Feature Flags, Feature Toggles, Feature Switches. What ever you can call them, they are a tool to easily switch a behavior in your code without making code changes. They are behavior based.

At first glace, Feature Flags and Environment Variables might seem like they are similar, but as we’ll see, they fulfill vastly different roles and conflating the two can be problematic.

A run down on the apps I use regularly and why. Caution, Mac specific drivel ahead.

Back in 2018, I wrote about a password reset method illustrating how to do a password reset without storing a reset code in the database. This has worked well for a few of my apps, but recently some good friends, we’ll call them Pedro and Rosco, came up with a much better solution.

I’m asked all the time “How can I learn all this stuff?". The simple answer is ‘build an app’

Do you want a secret that will make you 10x more productive?

Of course you do. As a programmer, you’re designed to look for better, faster, more efficient solutions to all life’s problems. It’s in your nature, and if you could be 10x faster, you would at least be curious.

Paige Niedringhaus writes a nice blog post called Password Reset Emails In Your React App Made Easy with Nodemailer, where she outlines how to use Nodemailer + ReactJS + Node.js + MySQL + Sequelize to build a simple password reset flow. Everyone reading these words has doubtless gone through the familiar password reset song and dance. Enter your email into a form field, receive an email with a link, click the link, reset your password, voilà!

A coworker asked me the other day. Why Vim, what do you like so much about it? I would dare say everyone who encounters Vim has a similar story. Many years ago, while on a Linux machine I first uncounted Vim. It was a simple way to edit text on the server. It didn’t make sense, but it worked. That was the extent of engagement with Vim for about 10 years, just being able to do simple editing of text.

Maybe you’re familiar with the LAMP stack? Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP. That’s been a pretty common way to serve websites for many years (circa 1998?). But things have changed, technologies have changed, and it’s not 1998 anymore. IE6 is dead, nested tables are dead, and the LAMP stack is the Old and Busted. The New Hotness is the MEAN stack, MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, and NodeJS. This new stack of technologies is what many new web apps are using these days.

Setting up Jenkins for Node.js + Mocha testing and such Install this stuff Node.js via Nave git clone https://github.com/isaacs/nave.git* ./bin/nave.sh usemain v.0.8.9 Mocha npm install -g mocha ChaiJS npm install -g chai xunit-file (Mocha custom report for Jenkins) npm install -g xunit-file Jshint npm install -g jshint Nock npm install -g nock Supertest npm install -g supertest Testacular npm install -g testacular PhantomJS npm install -g phantomjs Here is a handy script that will install v0.