It is more than mid-way through 2021. I should not be writing an essay about the nuances of log out. Yet here I am writing one; it is still an area that can be confusing. Today we’ll explain some simple and some complex sign-on and sign-out integrations with examples. ...

Let’s talk about spooky things that can happen while using the GitHub Marketplace or the Visual Studio Marketplace for build pipeline extensions. Much has been written this year about about supply chain attacks. In short, an attacker can gain access to a target by looking for an easier to compromise dependency of the target. This is a simplification, but it captures what happened with the SolarWinds incident, NPM package namespace incidents, and earlier Maven based attacks. ...

Let’s talk about cross origin resource sharing (referred to as CORS from here on), what it is, where it is used, and some mistakes I made when configuring this website’s hosting. After reading this you will hopefully never wonder again why that little error about not being ‘CORS-enabled’ shows up in the browser console. ...

Partition keys are a common concept among distributed software including CouchDB and Azure CosmosDB to other systems like Kafka and AWS Kinesis. They are a key input into the system that has consequences on how well it can be used to solve different end user problems and how well it performs under load. ...

What is the expected availability of a service API? What does a “99.9%” availability mean in the context of a service’s operation? What can a service client expect, what about a customer? Continuing from our prior post in January, let’s know discuss some aspects of using these percentage values in the context of how to guarantee availability. ...

I will not stretch the analogy of jugglers juggling and engineering teams engineering too far. In brief, software and system engineering teams can benefit from working on a few things simultaneously but too many or too few can cause everything to fall apart. ...

What is the expected availability of a service API? What does a “99.9%” availability mean in the context of a service’s operation? What can a service client expect, what about a customer? ...

A couple incomplete thoughts and questions for those that need to automatically log end users out of web applications. ...

Today’s post is a quick tip on how to easily create a sleep-delay loop in JavaScript. ...

Have you ever considered a service or suite of services and thought, “that looks like a ball of yarn.” There is a tendency amongst those of us who write software for a living to consider systems that are not understood as garbage. Often, this suspicion of poorly understood systems turns out to be unwarranted. What look like obtuse decisions made for no apparent reason turn out to have solid foundation in rationality. Software that looks strange with weird functionality sometimes is that way because strange and weird things were asked of it. ...