools of high level abstractions, and how our statistical intuition leads us astray on web performance.

Laila and Derek discuss how they have handled forms with complex validation requirements and how to make these forms have a smooth user experience.