Five Engineering Stories That Will Make Your Blood Curdle
If you’ve been an engineer for any considerable time, you’ve probably made some mistakes that made you want to crawl under your desk and hide. You may have even considered packing up your desk! In the spirit of the greatest holiday ever (Halloween), the Developer Advocacy group at Okta has shared some of their scariest engineering stories. Exploit Explorer Back when I still ran my own physical servers, 10 or more years ago, the word...
Develop Secure Apps with WebSockets and Node.js
WebSockets is a technology for communicating between the client and the server in a web application, where an open socket creates a persistent connection between the client and the server. This method of communication works outside of the HTTP request/response paradigm that has existed since the earliest days of the internet. Since sockets don’t use HTTP they can eliminate the overhead that comes with HTTP for low latency communications. In this tutorial, you will learn...
Why I Love IntelliJ IDEA for Java Development
If you’re a Java developer like me, you like to crank out code and get shit done. I like many things about IntelliJ IDEA, but I thought it’d be fun to write about the ones that make me most productive. First, a bit of my development history. When I first started doing Java development in the late 90s, I used HomeSite as my editor. HomeSite was an HTML editor initially developed by Nick Bradbury. I...
How to Authenticate with SAML in ASP.NET Core and C#
Security Assertion Markup Language, more commonly known as SAML, is an open standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties. Most commonly these parties are an Identity Provider and a Service Provider. The primary use case for SAML has typically been to provide single sign-on (SSO) for users to applications within an enterprise/workforce environment. Up until the past few years, SAML was considered the industry standard—and proven workhorse—for passing an authenticated user into applications...
Setup a Mute Indicator Light for Zoom with Hammerspoon
In this post, I’m going to show you how to set up a light that will turn on when you’re in a Zoom call. The color of the light will show your mute status, red will indicate that you’re muted, and green if you are not muted. Because Zoom doesn’t provide a native interface for determining mute status, I will instead use a tool called Hammerspoon to accomplish this. Note: Unlike most software for macOS,...
Build a Video Chat Service with JavaScript, WebRTC, and Okta
If you are familiar with any sort of real-time communications over the internet such as GoToMeeting, Google Meet, or Discord then chances are you have used WebRTC. WebRTC is an open framework for handling real-time communications. It supports video, voice, or any data between peers. WebRTC is supported by Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, and many others. In this tutorial, you will learn how to build a web application that allows a user to broadcast their...
Create a Secure Ktor Application with Kotlin
In this tutorial, you will build your very own Nano Blogging Service (nabl for short) using a modern JVM stack. This includes using the Kotlin programming language, the Ktor web framework, and securing it with Okta. Users can log in or sign up, post updates, and browse specific or global chronological feed without advertisements. The blogging service displays posts from the selected user or everyone in the chronological feed. Kotlin is often considered a “better...
What's New in Laravel 8
With Laravel 8’s release in September 2020, the popular PHP framework continues to offer new features and improvements. After version 5, Laravel moved to semantic versioning and the more frequent releases have meant smaller changes between each one. That said, there are still several exciting updates in this version of the framework. While Laravel will continue to offer security fixes for version 7 until early 2021, no more bug fixes will be released after October...
Spring Security SAML and Database Authentication
Spring Boot is a ubiquitous and well-supported suite of tools for developing web applications in Java. Database authentication, in which credentials identifying authorized users are stored in a database accessible by the application, is maybe the most common and straightforward method of authenticating users. SAML is a well-supported open standard for handling authentication between identity providers and service providers. Configuring SAML authentication in Spring Security is a common topic, and examples are easy to come...
Build a Modern API using Fastify and Node.js
Fastify is just as the name implies, fast. Not just in terms of development speed—its low overhead means the server is fast as well. When writing APIs, speed on both sides is paramount. Fastify is a web framework for Node.js that was designed for efficiency. Fastify is fully extensible with hooks, plugins, and decorators. It is schema-based, meaning you can define your response and request objects in your routes and have Fastify do the data...