This will be part one of two posts looking at using JSON Web Tokens (JWT) for authentication and authorisation. I’ll be integrating tokens into NodeJS Express and Apollo GraphQL server.
It will help if you are familiar with Express and Apollo GraphQL to fully benefit from this post, but reading this will give you a good idea of how to use JWT for authentication in Node applications.
First, let’s cover the basic flow of JWT authentication when a request is made.
This post will cover managing complex state at a feature level rather than the entire site. React hooks have enabled developers to have cleaner functional components which help to rationalise our component logic with ease.
Take useState hook, it’s one line of code that can be used to manage the state of a component rather than having to create a class component with the addition of boiler code. This is great because we are keeping simple things clear!
However, there are features that are inherently complex as they could have many nested child components and need to alter the state.
What options are there to manage this complexity in React?
Typically ‘speed of delivery’ is a key measure for an Agile software engineering team. However, sometimes you notice a pattern of weeks ending with high or low points, and this affects the predictability of your delivery. So how can you make delivery more consistent?
This post will focus more on pace of delivery and around team processes, rather than tooling to reduce overheads, like automation. The reason you want to achieve predictable delivery, is so that your team can confidently estimate what can be done in a sprint. This can also help product and business estimate how long a feature could take to deliver.
This post will be covering two topics, installing Bcrypt NodeJS as a dependency and prevent linking node_modules from host machine to your docker container.
Using Bcrypt package to encrypt passwords comes with a minor challenge: when installed it needs to be compiled to the operating system (OS) architecture using node-gyp, python 2.x. These prerequisite dependencies are needed to build the app on a dev machine, which needs to be documented. However, docker solves the need to communicate this in your “get started” documentation. Unfortunately this will create a problem of slow feedback loop during development.
For most of my published open source projects I’ve added a simple continuous integration (CI) pipeline using Travis CI. This time around I wanted a way to deploy a project after successful integration and try a new pipeline. Azure DevOps caught my attention. The goal here is to build, test and deploy my VS Code extension Git Mob to the marketplace.
I’ll provide bite size instructions to help you build a CI and continuous delivery (CD) pipeline for your VS Code extension on Azure DevOps platform. Following these steps I estimate it will take 15-25mins to get it all working.
This post is to help developers who are new to Azure DevOps releases and deploying a VS Code extension. Azure pipelines come with lots of great options but it can be difficult to know what to do to achieve your goal. The goal in this case is to deploy my VS Code extension, Git Mob to the marketplace.
I’ll provide bite size instructions to help you build a release for your VS Code extension using Azure DevOps platform. This will take about 5-10mins.
As the co-creator of Git Mob, a CLI tool to add multiple co-authors to a commit, I thought a good addition would be to build a UI around it in VS Code. This makes it super simple to see who you are co-authoring with and change without needing to remember any commands. Most importantly it consistently generates the meta data for co-authoring commits to GitHub. See Git Mob for VS Code to get started.
Stubbing a React component is easy with Sinon. You can replace a component with a Sinon stub which is rendered as a child in the component under tests.
Here are the steps to setup OpenSSH with Git to connect to a repository on GitHub.
I use Windows as my main OS and Cmder as my console emulator. Installing the full version you will get Git for Windows which has loads of Unix commands available in your PATH including OpenSSH. The version of Cmder I’m using is 1.3.0.
Async iterators will enable JavaScript engineers to read steams like lines of text from a web service or a file. It will be worth reading my previous post understanding sync iterators first before carrying on.
It may seem plausible for a for-of loop to iterate through lines in a file but ultimately it can’t execute until it has received the whole contents.
What is a generator in programming terms? It is a special function that can be used to control the iteration behaviour of a loop.
For an object to become an iterator it needs to know how to access values in a collection and to keep track of its position in the list. This is achieved by an object implementing a next method and returning the next value in the sequence. This method should return an object containing two properties: value and done. It must have the [Symbol.iterator] as well, as this is key to using the for..of loop.
How do you unit test your React components? There are plenty testing libraries to help support testing your React app. I’m going to look at using Jest and Kent C. Dodds@testing-library/react
