Category: Web Development

Late-to-the-party guide to Vim and Tmux

Late-to-the-party guide to Vim and Tmux

In my first job we used Emacs as our main text editor. However, I have no idea how to use it properly so I just used it more like Notepad++ than Emacs. In our team there is one person who refused to use Emacs, instead he was using vi (without the m!). To be honest, it looked painful watching him edit code with no syntax highlighting, no line numbers, and no plugins whatsoever. We tried constantly to convince him to use Emacs but he always refused and stuck to using vi. I thought the guy was crazy.

Fast forward 12 years in my career. I was attending a Ruby conference with my peers and one of the speakers (Brad Urani) demonstrated zshell, vim, and tmux and how he does development in his machine. It looked cool! Some of my peers also uses vim and tmux so its not a new concept to me, however I always decided to use gedit all these years. This time, they probably thought I was crazy. Continue Reading

Protect Your Online Accounts

Protect Your Online Accounts

Data breaches are a common occurrence nowadays, with larger and larger personal data being exposed to the public and the hands of malicious organizations. Big companies such as Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Equifax are not immune to these data breaches and resulted in exposing millions of customer accounts. In the Philippines we also experience these data breaches, recently in COL Financial (online stock brokerage) and in Jobstreet (job board). Therefore it is important for you to protect your online accounts to minimize the damage caused by these data breaches.

I personally have accounts in COL Financial and Jobstreet, and so the reported data breaches served as a wake up call for me to take steps into securing my own account. In this article I will share some ways on how to protect online accounts in a practical way. Continue Reading

Why I finally decided to use a Password Manager

Why I finally decided to use a Password Manager

For quite some time now I had been hesitant to use a password manager. Even though I knew that it is a security best practice, I feel that entrusting all your passwords to one program or organization is scary. This feeling changed recently amid increasing occurrence of data breaches and the amount of data that is being divulged. These events and reflecting how I actually use passwords finally drove me to install and use a password manager.

Password managers are programs that store your passwords in a secure and encrypted format. They also provide tools such as random password generators to make it easier for you to generate secure passwords. These programs can be installed locally in your computer or in the cloud and accessed through the internet. Continue Reading

Running Long Tasks and Scripts

As your web application grows, there will be times when you need to run scripts or code snippets that could take quite a while to finish. Examples of these are generating large and complex reports, or updating your database with new values. When there are large numbers of records in your application, these scripts may take hours or even days to finish.

We usually access our application using the SSH protocol to log in and perform tasks in the server remotely. This article describes ways to perform long-running scripts or tasks in your application in order from least effective to most effective. Continue Reading