When developers think about their skill set, the first thing that comes to mind is coding. But the most important developer skill isn’t coding. Then people tend to think that the most important developer skill is problem solving. That’s not it either. In fact, the most important skill for any…

There’s been a lot of hype recently about REST APIs dying, being replaced by the likes of GraphQL. I’m here to say REST APIs are not going anywhere. In fact, they are only going to become more popular. REST is a tried and true API design paradigm that has been…

Terminal, Console, Shell — We’ve all heard these terms, but do you know the difference between them? The word Terminal comes from terminate, as in the “terminal” end of a communications process. You may have heard the term ‘dumb terminal’ referring to basic text-based computer that is communicating with another…

One of the most simple ways to set up an SSH Tunnel is to make use of the ssh command’s -D argument. This argument allows you to specific a port upon which to listen locally. This causes ssh to act as a local SOCKS proxy server, routing any traffic pointed…

I recently saw several articles that mentioned research into how password managers store your secrets in memory. Some of the results were not great. Several password managers were reported as leaving some or all of your secrets in memory, as plain text, even after they have been used. Obviously, this…

In recent years, open source software has become more frequently used by businesses and individuals alike. Why is this, and what makes open source solutions so increasingly popular? Below I list five reasons why open source software can be good for your business. Security The security of software used in your…

It’s a modern day standard that all web applications store their platform specific configuration in environment variables. In the PHP world, this usually mean a .env file in the root of your project. Most modern frameworks, such as Laravel and Symfony, come with built in support for a .env file…

It is generally recommended that developers of web applications ensure their users pick decent passwords. This often means ensuring a minimum length, preventing common passwords, or words from the dictionary. Sometimes users need to mix and match various numbers, letters, and symbols too. But we can do better. Checking passwords against previous breach corpuses Several of…

There are many traits that a senior developer should have. Here’s my take on the essentials. Soft Skills I feel I need to mention soft skills first and foremost, as they are so frequently overlooked. They’re more than just being nice. Soft skills revolve around an individual’s ability to harmoniously interact with…