If you’ve ever used Express with TypeScript, you know first hand how confusing it can sometimes be. Traditional Express conventions involve the mutation of the Request object as a sort of “thread local” or “context” for the life of the request. …

I’m a chronic networker. When there isn’t a pandemic, you can find me talking to people at restaurants, bars, and meetups on a near-nightly basis. I can’t help it, I love learning about other people and seeing how we can help each other through this crazy ride we call life…

Overview Authentication is a trickier subject today than it was 10 years ago. There are hundreds of potential strategies for securing APIs and ensuring that a user is, in fact, who they say they are. When building or refactoring APIs, developers have to decide what authentication strategy makes sense for their…

When building a new integration with a third party API, there are so many different problems to solve! Idempotency, retries, exponential backoffs, authentication… the list goes on and on! One of the most common constraints when integrating with an external API is rate limiting. …

The Story Let me be honest for a second: I love giving tech talks, but my brain hates them. Every single time I sit down to prepare for a tech talk, I hit a writer’s block more substantial than The Wall in Game of Thrones. Writer’s block is not something I am…

Let me be candid: Buzzwords suck. They create unnecessary work hours, missed dinners with family, production outages, and unnecessary refactors of large code bases resulting in the aforementioned undesirable circumstances happening even more often. …

There are moments in life where realizations emerge that define our trajectories. Sometimes these moments are sudden onset, such as writing our first computer program that outputs “Hello world”. The feeling is magical and and immediate for many, prompting an indefinite obsession with the quick-feedback creative process of writing computer…

As originally posted at Jobstart. Introduction GraphQL is one of the most exciting technologies gaining developer attention in 2017. A viable alternative to RESTful APIs, GraphQL APIs provide a much more succinct and expressive way to read and write relational data between client and server. Two of the more exciting pieces…