The EU may have just banned the anonymous sale of online goods and services
Well, not exactly a cheerful topic for my first post of 2015, but it has to be said.The EU has introduced new VAT (Value Added Tax) legislation that is supposedly meant to prevent companies like Amazon...
View ArticleOn Mozilla's forced SSL
Yesterday, Mozilla made a blogpost, stating that they will be "deprecating non-secure HTTP" - in other words, forcing HTTPS. I believe that this decision is harmful to the open web, and this is...
View ArticleFunctional programming in Javascript: map, filter and reduce
This article is meant to be an introduction to functional programming in Javascript - specifically, it will explain the map, filter and reduce methods.While these are natively available in any recent...
View ArticleUsing Promises (eg. bluebird) with Express
When using a promises library like bluebird in Express, you might have found it somewhat awkward to use them correctly - it's easy to forget to tack on a .catch statement at the end of a chain of...
View ArticleWhy you should never, ever, ever use MongoDB
MongoDB is evil. It...... loses data (sources: 1, 2)... in fact, for a long time, ignored errors by default and assumed every single write succeeded no matter what (which on 32-bits systems led to...
View ArticleReflections on NPM-gate, one day later
Okay, so let's get these things out of the way first:I am not a lawyer. However, I have to deal with intellectual property on a regular basis, because of my open-source work. I'm also very strongly...
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What is Promise.try, and why does it matter?
A topic that frequently confuses users in the #Node.js channel, is the Promise.try method provided by Bluebird. People often struggle to understand what it is, or why they should use it - and this...
View ArticleStop using JWT for sessions
Update - June 19, 2016: A lot of people have been suggesting the same "solutions" to the problems below, but none of them are practical. I've published a new post with a slightly sarcastic flowchart -...
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Stop using JWT for sessions, part 2: Why your solution doesn't work
Almost a week ago I published an article explaining why you shouldn't use JSON Web Tokens as a session mechanism.Unfortunately, it seems I've found the upper limit on article length before people stop...
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CloudFlare, We Have A Problem
For the past few years, CloudFlare has been steadily gaining popularity - being used by a staggering amount of websites, big and small. One of their frequently repeated claims to fame is that they...
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