453: The Bike Shed Wrapped 2024

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at Thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joelle Kenville. And I'm Steph Nieman, and together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? Actually, I want to take some time to talk about what's old in my world because today, we are doing a end of year recap episode for all of our listeners. So one thing that I'm excited to talk about is we recorded 41 episodes of The Bike Shed this year. Including this one that we're recording right now? Yes. Which I believe will be the last of the year. We're so close to hitting that magic 42. I mean, yes. You're you're right. There's only fifty two weeks in a year. Like, Broadway was pretty good. I am pretty impressed with ourselves. Are there any episodes that kind of stood out for you this year or that you found were just really fun to record? Yes. I have two, standout episodes. One of them was, an episode called Semantics and the Meaning of Nil. Do you remember that one? I do. That one, I just remember, like, being so interesting to talk about because as the concept nil, I feel like doesn't get talked about enough in terms of how it affects the bugs that we encounter, the kind of ideas around why we use it or lack of ideas. And, yeah, it was just really cool to go deep into, like, this particular topic that, you know, at the service level, you might think is pretty I don't know. It's like so I think there's just a lot of kind of mental shortcuts that we have about nil, but there it can go really deep if you if you want to get into it. So I had a lot of fun talking about that. Yeah. I think particularly some of the ideas around projecting semantics on top of nil. The idea that nil literally just means absence of a value, but everybody that's using the application knows that, oh, if you get a nil in this particular location, it means that and then there's a whole paragraph that follows that. And how as programmers do we deal with all of that implicit context? Yeah. And I think had some good little tips and tricks too for a couple of cases that might help you avoid bugs, with nil. So that was one I really enjoyed. And then the other one, this was during our summer of guests kind of season. We did an episode with Jared Norman, and we talked about cohesive code. And I remember that conversation just being really fun. I don't think we often have recorded guests together, the the two of us plus a guest. And so it was fun to be like a trio, and I think I remember we were riffing, …