Is YAML writing fun? — I recently came across this blog post from Ruud van Asseldonk titled “The yaml document from hell”. I’ve always heard that YAML has its pitfalls, but hadn’t looked into the details — and thankfully hadn’t been affected — mainly due to my very infrequent and simple use of YAML. …

Two factor authentication (2FA) is a great way to improve the security of user accounts in an application. It helps protect against common issues with passwords, like users picking easily guessable passwords or reusing the same password across multiple sites. …

Take a trip into the Fediverse — Mastodon is different from most online services. It is a federated network, so when you set up an account you need to choose a server to use. Your username then becomes a combination of your handle and that server you signed up to. For example, I am currently @philnash@mastodon.social. But…

Link shortening has been around for a long time and Bitly is arguably the king of the link shorteners. It has support for shortening long URLs as well as custom short links, custom domains, and metrics to track how each link is performing. For those of us with the power…

Create your very own chatbot — Chatbots are programs that communicate in some way with humans. They can be very basic, responding to keywords or phrases, or use something like Twilio Autopilot to take advantage of natural language understanding (NLU) to provide a richer experience and build out more complicated conversations. In this tutorial, we are…

The Web Speech API has two functions, speech synthesis, otherwise known as text to speech, and speech recognition, or speech to text. We previously investigated text to speech so let’s take a look at how browsers handle recognising and transcribing speech with the SpeechRecognition API. Being able to take voice…

Some things you do as a developer can work for years only to turn around and bite you when you least expect it — These are the things that you wish another developer had told you early in your career so that you never had to make the mistakes. This article is about one of those things, and if you’re reading this, consider it my warning to you. File paths look like strings. You…

Autocomplete, proper keyboards, and more — There are plenty of opportunities for friction in the user experience when logging in, particularly while entering a two-factor authentication code. As developers, we should be building applications that support the need for account security but don’t detract from the user experience. …