Daniel Gray DanielFGray

The One Secret Trick To Becoming A Genius Programmer

Okay, the title of this post is a bit of a lie. There's no one secret trick to becoming a genius programmer - there are two, and they're more habits than tricks. Nevertheless, these kind of 'secret tricks' seem to resonate with people, so I went for this title anyway.

Every once in a while, a somewhat strange thing happens to me. I'll be helping somebody out on IRC - usually a beginner - answering a number of their questions in rapid succession, about a variety of topics. Then after a while, they call me a "genius" for being able to answer everything they're asking; either directly, or while talking about me to somebody else.

Now, I don't really agree with this "genius" characterization, and it can make me feel a bit awkward, but it shows that a lot of developers have a somewhat idealistic and nebulous notion of the "genius programmer" - the programmer that knows everything, who can do everything, who's never stumped by a problem, and of which ther

Authentication with an Express API and Postgres

Setting Up

Let's make sure our Express app has the required base modules:

# within root of API
npm install --save express pg knex bcrypt
npm install --save-dev nodemon

async/await is just the do-notation of the Promise monad

CertSimple just wrote a blog post arguing ES2017's async/await was the best thing to happen with JavaScript. I wholeheartedly agree.

In short, one of the (few?) good things about JavaScript used to be how well it handled asynchronous requests. This was mostly thanks to its Scheme-inherited implementation of functions and closures. That, though, was also one of its worst faults, because it led to the "callback hell", an seemingly unavoidable pattern that made highly asynchronous JS code almost unreadable. Many solutions attempted to solve that, but most failed. Promises almost did it, but failed too. Finally, async/await is here and, combined with Promises, it solves the problem for good. On this post, I'll explain why that is the case and trace a link between promises, async/await, the do-notation and monads.

First, let's illustrate the 3 styles by implementing

The right way to override any highlighting if you don't want to edit the colorscheme file directly

Generalities first

Suppose you have weird taste and you absolutely want:

your visual selection to always have a green background and black foreground,
your active statusline to always have a white background and red foreground,
your very own deep blue background.

While a lot of Node.js guides recommend using JWT as an alternative to session cookies (sometimes even mistakenly calling it "more secure than cookies"), this is a terrible idea. JWTs are absolutely not a secure way to deal with user authentication/sessions, and this article goes into more detail about that.

Secure user authentication requires the use of session cookies.

Cookies are small key/value pairs that are usually sent by a server, and stored on the client (often a browser). The client then sends this key/value pair back with every request, in a HTTP header. This way, unique clients can be identified between requests, and client-side settings can be stored and used by the server.

Session cookies are cookies containing a unique session ID that is generated by the server. This session ID is used by the server to identify the client whenever it makes a request, and to associate session data with that request.

*S

By the way, I'm available for tutoring and code review :)

What Promises library should I use?
How do I create a Promise myself?
How do I use new Promise?
How do I resolve a Promise?
But what if I want to resolve a synchronous result or error?
[But what if it's at the start of a chain, and I'm not in a .then callback yet?](https://gist.github.com/joepie91/4c3a10629a4263a522e3bc4839a28c83#6-but

	#!/bin/bash

	# Colors
	RED='\033[0;31m'
	GREEN='\033[0;32m'
	NO_COLOR='\033[0m'
	BLUE='\033[0;34m'
	YELLOW='\033[0;33m'
	NO_COLOR='\033[0m'

	import React, { useState, useRef, useEffect, useLayoutEffect } from 'react';
	import { useViewportScroll, useTransform, motion } from 'framer-motion';

	const Parallax = ({ rangeX, rangeY, children, ...rest }) => {
	const ref = useRef();

	const [rangeStart, setRangeStart] = useState(0);
	const [rangeEnd, setRangeEnd] = useState(0);

	const { scrollY } = useViewportScroll();

	#!/bin/bash

	##
	# Pure BASH interactive CLI/TUI menu (single and multi-select/checkboxes)
	#
	# Author: Markus Geiger <[email protected]>
	# Last revised 2019-09-11
	#
	# ATTENTION! TO BE REFACTORED! FIRST DRAFT!
	#