Auth in GraphQL: Lessons from Production
I got a chance to speak at the GraphQL Summit 2021. I presented about my experience at Zillow around authentication and authorization decisions through the whole stack.
Fastest node.js hashing algorithm for large strings
We needed to generate hash of graphql queries on one of our high throughput services and were vary of adding another crypto call because node. Luckily, the internet had some great resources for benchmarking and hashing. Starting with these two as inspiration: https://medium.com/@chris_72272/what-is-the-fastest-node-js-hashing-algorithm-c15c1a0e164e https://www.blake2.net/ I wanted to run my own tests because we were hashing... » read more
Flyway vs Principle of Least Privilege in Spring Boot
It’s nice to use Flyway or Liquibase or something similar to manage the evolution of DB schemas in your service. It’s even nicer when with a bit of Spring magic the migrations are applied automagically on service launch. This is possible with Flyway as described in the Spring Boot docs. However, when using this in... » read more
From Director to Developer: Lessons from Interviews
I started a new job as Software Developer at Zillow in October 2019. This would have been hard to imagine when I left Zillow in August 2018, so I wrote a few blog posts detailing my experience: Believing it Preparing Lessons from interviews (this post) In looking for a software developer position I cast a... » read more
From Director to Developer: Preparing
I started a new job as Software Developer at Zillow in October 2019. This would have been hard to imagine when I left Zillow in August 2018, so I wrote a few blog posts detailing my experience: Believing it Preparing (this post) Lessons from interviews I had a few things going for me in the... » read more
From Director to Developer – Believing it
I started a new job as Software Developer at Zillow in October 2019. This would have been hard to imagine when I left Zillow in August 2018, so I wrote a few blog posts detailing my experience: Believing it (this post) Preparing Lessons from interviews When I left Zillow to go on a sabbatical in... » read more
PieBike – visualizing which bikes you ride
Update October 2019, the app wasn’t getting much usage so I took it down. My favorite past time is riding mountain bikes, so no surprise my first app was PieBike for visualizing which bikes you ride base on Strava data. Building this app gave me the chance to learn several technologies: React & Create React App... » read more
TorresApp – booking campsites for Torres Del Paine made easy
When planning our South America adventure doing a backpacking loop through Torres Del Paine was very high on our list. Thanks to instagram it’s high on many people’s list and getting a reservation there is quite the process. Because of the lack of availability we didn’t end up going, but solving the problem of figuring... » read more
Handling exceptions and browser crashes in Selenium
This is part 3 of my Python, Selenium, Fargate posts. Part 1 — Run a Python Selenium web scraper on AWS Fargate Part 2 — Adding Browsermob Proxy to sniff traffic and have more confidence in whether the website you’re trying to scrape has loaded Part 3 — exception handling strategies for when something inevitably crashes (this) The scrape job that... » read more
Browsermob Proxy and Selenium, knowing when requests finish
This is part 2 of my Python, Selenium, Fargate posts. Part 1 — Run a Python Selenium web scraper on AWS Fargate Part 2 — Adding Browsermob Proxy to sniff traffic and have more confidence in whether the website you’re trying to scrape has loaded (this) Part 3 — exception handling strategies for when something inevitably crashes While trying to get... » read more