In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and migrations. Earlier in my career, I would come to a new project and inevitably a hectic migration would be underway. It’s not always a “stop the world” change, it can be as simple as switching from NPM to Yarn, but something is always changing. I used to naively believe my managers when they said cute things like “just this once” or “we’ll finally have our dependencies up to date.”
In the context of back-end web development, an ID is just a unique identifier for a record of data. For example, each user on a website will have its own ID. If the site is a social media platform, then each post will also have a unique ID.
Too often I neglect the idea of UX design in backend work. The goal of user experience design is to give users a product that’s easy to use. In the world of front-end development, that typically means making it obvious how to navigate your site, using commonly-understood icons, or implementing well-contrasted colors for foreground and background, making your site easy to read.
HMACs and MACs are authentication codes and are often the backbone of JWT authentication systems. A Message Authentication Code (MAC) is a string of bits that depends on a secret key and is sent with a message to prove the message wasn’t tampered with. HMACs are a more strict version of MACs that offer additional security benefits.
Once upon a time, a company I worked for had a problem, we had thousands of messages flowing through our data pipeline every second, and we wanted to be able to send real-time emails, SMS, and Slack alerts when messages matching specific criteria were found. A simple solution built using ElasticSearch’s percolate queries ended up being our saving grace.