🍪🍪🍪 On a Saturday

Emily Deans
Jul 30, 2017 · 2 min read

The weather in D.C. was unseasonably cool and rainy today, which made it slightly less painful to be cooped up inside coding all day.

I spent the morning working on one of last week’s daily projects. The focus of which is on creating cookies in conjunction with a log-in page. The ‘cookie’ concept is one I’ve heard referenced quite a bit in relation to the web. People wonder whether they should “clear” their cookies, or whether their cookies are a threat to their identity protection and security.

Before this past week, I honestly wasn’t really sure what a cookie was myself. To briefly sum up, cookies are small bits of data that are stored on a user’s computer and act as a sort of mediator between the server and said user. They enable a server to present their users with webpages that are customized specifically to them and can hold information around their preferences.

From what I’ve been able to gather on the topic, cookies were established as a means of allowing sites to remember information about users as they navigate through pages and databases on the web. This can be helpful when you’re trying to quickly log in to your library account or when you want to continue your online shopping session without losing the items that are already in your cart (also helpful when you’re ready to finally check out and don’t want to have to re-enter your billing address and shipping info for the gazillionth time).

Cookies — at their best — are quite helpful and convenient tools for those of us who engage frequently with the web. The concerns are borne primarily out of instances where folks have interacted with insecure (☹️) cookies. These can sometimes be vulnerable to hacking, which obviously can lead to a serious breach of privacy.

Of course, our cookie homework doesn’t pose quiiiiite that same level of potential threat, so the pressure is off for the time being. It’s a good reminder though of why it’s important to stay mindful of the damaging implications of bad code practices — especially as I continue to move forward in this field.

I’m planning to focus on the new weekly project first thing tomorrow morning and hope to have a working ‘Mystery Word’ game ready to go by submission time Thursday A.M.

Song of the Day: “Your Love is Killing Me” by Sharon Van Etten

Emily Deans

Written by

Washington, D.C.-based web developer. Former cheesemaker/food-systems nerd and current nerd in general.

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