On today's show, we cover a variety of topics. Tim was suffering from a "carding" attack (aka, a "credit card stuffing" attack) and had to build an internal CAPTCHA system in order to protect his web-based payment forms from bad actors. Adam created an open-source JavaScript library for mocking ES modules (see Mockable) that makes it possible to swap implementation details at runtime. And Ben falls back in love with ColdFusion—again—continuing to find that even the small language details...

On today's show, we cover a variety of topics. Ben talks about overcompensation at work; and, how we often swing way too hard in one direction as the first signs of a challenge. Carol talks about how her current task got away from her; and, how she suddenly founder herself creating a Pull Request with 84 files in it. Tim talks about the generation smoking ban going into effect in England. And Adam talks about the challenges of mentoring junior developers; and, how hard it is to have enough...

On today's show, we talk about incidents and outages at work. Incidents are a fact of life. If you depend on a file system or a database or a third party vendor, at some point, something will break and your service will be degraded. Customers freak out (rightly so); and, it becomes a cross-team effort to try and find the problem, fix it, and effectively communicate updates back to your customers. There's no right way to do this. But, one could argue that there are definitely wrong ways to do...

Adam picks Tim's brain searching for the perfect solution for payments and compliance auditing. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/173-shopping-for-solutions-payments-and-compliance-auditing/

In a world where many programmers instinctively reach for an existing solution in "user land", Ben poses the question: is there value in building out and maintaining your own standard library? This would be the collection of commonly-used functions and classes that you enjoy using; and, which are tailored to your use-cases and programming paradigms. Doing so would be a vibrant mixture of pragmatism, vanity, ego, efficiency, and compensation. But, would it ultimately be a net befit? Follow...

Tim just completed his quarterly strategy review meeting at work. As such, he's in the perfect head space to teach Adam and Ben what strategy is; how strategy differs from tactics; and, how OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) can be used in order to ensure that the work to be done actually rolls-up to one of the company's core strategies. In the end, Ben still has no idea what's going on (as per usual); but, Adam is down to clown. Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord!...

On today's show, we talk to Thelma Van about integrating design into the product development workflow. This includes User Experience (UX) design, User Interface (UI) design, scope negotiation, and user validation through interviews. It turns out, even if you can only talk to five of your customers, having this amount of feedback can have a massively out-sized impact on your overall design and development trajectory. Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website...

Several years ago, Stack Overflow noticed a small but surprising trend within their 2017 Developer Survey data. Even when attempting to adjust for several factors, it seems that the programmers who indent their code with spaces (as opposed to with tabs) have a higher earning potential. As an example of programmers who love using tabs, the hosts of the show offer up theories about this strange finding. Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is...

On today's show, we talk about two major announcements relating to the technology world. First, the government released a report calling on programmers to start using memory safe languages (see: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe). Second, Apple announced that it will halt work on Titan, its autonomous electric vehicle project. We also talk about the pros-and-cons of a Computer Science degree in relation to the web development industry. Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion...

The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has yet discovered. - Oscar Wilde You may never think about it or even be aware of it; but, you have a personal brand. A brand is not something you can opt into or out of. It simply exists. The only choice that you have is how you manage - or choose not to manage - your brand in relation to other people. On today's show, we talk about our own personal brands; how they can help us; how they sometimes hurt us; and, how the...

On today's show, we respond to a listener question from Kamil Maraz: I have started a Developer experience initiative in our company. We started with a survey, which led to many 1-on-1 meetings; and, one thing that came up a few times was onboarding. Long story short: it's not ideal. I was wondering if this topic could be an inspiration for one of the episodes. For example what is an onboarded colleague to you?; do you care about time to first commit?; what does the onboarding process in...

For the most part, software engineers like the concept of Agile methodology; and, they have a sense that agile development practices are the best way of getting work done. But, that doesn't mean we know how to put these agile practices in place (especially at scale). Today, we talk to Brian Sadler (@brian_sadler) - a seasoned software developer and Agile coach - about what Agile is, what parts of it work the best, and where teams often go wrong in their interpretation of best...

On this week's show, we explore a variety of topics. Ben wants to perform a mini retrospective on his desire to support the legacy platform at work. Carol is feeling isolated as the only engineer on her team - her dog is a good listener, but isn't very helpful when it comes to brainstorming. And, Adam wants to talk about the browser landscape; and see which browser(s) everyone is currently using. Also, Ben offers up some high praise for Lenny's Podcast - a show in which Lenny Rachitsky...

In web development, we tend to hold learning as a virtuous activity that's worthy of our spare time. In fact, there can be a lot of pressure on us to always be learning; and, to some degree, those of us who don't ride the wave of cutting-edge tech are "othered". But, is dabbling in new technology really moving the needle? Does learning a little of this and little of that really make for a more robust engineer? Or, is there more value to be gained from depth of understanding? And, at the end...

Ben never has enough time to accomplish everything that he wants to accomplish. On its own, this isn't necessarily a "bad thing". But, it can quickly lead to feelings of guilt: is he not good enough, is he not effective enough, is he letting everyone down? So much of this angst is emotional. And he knows this. But, he doesn't have the wherewithal that he needs to evolve his own perspective. The crew tries to help him out. Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our...

As we jump into the new year, the crew talks about their new year's goals—both for the podcast and for themselves. We strongly believe in the power of "learning in public". And, to that end, we've created a Google Form in which you can submit suggestions on how to improve the show: what do you like, what do you not like, what can we be doing better? No suggestion is off limits, so long as no people or animals are harmed! Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our...

Happy New Year! This week, we ease into 2024 with a variety of topics. Adam is building a new design system at work using Svelte and Tailwind CSS. Ben wonders if there's any way to create an "Overview Effect" in the world of programming. And Tim discusses a few philosophical fallacies in a work context: planning fallacy, overconfidence effect, automation bias, and plan continuation bias (aka, the sunk cost fallacy). Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website...

After a stressful year, we happily ease into another round of "No Effort December" in which the conversations flow without concern or constraint. Carol is excited to go ice skating for the first time in her life. Tim is trying to teach his kids about financial literacy. Ben shares his limited ability to fantasize. And Adam wonders why his computer gets so sticky. Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter...

In episode 154, we discussed the concept of a project premortem. That discussion inspired Carol to schedule her own premortem for a new 2-year project that her company is about to undertake. Given the fact that her team's work won't be sharable for at least 18-months, she's wants to make sure that her premortem is as effective as it can be. As such, we're going to have ourselves a little premortem premortem discussion on the show. Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on...

On this week's show, Adam Tuttle and friend-of-the-show, Adam Cameron, go in depth on Dead Man's Snitch - a software service that triggers an alarm if your application doesn't "check in" with high enough frequency. Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday. And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by...

On today's show, we cast off the social filters and lay down some hot takes! This journey of spice serves up the separation of concerns, the future of StackOverflow, the value of comments, the necessity of testing, the role of extracurricular coding, the beauty of clean code, the meh of JSON, and the challenge of building truly great products. Some of these hot takes are clearly wrong; but, I'll never tell! Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is...

Coming out of the Thanksgiving holiday (and still recovering from our food comas), we wanted to have some fun today and talk about all of the software that we're thankful to have in our lives. These aren't sponsors of the show (yet); but, we love them so much that we wanted to share them with the rest of the world. Topics include Dead Man's Snitch, Overcast podcast player, git source control, GitHub, Snagit and Skitch screen capture tools, 1Password for password management, PlexTV for media...

On today's show, we talk using pre-mortems to weed out potential ways a project could go wrong, and Adam wants to know how the crew has their logging set up. Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday. And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here:...

Inspired by a 4-part series on "Failure" produced by the Freakanomics radio podcast, we went around the table and talked about our own failures. This helps to remove the social stigma associated with failure; and, helps other people process internal conflicts of emotion. Tim talks about failing to sell websites in the early dot-com boom; Adam talks about failing to create a ColdFusion package manager; and, Ben talks about the years he lost trying to learn Object Oriented Programming...