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!

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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: [email protected]

This has been a thoughtbot podcast.

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© 2026 thoughtbot, inc.

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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.

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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: [email protected]

This has been a thoughtbot podcast.

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© 2026 thoughtbot, inc.

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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?!

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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: [email protected]

This has been a thoughtbot podcast.

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© 2026 thoughtbot, inc.

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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.

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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: [email protected]

This has been a thoughtbot podcast.

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© 2026 thoughtbot, inc.

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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.

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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: [email protected]

This has been a thoughtbot podcast.

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© 2026 thoughtbot, inc.

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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.

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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: [email protected]

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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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 many Google calendars, Aji looks back on using Jira to co-ordinate their international move, before they both reminisce about the benefits of using Alfred as people with ADHD.

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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 Sally Hall 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: [email protected]

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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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, and how to improve your own writing to ensure your reader remains engaged.

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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 Sally Hall.

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? Why not write to our hosts: [email protected]

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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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 they took away from producing the Bike Shed, and what they might do today if they were still in the hosting chair.

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Your hosts for this special episode of The Bike Shed have been Joël Quenneville, Sally Hall and Aji Slater. Joining them have been our returning hosts Derek Prior, Sage Griffin, Stephanie Viccari, Chris Toomey and Stephanie Minn.

Listen back to some of our guest’s highlighted episodes
Bike Shed 14: An Acceptable Level of Hassle with David Heinemeier Hanson
Bike Shed 172: What I Believe About Software
Bike Shed 180: A Citizen of the Internet with John Resig
Bike Shed 302: Observability with Charity Majors
Bike Shed 325: Pranting
Bike Shed 404: Estimation

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? Why not write to our hosts: [email protected]

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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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 rotation, the long standing channels that have had the most impact on them, the video essays that inspire their work, as well as a small detour Into the world of history videos.

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Here’s a handful of Joël and Ali’s personal recommendations:
VSauce - Veritasium - Jet Lag the Game - The Coding Train - Tom Scott - Kings and Generals - Daniel Steiner - Assassin’s Creed: Echoes of History - Jay Foreman / Map Men - Practical Engineering - Hannah Morris - Computerphile

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? Why not write to our hosts: [email protected]

This has been a thoughtbot podcast.
Stay up to date by following us on social media - YouTube - LinkedIn - Mastodon - BlueSky

© 2026 thoughtbot, inc.

Support The Bike Shed

Our hosts come together to wrap up season 2 and share some of their highlights along the way.

Our trio expand and recap on some key topics covered over the last few months, Sally and Joël provide updates on their work with typescripts and LLMs, and Aji accidentally stumbles into an idea for a new keynote topic.

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Your hosts for this episode have been thoughtbot’s own Joël Quenneville, Sally Hall 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? Why not write to our hosts: [email protected]

This has been a thoughtbot podcast.
Stay up to date by following us on social media - YouTube - LinkedIn - Mastodon - BlueSky

© 2026 thoughtbot, inc.

Support The Bike Shed