In the latest episode of my podcast Señors @ Scale, I interviewed Tudor Barbu (Principal Engineer at Lodgify), and he shared this gem from his early engineering days:
They had a UI with dropdowns for selecting a date. To make things look clean, they prefixed single-digit days with a zero, so 1 became 01, for dates below 10 (pretty standard)
After some data processing, it was discovered that when converting the string to a number in JavaScript, values like 08 and 09 are treated as invalid octal. It silently breaks because numbers starting with zero were interpreted as base-8.
And nobody could figure out the issue.
That story kicked off a really thoughtful conversation about:
- How our instincts shift from “clean code” to “what solves the problem”
- Why reading legacy code is harder than writing new code
- What delegation actually looks like at senior+ levels
- Mentoring junior devs in the age of AI
If you like the episode, consider subscribing. Here are the next guests:
- Matheus Albuquerque – Staff Software Engineer, Medallia
- José Enrique Calderón Sanz – Lead Software Engineer, JP Morgan Chase
- Erik Rasmussen – Principal Software Engineer, Attio
- Faris Aziz – Staff Software Engineer, Smallpdf
- Eduardo Aparicio Cardenes – Senior Frontend Engineer, Happening
They had a UI with dropdowns for selecting a date. To make things look clean, they prefixed single-digit days with a zero, so 1 became 01, for dates below 10 (pretty standard)
After some data processing, it was discovered that when converting the string to a number in JavaScript, values like 08 and 09 are treated as invalid octal. It silently breaks because numbers starting with zero were interpreted as base-8.
And nobody could figure out the issue.
That story kicked off a really thoughtful conversation about: - How our instincts shift from “clean code” to “what solves the problem” - Why reading legacy code is harder than writing new code - What delegation actually looks like at senior+ levels - Mentoring junior devs in the age of AI
If you like engineering stories from the trenches, here’s the episode: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5E96k3jpoaVKAwHSSj76bL YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcUgmUULjHE Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pragmatism-at-scale-wi...
All episodes: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale
If you like the episode, consider subscribing. Here are the next guests: - Matheus Albuquerque – Staff Software Engineer, Medallia - José Enrique Calderón Sanz – Lead Software Engineer, JP Morgan Chase - Erik Rasmussen – Principal Software Engineer, Attio - Faris Aziz – Staff Software Engineer, Smallpdf - Eduardo Aparicio Cardenes – Senior Frontend Engineer, Happening