Don’t get me wrong, I love me some NodeJS. You can quickly create apps, but at cost. It has several major security flaws, the biggest being NPM. Last week, it was reported that the NPM module event-stream had suddenly become malicious and was detected possibly stealing from Bitcoin wallets.

For those who don’t know, NPM typically ships with NodeJS. It allows developers to quickly and easily download modules (or libraries) into the apps they’re developing.

In the case of the event-stream module, it was acquired legally by a malicious attacker. The attacker injected a hack into a dependency for event-stream called flatmap-stream. It went undetected for several weeks. …

As blockchain technology grows and matures, we must now create a clear distinction between smart contracts and dapps (decentralized apps). Smart contracts really should be how they sound, agreements between parties without the need for a third party; while dapps should also be how they sound, decentralized applications that do not execute on any centralized machines.

Today on the Ethereum network, there’s really no difference between smart contracts and dapps, and as history with the network has proven, there really must be. Typically with software development, the more complex the system, the more room for mistakes that can be made. It’s been estimated that for every 1,000 lines of code, 15–50 mistakes are made. Usually whenever a mistake is made in a traditional application such as Microsoft Word, the app will crash, and maybe the user will lose a few hours worth of work. …

In 2005 only about 16% of the world’s population used the internet, as compared to 47% that use it as of 2016. As this number increases so does the number of websites, ecommerce sites, datacenters, internet service providers, and internet enabled devices. Every website a user visits on the internet must be hosted on a server, usually in a datacenter with dozens or hundreds of other servers. For those who don’t know, a server is simply just a computer that is designed to just “serve” data to those who request it. Every server has software running on it 24/7 to serve this data. …

With the emergence of dapps, there’s been some confusion as to what the difference is between apps and dapps. First off, an app is short for application, the word app really became common once the iPhone appeared in 2007 and apps starting coming out. Apps were the new trendy thing, a new app was coming out every week that would make people’s lives easier in one way or another. Dapps is something new that really just started with the release of Ethereum. Dapp is short for decentralized application, and is typically an app that runs on a blockchain such as Ethereum or NEO. …

There are many programming languages to choose from, however for the most part, there’s really only about 10 that are commonly used.

First off, we’re going to be looking at Turing complete programming languages, so SQL, CSS, HTML, and XML are out. Besides, from the data I’ve seen on what employers are looking for, SQL job postings far outnumber nearly every other programming language. Anyway, how do we measure how popular a programming language is? There’s several different ways that this is measured, so we’re going to be using data collected by the Netherlands based company, TIOBE. They collect data from all over the internet, and is mostly based on search engine queries from Google, Bing, blogs, Wikipedia, etc. …

As a decentralized platform, Ethereum is fantastic. It can execute smart contracts, create tokens, act as a ledger, and more. One of the big problems it has though, is that developers have to go out of their way to find the right libraries to embed it into their app. For those who don’t know, a library is a tool that developers use to help them create apps. …

Ok, we get it, blockchains are the latest, greatest thing revolutionizing the world as we know it. We’ve seen the entire cryptocurrency market cap explode over 500% just this year alone.

We’ve seen the number of new revolutionary coins, tokens, and other blockchains make over $600 million USD in ICOs just within the past few months. Yet, how many more new coins will there be? All these new blockchains and tokens are practically the same, just tackling a specific individual issue in most cases. What we need is something developers are going to use for years to come, to handle all the major coding issues developers face on a daily basis; because lets face it, when it comes down to it, who is really going to be utilizing blockchain technologies to their fullest potential are developers. Developers are the ones that are going to be creating the new use cases. Developers are the ones that are implementing smart contracts and working them into their systems. Yes, of course there are many regulatory challenges that still need to be addressed. …