Off Script

Today, Off Script hosts Josh and James discuss all things web application security. It’s something that is getting more and more important to get right. More cyber attacks. More ransomware attacks. They address good application hygiene and the common pitfalls they are seeing people fall for. Big data breaches can lead to losing customer trust so it’s so important to makes sure you’re running a tight ship with security.

Basic security maintenance is essential but what can companies and individuals be doing to make sure their web applications are secure during a time of high value bug bounties being offered to people for finding vulnerabilities?

• Bug bounties. The positives, negatives and relevancy to different sized agencies
• The use of bots to find MongoDB vulnerabilities
• Encrypted vaults
• The Slack issue
• How hard is it to put secure processes in place from the start?
• Canary and environment variables
• If you’re a security researcher, what do you do with responsible disclosure?
• The fine line between helping the hackers and helping the community
• What makes a good, secure app?
• Package managers
• Modern libraries making it obvious when you are doing a bad thing
• Open pull requests
• Get your house in order with OWASP
• Frameworks and the early standards they set with password management and security hygiene
• Importance of rotating keys
• Human interfaces and the floors surrounding them
• What can we learn from Twelve-Factor?
• Github Workspaces and recreatable environments
• The issues of convenience
• Macs vs dev accessibility and Windows catching up
• Github and Atom
• Good, automated test suites
• How to have a good view on what makes a good security test
• Falling into the trap of feeling productive
• Sitting down with the team to discuss testing value and priorities
• The creativity of SQL injection
• Reinventing the wheel
• Dangers of writing an encryption tool and importance of getting an external security company

Resources:

• GitHub Security Bug Bounty
• snyk
• Yarn
• The Open Web Application Security Project
• 12 Factor
• Hyper

Find out more about Stac and Parallax:

• Stac
• Parallax

Part 2 has landed! For this outing of Off Script, Josh and James explore the ‘Future of engineering leadership’.

This is an episode born from Q&A discussions and ideas at the recent Off Script Live event in Leeds. Dive into the modern challenges and the future direction of leadership in software engineering.

• AI Sustainability
• Company energy offset
• Energy demands of AI vs speed of innovation
• AI on device
• Apple Siri LLM on device?
• Loneliness in leadership positions
• Talk with peers in other companies
• Lattice HR for feedback
• Finding your role
• Event culture
• Consistency creates community
• Organiser sets the tone
• Challenges for future leaders
• Addressing the gap between vocal and and non vocal team members
• Communication types
• Generating positive feedback culture

Find out more about Stac and Parallax:

• https://stac.works
• https://parall.ax

It’s time to reflect and plan ahead! James and Josh look back at a tumultuous 2024 in tech and ask the big questions about where things are heading.

What were the highlights?
What lessons can we learn?
How do we prepare for 2025?

Listen now as we kick-off the year with a brand new instalment of Off Script!

• In praise of indie conferences
• The struggles of smaller events
• AWS re:Invent conference
• Multi Cloud
• Distributed SQL - DSQL
• Tough time for tech in 2024
• All Day Hey!
• Publishing platforms
• Tech Influencers
• Complete CSS - Any Bell
• Learn with Jason
• The state of the tech economy
• Whisper Flow
• CrowdStrike outage
• AI, Automation, valid JSON, OLLAMA , Constrained Sampling
• AI Agents, Cursor IDE
• SASS is in danger?
• Adobe Podcast
• New Ruby on Rails
• Laravel 11
• Deno
• BlueSky

References

• https://piccalil.li/complete-css
• https://www.youtube.com/@learnwithjason

Find out more about Stac and Parallax:

• https://stac.works
• https://parall.ax

We welcomed Sharon Steed to Hey! Live as our guest in November for a special, free live-streamed lecture. Sharon and Hey! Founder, Josh Nesbitt explored "Empathy at work".

Transformational culture starts with empathy. But how do you make that happen? How do you create a culture that everyone feels heard in? Respected? Where each individual knows them and their ideas are valuable to not only their coworkers, but the company at large?

These are the ideas Communilogue’s founder and principal Sharon Steed examines in her ebook "Empathy at work". Communilogue is also an empathy consultancy, so we can't wait for Sharon's insight into this fascinating topic at our live-streamed event.

Sharon speaks at companies and conferences globally on empathy at work. Her story is unique in that she got her start speaking and consulting in a non-traditional way.

Sharon is a life-long stutterer, and she uses her speech impediment to teach what empathy is and how to use it as a foundation for positive and effective communication. Stuttering has informed her view of communication as a result of years of being both terrified to speak but also fascinated with the the intricacies of conversation. She has spoken about empathy and communication, vulnerability and her experiences as a stutterer at conferences and companies globally.

"Empathy at work" is a topic Sharon has fantastic insight into. She has written an ebook about it facilitates a training course of the same name.

We're happy to welcome Lu Liu, software engineer from Fintech industry to Off Script by Hey! Radio.

This is a story with practical lessons about how it's never too late to get into technology. Lu shares her journey into tech, how she got into the industry and how she overcame the difficulty and obstacles she encountered at the beginning of her career. She extracts key advice and takeaways she's learned that will be useful for people who are trying to change their career path into tech or students who want to pursue a career in tech.

There are lessons in Lu's talk that also benefit anyone with more experience in the industry who wants to reconnect with what that journey feels like if say, you manage a team with people who are. It's easy to lose sight of what the beginning feels like so there is something in this for all levels of industry experience.