Easily secure your application’s sensitive information with dotenv in Express. — Modern applications use all sorts of data. Sometimes, data is used for authenticating into third-party services, connecting to a database, or any other myriad options. In the example of a database connection, the necessary data would be the developer’s username and password, along with a number of other required parameters.

Get your Node.js application up and running with this fast, comprehensive overview of Docker containers and how to use them with Node.js. — If you’ve found this article, that means that you have been tasked to setup an application and run it inside of a Docker container. By the end of this article, you will be able to do exactly that. Before diving into the necessary code, it’s important to understand the underlying…

The fast, no-nonsense guide to creating style-agnostic Modals in React. — A Modal is a popup box that appears in response to some user action. Modals are generally preferred over actions which block other events from occurring, like window.confirm and window.alert. Luckily, creating modals in React is easy. In this article, we’re going to create a simple, bare-bones modal for React…

Not confident with recursion? No worries —here’s the how-to guide for solving DP problems with a bottom-up approach. — Dynamic Programming (DP) is a funny term. It was named as such to avoid enraging a former Secretary of Defense, and the name has stuck ever since. Essentially, there’s nothing dynamic about it. DP can simply be categorized as an algorithmic strategy where one breaks down a single problem into…

The classic backtracking problem, demystified with diagrams and thorough explanations. — Permutations is not an easy problem. For those who haven’t seen a backtracking question before, there is no clear naive solution, and this poses a real threat for software engineers during interviews. Luckily, there is a method for solving questions like Permutations. In this article, the question will be broken…

Learn how to create, read, update, and destroy data from the database with models. — Ruby on Rails is the premier example of a framework that uses the MVC architectural pattern. The M stands for model, and models are used in Rails to represent business data and logic. In Rails, business data is represented as objects that hold data and require persistence in a database…

Protect Express applications from cross-site request forgeries with a minimum of hassle and middleware. — Security is of paramount concern for all developers, and especially for developers using unopinionated web frameworks, like Express. Since Express doesn’t have opinions about the correct way to create applications, it also does not have opinions about the correct way to secure applications. …

Design beautiful objects in JavaScript using this simple explanation of Kyle Simpson’s OLOO design pattern. — Every JavaScript developer knows that Objects are powerful; however, JavaScript’s objects also have a unique type of inheritance which grant them novel space-saving capabilities. This type of inheritance is called Prototypal Inheritance, and this type of inheritance makes OLOO possible. OLOO stands for Objects Linking to Other Objects, and is…

Solve the classic interview problem in linear time without sorting. — Two Sum — It’s possibly one of the most prolific algorithm questions in existence, and as such, should be practiced extensively. Even though it is a common question, there are many variants to this problem that could trip up a developer in an interview. One constraint that could be used…