Episode Details

Joël is joined by thoughtbot Software Developer and Dirt Jumper Daniel Nolan. Dirt jumping is BMX-style riding 🏍️ with really enormous dirt jumps.

But for a person who loves excitement in his spare time, for Daniel at work, it's not the new and shiny that interests him. When he dives into something, the "boring" parts of tech are what he finds most fulfilling. He wants to know the "why," and in this conversation, he explains how it sustains his career.

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

• Debugging series
• Dependabot
• Coverband
• thoughtbot maintenance service
• Sentry
• New Relic
• Custom Rubocop rules
• Daniel Nolan Twitter
• Daniel Nolan GitHub

Transcript:

JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. And today, I'm joined with a guest, Daniel Nolan.

DANIEL: Hey.

JOËL: And, together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Daniel, what's new in your world?

DANIEL: So, recently, I just picked up a dirt jumper bicycle, and I've been learning to get better at dirt jumping. I ride mountain bikes quite a bit. But jumping is something that I haven't been super comfortable with.

JOËL: What is dirt jumping?

DANIEL: So, Dirt Jumping is kind of more like BMX-style riding with really huge dirt jumps. If you do it right, you don't pedal. So you should be jumping and pumping and making your way around the track or the course without the need to pedal. So it's actually pretty interesting. And it's supposed to level up your mountain bike skills if you get good at this.

JOËL: So the idea is you start up high somewhere, and you just kind of let the gravity bring you down?

DANIEL: Yep, that's the idea. So you start up on a platform; usually, you drop in. And then, from there, you start the series of jumps or rollers, pick up speed, and then kind of go into some bigger jumps, and berms, and stuff and make your way around the course. It's pretty fun.

JOËL: So you're coming down from a high, and then you hit a dirt ramp somewhere. You go up in the air. You fly off, and you're doing, like, a flip or something like that?

DANIEL: Yeah, not quite there yet. Some of the people I ride with can do flips, and no handers, and stuff; definitely not there, but just getting comfortable on big dirt jumps. I think the scariest thing is not being able to see the landing. So it's, like, if it's just a little jump, like, you know where you're going. But if it's like one of those big jumps with a huge lift, you just have no idea what's on the other side. And no matter how, you know, even if you've hit it ten times, it's still scary because you can't see it.

JOËL: How do you land safely when you can't see your landing place?

DANIEL: There's a technique where you kind of push the bike down. So, like, once you're in the air and you've kind of leveled the bike out, an