This article has been trimmed down from my recently resurrected blog, Literary Phenomenot based on the assumption that you may not be interested to know what I'm listening to this week, what I'm reading, or what kinds of antics my toddler has been up to.
The First of Some Unknown Number
In an attempt to reflect on my week and get back into writing, I've decided to document a portion of my internal and external encounters every seven days. If you read through the rest of my WordPress blog, you'll find gaps, sometimes years, between writings. Does the "Some Unknown Number" make sense now? Good.
This Week in Tech
Today marks the end of my third week at my new job! I've been documenting a legacy codebase, and I found some tools that have made this process so much easier:
mermaid.js - I've created three sequence diagrams with Mermaid this week, and it really is a joy to use. The documentation is iffy at times, so I visited the repo for answers. What I found were 205 open issues, 12 pull requests, and a request for assistance in the README. This may be the open source project I've been looking for!
Mermaid Preview for Visual Studio Code - Along with mermaid.js, this plugin provides a preview in VS Code and supports a number of formats. It worked great for the sequence diagrams, but the mini-preview was seriously in the way when I tried to make a flow chart. That led me to yet another new visualization tool.
draw.io - This thing is just fantastic, and it can be integrated into Confluence. I got that flow chart finished after all, and then I moved on to creating a visualization of entity relationships.
Separating Authentication and Authorization
It's been a while since I've heard anything about PolicyServer, but I've been working on a Dockerized example project that includes IdentityServer4, PolicyServer, and messaging with RabitMQ and MassTransit. I plan on serving two micro-frontend applications for a separate conversation, one with Chris Davies' eev, and one with single-spa by Canopy. If this sounds ambitious, head over to Enterprise Integration Patterns to nerd out on some much more complicated topographies. You just might experience some web design nostalgia, too.
Don't Feed the Trolls
I took a stroll through the top dev.to posts of all time where I found this article about the risks of storing your JWTs in Local Storage.
Sure, it has a clickbait title, but I found the content to be very informative. Continuing on to the comments, I discovered that the topic is a very unpopular opinion. Attacks were coming from all angles (e.g., "using memes in your little disquisition is kind of meh unless you're five."), but @rdegges remained tactful and pleasant throughout. I'm impressed!
More on Authentication Systems
By now you've recognized a theme. I read a 2016 article about authentication systems specifically because I've seen those two in use, and I wanted to dig a little deeper into the pros and cons of each. At my last position, scaling wasn't really an issue, so it's been interesting to learn all the ways that can become a factor. I'm curious which more people use.
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