Episode Details

If you're in the market for bicycle shorts, Joël's got you. Stephanie just returned from RubyKaigi in Japan and shares details of her trip.

Recently at thoughtbot, there have been conversations around an interesting data modeling exercise. Joël and Stephanie discuss the following:

• Value Objects vs. Hashes
• Doing Math on Compound Numbers
• Monoids and Folding
• Naming Concepts in Code

This episode is brought to you by Airbrake. Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack.

• Ruby Kaigi
• Google Translate Lens
• Video on city parks
• Enumerable#tally
• Hash#merge
• Monoids
• Enumerable#all?
• Value of specialized vocabulary
• Gist with Joël’s code solution

Transcript:

STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn.

JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a little bit of what we've learned along the way.

STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world?

JOËL: I've made an unusual purchase this week. I went out and bought a pair of bicycle shorts. And, for those who are not aware, these are special shorts that have padding built into them. Typically, they're, like, skin-tight, but I got, I guess, what are called mountain biking shorts. So, they kind of look more like the cut of a normal short. But they've got this, like, built-in padding for biking.

STEPHANIE: So. Just to confirm, you did get these shorts for biking purposes, right?

JOËL: Yes. I purchased these shorts for biking purposes.

STEPHANIE: Okay. [laughs]

JOËL: And I got these because I was talking to a friend about this and mentioning that this was, like, probably the most ambitious cycling thing I've ever done in my life. And they recommended if you have not done bike shorts, you really should get them. They make a big difference.

STEPHANIE: Wow. Okay, I have two thoughts here. First of all, you prefaced this saying that this was an unusual purchase. So I thought maybe that you bought these bike shorts for some other purpose. [laughs] But I am excited to talk about this because I've also been curious about trying bike shorts.

I bike a lot in Chicago in the summer, and I've been doing, like, longer rides on the Lakefront trail. And one of my goals, actually, this summer is to do a bikepacking trip. But I have not been super comfortable on longer rides. And I was just thinking that this might be something really helpful to make them a little more enjoyable.

JOËL: So, is the kind of biking that you're doing closer to what might be considered commuting?

STEPHANIE: Yeah, mostly commuting. But also, just, like, going on long rides on the weekends, in addition to this, hopefully, forthcoming bikepacking trip up to a state park. So not too long, maybe, like, 60 miles, but definitely long enough to start getting a little uncomfy on your seat.

JOËL: Yeah, is 60 miles