The Polyglot Developer is Live on Twitch

I am pleased to announce that The Polyglot Developer is now a part of Twitch when it comes to streaming developer content live!

So what can you expect when it comes to the Twitch channel?

Think webinar, but without all the marketing nonsense that typically comes with them. Twitch streams are live, not at all formal, and an opportunity for the community to engage with the presenter as things happen on the stream. In other words, instead of leaving a comment on a blog post or YouTube video, you can ask questions and provide feedback as things happen, not only to the presenter, but to other members within The Polyglot Developer community.

So how do you get involved and what does this mean for the other education channels?

Change the Host File of an Android Emulator

While working on a bug in one of my projects recently, I found an issue that I could only recreate on an Android device. However, due to some cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) issues on my server, I had to serve my development environment from a changed hostfile that had a specific subdomain of my project.

With the ability to use a remote Chrome debugger from your desktop to a mobile device, you can use an emulator and still have your full Chrome debugging capabilities. The only problem then, is how to get the host file to match your desktop environment. Following these steps will allow you to do just that!

TPDP E32: Getting Familiar with TypeScript for Development

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.

TPDP Episode #29: Asynchronous JavaScript Development

The latest episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast has just published, this time focusing on the use of callbacks, promises, and async / await, in JavaScript.

This episode titled, Asynchronous JavaScript Development, is the twenty-ninth episode to appear on the show and it features Corbin Crutchley, an expert JavaScript developer and open source maintainer.

If you’ve ever struggled with wrapping your head around working with remote resources or blocking tasks in JavaScript, this episode should clear things up.

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 #24: Mobile Application Security

I’m pleased to announce that the latest episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast titled, Mobile Application Security, has been published to iTunes, Pocket Casts, and every other major podcasting network that consumes the feed!

In this episode, which is the 24th episode of the show, I’m joined by first time guest, Rob Lauer, and returning guest TJ VanToll. Both of these guests work for Progress, which is the company behind NativeScript, and you’ll remember that episode 5 was strictly around getting to know what NativeScript has to offer. The focus of this episode isn’t around NativeScript, but around the security of your mobile applications. Just like with web applications, security is important with mobile, even if it isn’t talked about as much.

In this episode you’ll learn about protecting your application source code from reverse engineering, protecting your users data at rest, and securely transferring your data between remote web services.

Query A GraphQL API On Android And iOS With NativeScript And Angular

I’ve recently written several tutorials around GraphQL and there are more to come. However, most of these tutorials, including my eBook and video course, Web Services for the JavaScript Developer, have focused on the backend side of things and less of the frontend side of things. Knowing how to create a GraphQL powered API is great, but what if you need to query it from a client facing application?

In a recent tutorial I demonstrated querying a GraphQL API from a Vue.js web application, but what if we wanted to explore something with an Android or iOS mobile application?

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to create an iOS and Android mobile application using NativeScript and Angular and then query a GraphQL API from that application using numerous methods.