Password Hashing and JWTs for NativeScript Apps with an Express.js Backend

When building an application that allows users to have accounts, you have to ensure that access to these accounts is secure. When building a user account system, an important factor to keep in mind is how passwords are stored. Storing passwords as plain text is a complete rookie move that leaves your users vulnerable to all sorts of data breaches.

The best way to protect passwords is to employ hashing and salting and in this tutorial, we’ll show you exactly how to do this. We’ll also show you how to generate JSON Web Tokens (JWT) on a Node.js server backend that can be used to authenticate and authorize users, as well as how to store those tokens on the client NativeScript application.

TPDP Episode #27: Static Website Generation with Hugo

I am pleased to announce that the latest episode of the Polyglot Developer Podcast has been published and is now available on all of the major podcast networks!

As many of you know, The Polyglot Developer is a static website composed of strictly HTML, JavaScript and CSS. There is no backend technology, no database, nothing dynamic, and as a result it is fast, cheap to operate, and easy to maintain.

This episode, Static Website Generation with Hugo, will shed some light into static site generation and how it differs and is advantageous over the popular alternatives such as WordPress and Drupal.

There are many static site generators available, but the focus of this episode is on Hugo, a popular generator because of its speed and functionality. To talk about Hugo, the core maintainer of the open source project, Bjørn Erik Pedersen, is on the show.

Sort A Vector Of Integers With The Quicksort Algorithm In C++

If you’re studying computer science, at some point you’re going to be exposed to the Quicksort algorithm. Even if you’re not a computer science student, chances are this particular algorithm will come up at some point in time as part of an interview. I’ve been asked about it plenty of times in interview processes and never once used it again.

Whether or not you’ll ever use the Quicksort algorithm, it is important to know and that is what we’re going to review in this back to the basics tutorial.

In this tutorial we’re going to sort a vector of integer values using the Quicksort algorithm. We’re going to use a vector because it is a commonly used data structure in C++.

Building a Simple Web Application in Dart

Dart is a programming language developed by Google and made popular by Flutter, their mobile development framework for cross-platform application development.

The Dart language is a general-purpose language, built to be used for far more than just mobile development, and, in this short tutorial, I will show you how to build a basic web application, using Dart.

Getting Familiar With Arrays And Vectors In C++

When it comes to the fundamentals of computer programming, arrays will almost always make an appearance. Being able to store a collection of values could be beneficial to a near endless amount of use-cases.

To continue the back to the basics programming series, in this tutorial we’ll explore standard arrays as well vectors which are a much more powerful alternative when it comes to C++.

Using Socket.io to Create a Multiplayer Game with Angular and Node.js

When it comes to client and server communication, there are quite a few approaches towards solving the problem. You could create a RESTful API or GraphQL API on your server and consume it on-demand with your client, or you can go the socket approach and interact in real-time through events. There isn’t a wrong way to do things, but some ways are better than others given the task at hand.

Let’s take for example gaming and online multiplayer games. While certain aspects of the game would make sense to use REST or GraphQL, not everything would feel responsive enough. Instead it makes sense to use sockets.

In this tutorial we’re going to explore Socket.io for our client and server communication. We’re going to create a Socket.io server with Node.js and that server will communicate with each of our games running as Angular applications.

Getting Familiar With Loops In C++

In this back to the basics tutorial, we’re going to be exploring loops in C++, something that you’ll take with you well into your software development career, regardless of programming language. The content in this tutorial is targeted at new developers or those that would like to start learning C++.

So when might you want to use a loop? If you need to perform a repetitive task of any kind, a loop is probably going to be want you want to use.

In this tutorial we’re going to explore for loops, while loops, and do-while loops using the C++ programming language.