Show Notes
Joël and Steve sit down to discuss the ins and outs of decomposition within their respective workflows and how they use it to their advantage when working on certain projects.
Together they look at working with vertical slices over other decomposition methods, when and how to break down code as efficiently as possible, and Joël lays out his three key principles that help him write code dubbed “The Triangle of Separation”.
—
The Sponsor for this episode has been Judoscale - Autoscale the Right Way. Check out the link for your free gift!
Learn more about Joël’s triangle of separation and working with vertical slices!
Your guest this week has been Steve Polito, and your host for this episode has been thoughtbot’s own Joël Quenneville.
You can find Steve’s work over on GitHub, or dive into more of his thought processes over on his thoughtbot’s blogs.
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
© 2025 thoughtbot, inc.
—
Credit: Ad-read music by joystock.org Support The Bike Shed
More from The Bike Shed
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?
Joël takes Bike Shed out onto the conference floor at RailsWorld as he interviews programer and streamer Rachael Wright-Munn, aka ChaelCodes.
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.
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.
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!