Most applications require some sort of secret or password to enable access: database connection info, API keys, OAuth client secrets, and JWT keys, to list some examples. Dealing with secrets in your projects is always a chore, and it’s often done wrong. In this post, I’ll describe five common problems, which you can think of as anti-patterns (the opposite of a best practice) and I’ll offer suggestions to help you avoid these issues. Table of...

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Developers use APIs to for everything! You build APIs for your own apps to consume, or as a part of a microservices architecture. Bottom line, you’re building and using APIs to make your life easier. The ongoing effort to simplify development and work more efficiently, sometimes this also means looking for new libraries or processes (or more often less process). For many teams managing authentication and access control for their apps and APIs is more...

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