Social Networks for the life of the world
Status Codes Real Web services have to be able to pass back a status code. Maybe it’s a plain 200 success code, or a 404 not found code. Whatever. We have to be able to control it. Here’s how. We’ll use the NegotiatedContentResult template class in the signature for the Get method. We have to … Read more
We send data to a web service via POST, PUT, or PATCH. All these web requests carry a payload: one or more items of data. How do we code these web services to accept data?
JSDoc is a way to put programmer documentation in Javascript code. It’s in the tradition of Doxygen , Javadoc, and C#’s documentation comments. And what a sorry tradition that is. Tools for extracting that kind of documentation and making, well, documents from it are just atrocious. (Set me straight in a comment if I’m wrong.) … Read more
Many people surely know all this by now. Still, here are some things I’ve recently learned about notifying clients (browsers, API clients) about errors. Delivering errors from route handlers to clients This is remarkably easy, once you figure it out. Just use the http-errors package. (Beware, not the http-error package; it does something different. Call … Read more
I just got an email survey from our local monopoly internet service provider. Will you recommend Comcast to a friend? Yes=10 No=1 This betrays a profound misunderstanding of the usefulness of that kind of survey, called the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. Why is “will you recommend our lightly regulated monopoly to your friends” a … Read more
Stripe.com’s Stripe Elements is a great way to handle payment card information in a way that slows down cybercreeps. It’s secure because customers only enter card numbers into Stripe-furnished iframes, never into forms on the site taking payments via Stripe. Here is the sequence diagram for how Stripe Elements handles data flow
Software designers sometimes need to present UML sequence diagrams like this one. This kind of thing is absurdly fiddly to draw with most graphics packages. But there’s a language called PlantUML that allows us to write them as text and render them in various software tools, including WordPress with the plugin called PlantUML Renderer. The … Read more
Jupyter is an excellent free open source package for literate programming, especially in Python. It’s nice because it keeps a good record of what you try in experimental programming. And it’s easy to tidy up your work when you figure out what you’ve done, and store or publish it. It’s also sweet because it’s a … Read more
It’s tempting, when in a hurry, to create a queue object in Javascript with an array. To enqueue something, push() it onto the array. To dequeue it, shift() it off. It works. But it’s slow, because shift() takes O(n) time where n is the length of the queue. Kate Morely cooked up an almost-as-simple but … Read more
A few days ago I ordered some Yubico FIDO U2F security keys, after reading that they are a useful way to help secure various online accounts and keep intruders out. These used to cost US$20 each singly and $18 each in bulk. The current (Dec 2020) product costs $24.50. They arrived, packaged inconspicously, promptly after … Read more