Tag: typescript

Resty Desktop, a GUI for the Restic Backup Application

June 26, 2026 Nic Raboy

There are quite a few backup applications in circulation, each with their own set of benefits. I have personally become very fond of the Restic backup application because of it being quick, reliable, and open source.

Typically when I use Restic on my server I'm using Backrest, like demonstrated in a previous tutorial. When I am on my desktop I use the CLI, but often find it cumbersome to remember the commands, paths to my backups, etc.

This brought me to the creation of Resty Desktop, a GUI wrapper to the official Restic CLI application!

Test Password Strength and Password History with TypeScript and MongoDB

June 19, 2026 Nic Raboy

Just about every application you build is going to need some form of user authentication, and the moment you have user accounts, you have passwords to manage. Storing them safely is only part of the job. You also need to make sure those passwords are strong enough to be worth protecting in the first place, and in many cases, you need to make sure the same password isn't recycled every time it’s rotated.

Password reuse is a bigger deal than it sounds. Compliance frameworks frequently require that the last several passwords cannot be used again, and even outside of compliance, it is good hygiene. If a password leaks today and a user just rotates back to it six months from now, your rotation policy did not actually protect anyone.

MongoDB happens to be a really good fit for this kind of feature. A user document can store the current password hash at the root of the document, along with a growing array of previous hashes, all in the same record. There is no separate join table to set up and no migration to run when a user changes their password for the tenth time.

In this tutorial, we'll see how to build a small TypeScript API using Express Framework, Zod, and the MongoDB Node.js driver. This application registers users with strong password rules, authenticates them, and rejects any password change that has been seen before.

MongoDB and GraphQL: A Perfect Match

May 15, 2026 Nic Raboy

GraphQL is a powerful and efficient way to build APIs. The client queries the API, similarly to how they would a database, and that API returns only the data that they've requested, often reducing the response payload and improving response times. Low response times are critical in the modern world.

When the GraphQL API is paired with MongoDB, you're not only getting those fast response times, but you're also getting a data format that is consistent from start to finish.

Imagine this: Your client is executing a GraphQL query and that query looks similar to JSON. When the data reaches your application—which, let's say, is TypeScript in this example—you're now working with a data format that is similar to JSON in your application. Taking it a step further, when working with MongoDB, the data you send to and from MongoDB will also be similar to JSON. So what you're getting is that consistent data experience on top of performance. No need to worry too much about manipulating and formatting your data, and instead you get to focus on the user experience of your application, not the database and tooling.

In this tutorial, we're going to see just how easy it is to use MongoDB in your GraphQL API, this time built with TypeScript.

Build a Real-Time Voice Interview Coach with TypeScript and LiveKit

May 6, 2026 Nic Raboy

Do you struggle with interviews? You're not alone! You can have the best interview notes in the world, but when you start having that vocal conversation, you might end up a deer in the headlights, freezing and forgetting everything you thought you prepared for.

There's good news though!

With modern AI tools like LiveKit, you can have a voice conversation with an AI agent, mocking a real interview experience. Imagine uploading a job description and your resume and being immediately paired with an expert (the agent) to ask you real questions for the job and providing feedback on how you answer and present yourself.

In this tutorial we'll explore using LiveKit and TypeScript, paired with various LLM models and Apache Tika, to establish a very realistic interview coaching experience.

Build a Movie Watchlist with Node.js, TypeScript, and MongoDB

April 13, 2026 Nic Raboy

Almost every modern web application will need a REST API for a client to talk to, and in almost every scenario, that client is going to expect JSON. The best developer experience is a stack where you can stay in JSON-shaped data end to end, without awkward transformations in the middle.

Take MongoDB, Express Framework, and Node.js as an example.

Express receives HTTP requests and sends responses. MongoDB sits in the middle and stores documents. The client can send JSON to your routes, your routes can send documents to MongoDB, and MongoDB can hand BSON back that maps naturally to what you serialize in the response. That works well because MongoDB is a document database. When you also want text search over fields like title and plot, MongoDB Search gives you a $search stage in an aggregation pipeline on the same cluster, so you are not bolting on a separate search system just to power a search box.

In this tutorial, we'll see how to build a small movie watchlist API using TypeScript and MongoDB. We'll explore a few different schema design opportunities and make use of MongoDB Search for full-text search.

TPDP E32: Getting Familiar with TypeScript for Development

October 14, 2019 Nic Raboy

I'm happy to announce that E32 of The Polyglot Developer Podcast is now available for download!

This episode features Corbin Crutchley, a friend, regular guest, and owner of the blog, Unicorn Utterances. You might remember Corbin from the episode, Asynchronous JavaScript Development, where we focused on promises, callbacks, and a lot of other asynchronous topics in JavaScript. This time around we're focusing on TypeScript, which is a super-set to JavaScript, and is becoming an increasingly popular development technology.

Including Attractive Charts In Your Angular Web Application

June 27, 2018 Nic Raboy

It's probably obvious, but most modern applications crave data and in many of those scenarios, being able to visualize the data is a necessity. This is where charting and graphs become valuable within frontend applications. Having attractive charts in your application can make a world of difference and with a convenient library like Chart.js, it isn't complicated.

If you've been keeping up, you'll remember I wrote a tutorial titled, Use Chart.js to Display Attractive Charts in a Vue.js Web Application which focused on Vue.js. This time around we're going to see how to include charts in an Angular web application.