Web & Security

CORS looks intimidating. People see "Cross-Origin Resource Sharing" and think about domain policies, browser security models, and complex preflight negotiations. They see error messages like "No ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ header is…

Google just opened the doors to a new privacy superpower. The technique they’ve built on, and just released to the public, is known as a Zero-Knowledge-Proof. Here’s why it matters—and how it actually works—in plain English. 1. A Curious…

Today you are going to aquire a new super power… the power to control your browser with your thoughts! Okay, well not exactly with your thoughts, but with these scripts that I will show you how to use with Puppetteer (the most popular and…

Hello, dear readers! Today I’m going to explain one of the most basic and fascinating concepts of the web world: what happens when you navigate to a URL in a browser and hit "Enter". You probably do this every day without thinking much…

SPOILER ALERT: Yes. Code without tests is such an old idea that in his book “Working Effectively with Legacy Code” (written in 2004!) Michael Feather defines “Legacy Code” as code that is not accompanied by unit tests. This should be…

This is one of my all time favorite dialogs between a developer and his wife over a subject (HTTP and REST) that is the backbone of the web. The truth of the matter is that many professional developers have had the same questions the wife…

Web security doesn’t always get the attention that it deserves. That is unfortunate because it leaves companies and their customers vulnerable to an array of cyber attacks. I wrote an article about How and Why companies are Hacked last…

Anthem, Sony, Home Depot, Dairy Queen, Kmart…What do all of these companies have in common? They were hacked and lost millions! It seems like not a day goes by anymore where you don’t hear about another company that has had its private…

Being a developer is a lot of fun. When people ask me why I love doing it so much, I usually don’t have just one answer for them. However, one answer I give often draws a few funny looks from the questioner. I love it because everyday I…

Does anyone else have a problem with this?? This seems to pop up for me ALL THE TIME! Whether it is in a web URL, a file path on Windows computers, a file path on Mac computers, switch charters in command line, or wherever else they are…

So I was hanging out with my non-technical friend the other day and he asked something along the lines of “What is the ‘HTTP://’ part of the web URL for?” Being a web developer, I was fairly familiar with how HTTP is just a “protocol”…