about me

Software developer, Londoner, climber, Nintendo fanboy. My recent work has revolved around building back-end services for e-commerce companies.

I wish to broaden my knowledge of modern software development as I feel whatever your area of specialty is, front-end, back-end, DevOps, it's important to appreciate the entire landscape.

A couple of quotes that have inspired me to learn:

"If we all reacted the same way, we'd be predictable, and there's always more than one way to view a situation. What's true for the group is also true for the individual. It's simple: Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death." - Motoko Kusanagi

“If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself.” - Albert Einstein

Unless I can explain what I've been learning, I can't be sure I understand it myself. Anyone can follow a tutorial to the letter to implement something. Hence the creation of this blog.

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DoItAll: part 00 Backend developer wanting to "build an app"

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I've never been an all rounder, I've always created backend services in my work but never stepped into the realms of the other parts of software development, devOps, front end, architecture, etc. I have an idea that I want to build, but frustratingly I feel overwhelmed by the gaps I have in my knowledge. I feel paralysed and not knowing where to start. But I am an engineer, this is just another set of problems to find solutions for. So I will be creating a series of posts chronicling my experience. Hopefully this will be the start of an enlightening and fun experience.
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Comparing REST and GraphQL

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This article will compare REST with the lesser known  GraphQL  style APIs. What is a REST API? REST (Representational State Transfer) is a client-server architecture style centred around resources and the state transitions can go through. A resource is named and located via a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) . Usually, the HTTP transport protocol is used which give access to the standard HTTP methods/verbs allowing CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations to be performed on the resources. The accepted CRUD operation to HTTP verb mappings can be found here .   For instance: curl -X GET http://api.com/users/1/photos/1 -H 'Content-Type: application/json' In the above example, the HTTP verb GET is used to indicate a read operation, the Content-Type:  application/JSON header indicates the desired representation. There are many more REST architectural constraints which would make an API truly RESTful but this is the general minimal you'll...
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Comparing Authentication and Authorization

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This is a large and somewhat confusing topic in software engineering. It doesn't help that we often abbreviate both terms to "auth", so first an explanation in plain English: Authentication : Are you who you say you are. Authorization : What you are allowed to do. It is useful to have the above one-liners in mind when thinking about these terms. Authentication is the act of confirming a claim to be true, authentic, real, genuine.  E.g. A person at airport claims to be Kye Yeung with a passport. The security guard authenticates this claim. Authorization is the act of giving permission to access resources. E.g. My nephew asks if he can play video games for an hour, I can authorize/give him permission to do so or not. This article will discuss a few popular internet security technologies but is by no means exhaustive. Basic HTTP Authentication Basic HTTP authentication , often abbreviated to "basic auth", is a protocol that requires client requests t...
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