Articles

Protecting and syncing secret keys

You should never expose API keys or secrets. If you expose them, you might get into trouble. Once, I had to almost had to pay an excessive amount because my friend leaked my Amazon API key by accident.

What’s the amount? I can’t remember, but I think somewhere between $20,000 to $60,000. Thankfully, Amazon waived the charges.

It’s big trouble if you expose your API keys. So don’t expose them.

The best way to protect your API keys is to use environment variables.

Handling Errors in Express

I had a hard time learning how to handle errors in Express when I started. Nobody seemed to have written the answers I needed, so I had to learn it the hard way.

Today, I want to share everything I know about handling errors in an Express app.

What programming languages should you learn?

There are LOTS of languages. Picking one (or two, or three! 😱) can be scary and overwhelming at first. In this article, I want to share three things:

1. What to consider when picking languages
2. What NOT to worry about when you pick languages
3. Recommendations for languages to learn

The difference between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

In this article, I want to explain the difference between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with an analogy. I hope it helps you understand what these languages are, and what they do.

Style hover, focus, and active states differently

I’ve been styling :hover, :focus, and :active states the same way for years. I can’t remember when I started styling this way. Here’s the code I always use:

// Not the best approach. I'll explain why in this article
.selector {
&:hover,
&:focus,
&:active {
// Styles here
}
}

As I paid more attention to keyboard accessibility (and therefore paying more attention to focus), I began to think we should not style hover, focus, and active states the same way.

Hover, focus, and active states should be styled different.

There’s a simple reason: They’re different states!

Today, I want to show you a magical way to style all three states effortlessly.

Creating a custom focus style

When you create a custom focus style, you want to think about four things:

1. Adding an outline
2. Creating animations that contain movement
3. Changing the background color
4. Changing the text color

I wrote more about this in my article on designing focus. During my research, I found three kinds of focus style I liked.

1. The one on Smashing Magazine
2. The one on WTF Forms
3. The one on Slack

Today, I want to show you how to create these focus styles and use them effortlessly across your website.

Designing a focus style

Focus is important. It tells us what element we’re currently focusing on. Most developers suggest keeping the default focus style.

I think there are problems with the default style. I tried searching for inspiration to design a better focus style, but I couldn’t find anything on this topic. So I did some quick research by visiting sites I use and paying attention to their focus styles.

I want to document my research and findings in this article. I hope it helps you:

1. Understand the problems with the default focus style
2. Give you some inspiration to design your own focus styles

Using Async/await in Express

Have you noticed you write a lot of asynchronous code in Express request handlers? This is normal because you need to communicate with the database, the file system, and other APIs.

When you have so much asynchronous code, it helps to use Async/await. It makes your code easier to understand.

Today, I want to share how to use async/await in an Express request handler.

Converting callbacks to promises

It’s easier to work with Promises (or Async/await) compared to callbacks. This is especially true when you work in Node-based environments. Unfortunately, most Node APIs are written with callbacks.

Today I want to show you how to convert callbacks to promises.

Three useful Express middleware

As I created applications with Express and Node, I learned about three useful middlewares:

1. Morgan
2. Camelcase
3. Remove empty properties

Of these three, Morgan is an actual middleware. You can download Morgan from npm directly. The other two are middlewares I created with camelcase-keys and omit-empty respectively.

I want to share what these three middlewares do, and how they make life easier for me when I’m creating applications.