Backend - Pg. 2
Death, Taxes, and Database Migrations
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Earlier in my career, I would come to a new project and inevitably a hectic migration would be underway. It's not always a "stop the world" change, it can be as simple as switching from NPM to Yarn, but something is always changing. I used to naively believe my managers when they said cute things like "just this once" or "we'll finally have our dependencies up to date."
What are UUIDs, and are they better than regular IDs?
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
In the context of back-end web development, an ID is just a unique identifier for a record of data. For example, each user on a website will have its own ID. If the site is a social media platform, then each post will also have a unique ID.
Backend Developers are UX Designers Too
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Too often I neglect the idea of UX design in backend work. The goal of user experience design is to give users a product that's easy to use. In the world of front-end development, that typically means making it obvious how to navigate your site, using commonly-understood icons, or implementing well-contrasted colors for foreground and background, making your site easy to read.
HMAC and MACs - The Inner Workings of JWTs
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
HMACs and MACs are authentication codes and are often the backbone of JWT authentication systems. A Message Authentication Code (MAC) is a string of bits that depends on a secret key and is sent with a message to prove the message wasn't tampered with. HMACs are a more strict version of MACs that offer additional security benefits.
Building Alerts with Percolate Queries in ElasticSearch
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Once upon a time, a company I worked for had a problem, we had thousands of messages flowing through our data pipeline every second, and we wanted to be able to send real-time emails, SMS, and Slack alerts when messages matching specific criteria were found. A simple solution built using ElasticSearch's percolate queries ended up being our saving grace.
