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The Bike Shed

by thoughtbot

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Latest episodes

510: Technical Debt is Technically Risk

October 13, 2026 · 37 min

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…
509: Bringing Back Rails Generators with Rachel Wright-Munn

October 6, 2026 · 23 min

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…
508: The Wonders of Static Analysis

September 29, 2026 · 43 min

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…
507: Stacked Vertical Slices

September 15, 2026 · 45 min

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…
506: The Muppet Software Team

July 14, 2026 · 39 min

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…

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505: What is a “principal” or “staff” engineer?

July 7, 2026 · 34 min

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…
504: AI Ethics (with guests!)

June 30, 2026 · 32 min

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…
503: Seeing the Graph for the Trees

June 23, 2026 · 41 min

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…
502: Apps That Make Our Work Go

June 16, 2026 · 41 min

Aji and Sally are back together again, this time to discuss the different apps they use to make their workflows and To Do lists easier and quicker to achieve. Sally dives into the Notion calendar system which she uses to coordinate her…
501: What makes for good technical writing?

June 2, 2026 · 34 min

Sally and Joël get technical as they lay out their thoughts on blog posts. Our hosts pick apart what makes a good technical blog post, why consistent terms are more important than you might think when communicating with your audience…
500: Celebrating with past hosts

May 26, 2026 · 58 min

The Bike Shed celebrates its 500th episode with hosts new and old as they reflect on the show’s history and ask, what’s new in your world? Our past hosts look back at their time on the show, their favourite moments while hosting, what…
499: BikeTube ShedTacular!

April 28, 2026 · 49 min

Take a trip through Joël and Aji’s YouTube recommended list as they go over the media that has inspired their work the most over the course of their careers. Our hosts highlight different creators that feature regularly in their YouTube…

Full episode archive on Apple Podcasts →

About the show

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.