Misc

There are so many todo apps, but none of them seems to have the ability to let me do this:

I want to be able to create a list of todo items – let’s call this list the should-do-list – and manually change the order of todo-items. Then I want to take this list, and create a new view of it. Let’s call this view the want-to-list. The want-to and the should-do list will always contain the same items, only the order of items is different. I want to be able to manually change the order on each list without impacting the order on the other list.

Today I reached out to the maintainers of rxPY for help on understanding the window_with_count-operator. I have trying to get this to work for a while now, and it just does not what I would expect. I have read the official rxPY-documentation, searched Stackoverflow, Google, and the project’s GitHub issues (because people are very helpful there in this particular project). I also looked at the tests, but those were confusing me even more. So I decided to ask for help by submitting a GitHub issue. Note: In general, I would assume that GitHub issues are the right place to ask for help. Many projects will automatically close questions, because issues are reserved for issues, like bug reports. However, in this case the project maintainers are actively answering questions there.

The OWASP 2021 report is a good reminder to educate myself about web security. For example, I know about current password hashing algorithms (i.e. Argon2), but I need to educate myself about authenticated encryption vs only encryption. This year’s top 10 are:

• [A01:2021-Broken Access Control]{(https://owasp.org/Top10/A01_2021-Broken_Access_Control/}
• A02:2021-Cryptographic Failures
• A03:2021-Injection
• A04:2021-Insecure Design
• A05:2021-Security Misconfiguration
• A06:2021-Vulnerable and Outdated Components
• A07:2021-Identification and Authentication Failures
• A08:2021-Software and Data Integrity Failures
• A09:2021-Security Logging and Monitoring Failures
• A10:2021-Server-Side Request Forgery

I have been experimenting with using Grafana to visualize time-series data recently, and it so far it has been quite a nice experience. One problem that I kept running in, was that I manually created and tweaked a dashboard in the Grafana UI, but when I destroyed and re-build the docker-container, the dashboard was gone. Of course, this was not unexpected, since I wasn’t persisting anything Grafana related outside off its docker-container. But until today I hadn’t taken the time to look into solving this issue.

There have been some pretty scary security issues recently in a number of popular npm-packages that will install malware (backdoors, rootkits, crypto miners) on your development-machine. I haven’t yet taken the time to set this up myself, but I plan on moving all my JavaScript development into docker-containers, so that any malware will only infect the container (until the malware learns how to escape the container…).

If you are using WebStorm, here are instructions how to use docker for frontend-development.

Because I am primarily a backend developer, I have not paid much attention to innovations in frontend technology. Once I had learned the basics of the Bootstrap css framework, I didn’t really feel the need for learning about the details of css layout. But with my recent journey into frontend development, I also took a look at tailwindcss. As it turns out, this is exactly what I have been needing all my backend-developer-life. Its workflow is pretty much what I have been doing with Bootstrap most of the time: just adding a whole bunch of utility-classes directly to html elements, instead of neatly defining my own classes in css.

I had previous complained written about my difficulties when trying to add tailwind css to a fresh vuejs starter project. I wasn’t satisfied with the end-result, so I tried again today. And again, it took me ours of searching, and only finding unhelpful answers of people who seemingly just copy & paste commands until something works? Is this what frontend development will be like for me?

Anyway, I finally managed to reliably create an empty vue3 project that uses the most recent version of tailwind.

Awareness that gender diversity is real, and not everyone wants to identify as either male or female is slowly moving into peoples minds, it seems. I remember discussions that clients were having, usually about user registration forms, where they had in the past always asked for the gender as “male” or “female”. They had long discussions, and their decisions kept changing. I was not in a position to have any input into either the discussions nor the decisions, but I regularly saw the results. I was sometimes amused, and sometimes shocked how little sensitivity was shown: They actually thought about using a term similar to “other”, but with an almost derogatory connotation (“Sonstige”, in German). Luckily, they later changed that again.

Frontend dependency trees seem terrifying

I did a little experiment today: I used my IDE’s (WebStorm) built-in “create new project” feature to create a vuejs, angular, and a react starter project. Then I compared the total number of installed dependencies for each project using

npm ls --all | grep -v deduped | grep -v OPTIONAL | wc -l

which should count all installed packages without duplicates. For comparison, I counted the installed packages on one of my python projects that is actually a full-blown production application:

I have previously written about the awesome but less known git bisect command and the rather obscure git interpret-trailer command. Today I thought I’d share another obscure git command that I stumbled upon during my research: git notes.

Adding notes to git commits without changing the commit

git-notes - Add or inspect object notes

DESCRIPTION
Adds, removes, or reads notes attached to objects, without touching the objects themselves.

That is the beginning of the man-page. So, git notes can be used to add some information to a commit, without changing the commit itself. The documentation gives example: You could add a note to a commit that indicates who tested the commit: