I’m an engineering leader with a passion for web development and a focus on delivering great user experiences with clean, engaging UI's through concise, maintainable code.
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Leading Individuals
I believe that the best way to lead people is by understanding them, what motivates and demotivates them, what constraints they operate under (e.g. time, location) and how they prefer to communicate. Every person is unique, and while tailoring your leadership approach to each individual takes more effort than applying a one-size-fits-all model, it ultimately leads to more engaged, fulfilled team members and better outcomes.
Read ArticleThe Importance of Pet Projects
Pet projects, side projects, side hustles. For many engineers, having a creative outlet outside of their day-to-day work is essential for both professional growth and maintaining a healthy state of mind. While I acknowledge that not every engineer has the time or desire to code outside of work, the concept of a pet project can be just as fulfilling when found within work itself.
Read ArticleSnyk pnpm support for vulnerability scanning
Snyk is a great tool for dependency vulnerability scanning, but it lacks support for pnpm. In this post I share a workaround to scan pnpm projects and publish vulnerabilities to their Web UI using Snyk CLI and GitHub Actions (but you can adapt this to any CI tool).
Read ArticleApollo Server 4 Serverless GraphQL Upload
Apollo Server 4 changed the way we integrate with Serverless functions, the apollo-server-lambda project is no longer part of the core package, being replaced with @as-integrations/aws-lambda. With this change it’s no longer obvious how we can use Express middleware like graphql-upload for serverless functions, but it is still possible using the @vendia/serverless-express project. This article will focus on AWS Lambda integrations, but the solution should be just as relevant for any of the cloud providers (using the appropriate apollo-server-integrations package).
React OAuth2 Authentication with Cloudentity
In this tutorial we’re going to run through creating a react app that authenticates with a OAuth2 authorization server, in this case we’ll use Cloudentity. Cloudentity is an authentication and authorization provider that specialises in hyper-scalability. We’ll implement login using the Resource Owner Password Grant, and demonstrate authenticating API calls.
Read ArticleUsing GraphQL Scalars With Code Generator
Here’s one that might be obvious for GraphQL veterans, but I wasted some time Googling for an answer that didn’t seem clear. I’m trying to use GraphQL Code Generator with a schema that was using GraphQL Scalars and received the error:
Failed to load schema from ./src/schema/**/*.ts:
Unknown type: "Date".
Introducing Trade Monitor - a free stock notification service
As a novice investor the first thing I wanted was a way to setup alerts when stocks hit certain thresholds. It’s sounds really simple and I’m sure there’s a service out there for it, but I struggled to find a simple, free one. So I built one.
Read ArticleDuplicate Celery logs in a Flask app
Celery and Flask go together like tacos and Tuesdays, so I was surprised to run into some incompatibility in the way they setup and use loggers which caused Celery to dump duplicate logs. Perhaps it was just the way I had structured my project, using a Flask application factory and Celery tasks in a tasks folder, but that seems pretty standard. Or maybe it’s how I’m setting the log level? But I digress.
Using OWASP ZAP to test for CORS origin reflection exploits
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) protects a user from having sensitive information leaked from one site to another. If the browser allowed any cross-domain XHR requests, sites would be able to steal information from other sites that you are logged into by making authenticated requests to them via JavaScript (the target site’s cookies will be sent with the request). But CORS can be easily misconfigured and result in vulnerabilities in your site, one particular misconfiguration is CORS origin reflection, where the Origin request header is processed through a whitelist (or regular expression) on the server and if allowed, is returned in an Access-Control-Allow-Origin: response header. Poor regex can result in allowing unintended domains through.
In this post I’ll walk you through using OWASP ZAP to manually test a list of domain names passed as origins to a webserver, and evaluating whether they are reflected in the allowed CORS domains.
Read ArticleWTForms SelectField with Custom Option Attributes
I was surprised to run into this problem in my Flask app, I needed to pass a custom attribute to one of the options in a select list provided by WTForms (in my case I wanted to set the first option as disabled), but it turns out that this is a common problem with lots of work arounds.
Here’s a nice clean solution to pass those custom attributes, keeping the built-in SelectField, but using a custom widget which supports providing attributes for any of the options via a keyed dictionary.