Every week in my Tuesday Lunch & Learn livestream, we choose a useful software development skill, define a challenge related to that skill, and solve the challenge live. This week, we’re timing out network requests.

Not all server failures are clear-cut. Sometimes servers accept a connection, but then just leave it open without sending a response, or trickle out data one byte at a time. Your normal error-handling code won’t do anything about this. To your code, everything will appear to be working, even though the server is functionally broken.

As a result, it’s important to program your clients to recognize a “stuck” server. And, of course, if you’re going to program it, you need to be able to test it. How can you write a fast unit test that simulates a misbehaving server? How can you program your application code to time out? We answer these questions in today’s episode.

To follow along, download the code from GitHub and check out the 2020-09-15 tag. To see the final result, check out the 2020-09-15-end tag or view it on GitHub.

Visit the Lunch & Learn archive for more.