Managed investments are alright!

Managed investments are alright!

“Why did you get that VUL? They are inefficient! Just buy Term Insurance and invest the difference!“. This was me years ago after I found out that a friend just purchased a Variable Universal Life Insurance from a big insurance company. I then went on a tirade about the insurance fees, agent commission, and managed fund expenses. I continued on about why it is a bad idea to mix insurance and investments.

Was I trying to help? My intentions were good: I wanted my friend to have the best insurance and investment set up. Paying unnecessary fees is a big no-no from my perspective. Continue Reading

Life Concepts

Life Concepts

As I add another digit to my life’s marker this month, sometimes I can’t help but look back and check to see if I have really grown worthy of my age. I found that through several trials and heartaches these past year, what helped me the most are the things I learned exploring and reading about personal philosophy.

These are some concepts that I find worthy of sharing to everyone. As they only touch the general idea behind each concept, I will leave it to the reader to decide whether they are ideas worth looking deeper into. Continue Reading

Simple Web Applications using Rack

As Ruby developers, we are familiar with popular web frameworks such as Rails, Sinatra and Hanami. These frameworks make our lives much easier due to the built-in features, conventions that allow others to easily understand our code, and the use of the vast Ruby ecosystem.

Knowledge of these frameworks enable developers to create feature-rich web applications in a short amount of time. But do you know the layer beneath that framework? Are you aware that these frameworks use a mini-framework within? As part of the series on Web Application Basics, we will introduce Rack and why it is important for developers to know how it works. Continue Reading

Web Development Basics: Server

Once a web request traveled through the Internet and reached the server, it can now be processed, right? Not so fast! In a production setup, the request does not reach the application right away. We will introduce the different services that support a web application: Content Delivery Networks, Load Balancers, Reverse Proxies, Web Servers, and Application Servers.

Why do we need all of this?

Technically, it is possible to connect an application directly to the Internet and start serving requests. While this will suffice for a small Internet-of-Things home service, this is going to be problematic in a real-world production use. Continue Reading

Web Development Basics: Security

In the previous article we discussed how requests through the Internet are protected using HTTPS. This is made possible through the use of TLS Certificates. In this article we will discuss what these certificates are, the different types, and how anyone can use them for their own web application.

TLS certificates

To establish a secure communication between a browser and the server, the first step is to do what is called a TLS handshake. In this process, the public key of the server is used to generate the key that is used for symmetric encryption. This public key is shared using a TLS certificate. Continue Reading