Cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks are very serious. When fully exploited, it gives one full control of user account on websites. Imagine somebody gaining access to your bank account and transfering all the money out. From the bank’s perspective, this would be a perfectly fine legitimate operation from the account owner. …

Building great online experiences is hard and it is due to the one critical limitation that system designers fear the most, latency. The latency for a request from San Francisco to New York City compared to a CPU cycle is eight orders of magnitude! This difference in latency causes a…

While REST defines useful constraints, there are still plenty of way to shoot yourself in the foot. Let’s consider an use-case and attempt to write a REST endpoint for it. We’ll strawman some bad designs in order to get to a final good one. Sample use-case Let’s say we are tasked to…

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You are in agile retrospective and everybody has brought up the same pain point. The single action item is to resolve the pain point, it has been assigned to an owner. Then in the next retrospective everybody brings up the same pain point. …

Naysayers will say Node.js isn’t for serious work as its single threaded, and while it is true the JavaScript event loop is indeed single threaded, this is a performance advantage. Node.js …

This is a general outline of an incident response playbook to handle and recover from a production outage. This document won’t be perfectly applicable to your own production system, but can be used as a starting point to write your own incident response playbook. Production system assumptions We will start with an outline…

Prettier is an opinionated code formatter that intentionally has few options. While prettier will never add/remove code, it will brutally reformat all the whitespace around the code to a fixed style. At times Prettier will reshuffle multiple lines just because a variable name got longer by 1 character. This seems…

TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript, if one avoids certain features. Under the hood, transpiling TypeScript to JavaScript is simply removing the type annotations. In other words, the actual running code isn’t anymore powerful than JavaScript itself.

As software developers, we are constantly moving up and down the ladder of abstraction. Junior developers tend to get lost and get stuck when they attempt to solve problems at the wrong level of abstraction. …