Build Beautiful Angular Apps with Bootstrap
I’ve been a longtime fan of CSS frameworks since 2005. I led an open-source project called AppFuse at the time and wanted a way to provide themes for our users. We used Mike Stenhouse’s CSS Framework and held a design content to gather some themes we liked for our users. A couple of other CSS frameworks came along in the next few years, namely Blueprint in 2007 and Compass in 2008. However, no CSS frameworks...
Build a Secure NestJS API with Postgres
NestJS is a modern, progressive framework for building Node.js applications and APIs. NestJS is built on TypeScript, and is designed to use solid programming metaphors such as controllers and modules. Having automatic Swagger API documentation built-in is also a great feature. Postgres (or PostgreSQL), much like other relational databases, provides a way to persist and query data. It’s a powerful, open-source, object-relational database system with over 30 years of active development that has earned it...
Why CLIs Suck (and GUIs are Better)
Posing this question on Twitter, I was amazed at the amount of responses it got: Check the thread out here. There were definitely some great points from both sides, but I wanted to explore my take on the choice in more depth. For clarity, GUIs are Graphic User Interfaces, and CLIs are Command Line Interfaces. Let’s start with: WHY COMMAND LINE INTERFACES SUCK (Don’t worry, it’s not that dramatic - just using a catchy title!...
Build a Secure Blog with Gatsby, React, and Netlify
Gatsby is a tool for creating static websites with React. It allows you to pull your data from virtually anywhere: content management systems (CMSs), Markdown files, APIs, and databases. Gatsby leverages GraphQL and webpack to combine your data and React code to generate static files for your website. JAM - JavaScript, APIs, and Markup - apps are delivered by pre-rendering files and serving them directly from a CDN, removing the requirement to manage or run...
Create and Verify PASETO Tokens in Java
PASETO is the latest trend in security token formats. Its primary goal is to reduce the problems the JSON Web Token (JWT) related specifications introduce. In this post, I’ll give you a brief introduction to PASETO tokens and then jump into an example that creates and parses tokens using in Java using JPaseto. If you’d rather watch a video, I created a screencast too! What is PASETO? PASETO stands for Platform-Agnostic SEcurity TOkens. The PASETO...
What Is Angular Ivy and Why Is It Awesome?
Over the last year or so, a new buzzword started floating around Angular forums and blogs. The word was Ivy. Ivy promises to make your application faster and smaller. But what exactly does this new technology do? Ivy is a complete rewrite of Angular’s rendering engine. In fact, it is the fourth rewrite of the engine and the third since Angular 2. But unlike rewrites two and three, which you might not have even noticed,...
Tech at the Edge of the World: Offline Applications
In January of 2020, I was fortunate enough to join a 16 day voyage to Antarctica, and speak at a tech mastermind conference called AntarctiConf. Going to see the seventh continent was one of the coolest experiences of my life, and to top it all off I was joined by other incredible like-minded tech geeks and coders! I highly recommend adding Antartica to your travel bucket list as well, it is such a life-changing place...
Node Microservices: From Zero to Hero
Node is one of the premier frameworks for microservice architecture today. The microservice pattern allows developers to compartmentalize individual components of a larger application infrastructure. Because each component runs independently, you can upgrade or modify components without impacting the larger application. Each component exposes an interface to external consumers who are blind to any internal logic the service does. One of the challenges of working in a microservice environment is the process of one service...
Managing Multiple Okta Instances with Terraform Cloud
Congratulations, you’ve chosen to use Okta to solve your identity problems. Welcome to the happy sunny utopia of a managed identity solution! But wait! How do you manage your environments? Your applications all have separate production, staging, and development environments. How do you manage that in Okta without writing a ton of custom scripts? In this post, you’ll learn how to manage multiple Okta instances using Terraform and our Okta Terraform Provider. I’ll walk you...
How to GraphQL in Java
REST APIs are hard to design so they serve multiple clients well. As each client has their own needs in terms of data searching, filtering and which fields they want, a traditional REST API will provide a single version of an entity and the client has the responsibility of navigating through multiple endpoints and correlate the data on their side to build the data they want. GraphQL was developed by Facebook to overcome the shortcomings...