Navigating the Maze of Authentication Options for Solo Devs and Small Teams (header)

Navigating the Maze of Authentication Options: A Solo Developer’s Guide

Andy Link Articles, Programming, Security Leave a Comment

In web development, choosing the right authentication strategy is a pivotal decision, especially for solo developers or small teams working with limited resources. After extensive research, I’ve adopted a hybrid approach that combines the security and ease of 3rd party services like Google and Microsoft with the control of an in-house solution.

This hybrid approach addresses my core concerns: cost, control, and user convenience while keeping the in-house method at the forefront. As we explore this topic, I’ll share the considerations and insights that shaped my strategy, aiming to guide you toward the authentication system that best fits your project’s unique demands.

Dynamic Unit Conversions in Math.js

Using Math.js for Dynamic Unit Conversions

Lou Mauget Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript Leave a Comment

In this post, I’ll survey a convenient JavaScript math.js library approach for converting a numeric value having a unit to a value for another unit. I’ll show how to convert a number associated with a unit to a value having another unit, add custom units and conversions, and evaluate textual expressions containing values with units. To wrap up, we’ll walk through a few practical use cases.

By the end of this post, I hope you are inspired to use math.js in your projects. It’s a powerful tool in the right scenarios. With that, let’s get started.

Optimizing Output File Testing in Spring Batch

Optimizing Output File Testing in Spring Batch

Jonny Hackett Articles, Java, Spring, Spring Batch, Testing Leave a Comment

It’s quite common to build Spring Batch jobs in which the output is a file for distribution to another team, or to another business. These text files can be in various formats from delimited, fixed length, XML, or some other structure such as an MT950 formatted file (common in financial institutions). In a previous article, I discussed testing practices using …

Dev Container CLI Escaping the IDE Restrictions

Dev Container CLI: Escaping the IDE Restrictions

Jake Everhart API Development, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Docker, Programming 1 Comment

In past blogs, I have discussed development containers (dev containers) in detail, from explaining their general mechanics to showing how they can bolster a team’s build automation. As a brief recap for the uninitiated: dev containers are a way of encapsulating a developer’s setup into a container, typically a Docker container. As a practical example, rather than forcing a new teammate to manually install and configure all the necessary tooling before contributing to a project, they can leverage a team’s devcontainer.json definition file to quickly spin up a fully configured development environment.

Microsoft has championed this workflow over the past few years, offering tight integration with tools like VS Code and Codespaces to make containerized development as seamless as possible. At the time of writing, the developer experience has reached a point where I honestly prefer to operate within a dev container for certain types of projects. When I open a team’s codebase within VS Code and it informs me that they have provided a dev container to use, I have higher confidence that I’ll be using the same versions of their tools and seeing the behaviors that they expect.

I’ve even come to trust these setups more than an equivalent set of Dockerfiles or docker-compose scripts, just because the simplicity of the ecosystem makes it more likely that everything is well-maintained and configured correctly. It’s easy to see how these standardization and automation benefits can be a huge boost to teams…once they’ve adopted the right tools to integrate with them.

But what if you don’t want to use VS Code?

Macros: To Code or Not to Code

Joel Buckingham Articles, Development Technologies & Tools Leave a Comment

No matter what project I find myself working on, it seems like I have a batch of actions I need to sift through to find all the instances of some conditions and then do something with each instance found at least once a week. You only need to do it once and then move on, so buying a tool or writing some fancy code to handle it seems like overkill. This is where text editors with macro recording functionality can save the day, or at least a few hours of the day.

In this blog, I’ll share a practical use case for macros. I’ll walk you through the example, and then we’ll dive into what it looks like to use macros. I hope that this demonstrates the value and versatility of adding macros to your programming tool belt.