Category Archives: webdev

cloud, JavaScript

How To Build An Integration With JFrog Xray?

The trend of DevSecOps is not new but it’s growing fast. More and more organizations wish to integrate their security team in all the phases of development and operation. 

Many security products keep your code safe from vulnerabilities at different stages (dev, test, qa and prod). However, JFrog Xray is unique in its capabilities to perform analysis of all the binaries you are consuming in your project.

JFrog Xray works with JFrog Artifactory to perform a deep analysis of binary components at any stage of the application lifecycle. It provides full transparency that leads to (more) trust in your software. By scanning binary components and their metadata, recursively going through dependencies at any level (think on the layers you have in any Docker container), JFrog Xray provides great visibility into issues lurking in components anywhere in your organization.

One of the best parts is that JFrog Xray is also fully automated through a rich REST API that lets it integrate with a CI/CD pipeline and allows other binary analysis tools to build on its unique capabilities.

Continue reading →
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cloud, webdev

Code Reviews Will Improve You (And Your Code)

Fog on mountains

There are many options to improve your software quality.
One of the most effective methods is to do code reviews with other developers.
Code reviews are as much a social interaction as a technical best practice. In a healthy engineering culture (egoless), team members engage their peers to improve the quality of their code and increase their productivity. Developers understand that the time they spend looking at a colleague’s code is repaid when other team members examine their own deliverables. These days, most of the companies (e.g. Facebook, Netflix, Google, Amazon, Uber) are embracing it, so it’s another sign that something is working well here.
The important thing to remember when you are doing a code review is to be kind and to ask questions (clarifications) before you suggesting anything.

Why Ask For A Peer Review?

  1. The most basic reason is to find bugs.
    If you won’t ask for it, you will miss bugs in your code:
    a. Accidental errors – typos or mixing variables.
    b. Structural errors – dead code, logic or algorithm bugs, performance or architecture concerns. These are often much easier to spot for an external reviewers the see your work from their perspective.
  2. You preventing from yourself a great way to learn and get better – Committers are motivated by the notion of a viewer who will look over the change request: the committer tends to clean up loose ends, consolidate TODOs, and generally improve the commit.
  3. Your code is not as clear as you think. Another developer will make it better both from its testability and readability aspects.

Code reviews are very important not only for developers but also to product managers, test engineers, designers and others.

In many cases, developers will be the first ones to see the benefits. It will allow them to move faster and with higher quality. Continue reading →

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JavaScript, life

The Monty Hall Problem

The Monty Hall problem is a brain teaser loosely based on the American television game show “Let’s Make a Deal” and named after its original host, Monty Hall.

I wrote a little web app that show you what is the right choice with a simulator. It’s a bit hard to explain the correct solution as it’s going against ‘common’ sense. Continue reading →

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webdev

Useful Google Sheets Functions

water falls

From time to time you want to get more from your data in Google Sheet. It might be some information you collected from a form or any other spreadsheet with data you wish to work on. Here are some useful functions for common tasks.

1. Return the last row

There is no specific function to return the “last row” – but this hack is working perfectly.

=INDEX(A:A,COUNTA(A:A),1)

2. Joining text

Useful for all the cases where you have first name and last name in 2 columns and you wish to join them.

="this name " & A1 & “ plus this extra name ” & B1

or if you have cells you wish to merge into one with a certain delimiter:
=join(“;”,A1:A5)

3. Import any RSS, HTML or CSV data Continue reading →

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Chrome, HTML5, webdev

Share Location On The Web With Waze

If you have a website that contain ‘just’ your (business) address you can do better.

How?

You can use the links below to help your users navigate to you with one click.

This will save them the trouble to ‘select’, ‘copy’ and open their map app in order to get to you. Waze supports an API which enables developers to open the Waze client application through an external URL. The URL can be accessed from within your mobile web page or web app.

waze-logo

The following are the available parameters you can insert to your ‘a href’ tag: Continue reading →

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bots, JavaScript

Build Your First Smart Bot For Google Home

In the past few months, I heard someone smart saying that “the future is artificial intelligence first”.

Artificial intelligence, is making computers “smart” so they can think on their own and be even more helpful for us. It’s clear that Google, has been investing heavily in the areas of:

  • Machine learning – Teaching computers how to see patterns in data and act on it.
  • Speech recognition and Language understanding – Meaning, being able to understand you when you are talking with all the little differences and nuance.

These days we can see it all come together in the Google Assistant. It allows you to have a conversation with Google and be more productive. In this post, we will see how it’s all working by building a new Action for Google home. In the same time, we will have a nice bot that in the future we will integrate with many apps. Cool? Continue reading →

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Chrome, JavaScript, webdev

Online Editors For Web Developers

One of the most powerful aspects of the web is the ability to share your ideas and work with others quickly.

Over the years, I tried several options to share code and do demos. It’s true that you can always start your own server and serve your site, but in many cases, you want to focus on your demo and not do administrative work again and again. Here are some tools that I enjoyed using and I still find myself returning to check them from time to time. In most of them you got a nice ability to move (even) faster and to use GitHub for your code. Continue reading →

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Chrome, JavaScript, webdev

Protect Your Website With HTTPS

TL;DR

  1. Create (for free) an SSL certificate.
    One resource for that is letsencrypt.org
  2. Install it on your website’s server: letsencrypt.org/docs/client-options/ – You just quickly choose the client that will match your server environment or do everything in your browser.
  3. Change all your website’s links from HTTP to HTTPS so that search engines are notified and users will get the HTTPS version.
  4. Go have a drink.

Why?

You should always protect all of your websites with HTTPS, even if they don’t handle sensitive communications. HTTPS helps prevent intruders from tampering with the communications between your websites and your users’ browsers. It might be a malicious attacker or legitimate (but intrusive) companies, such as ISPs or hotels that inject ads into pages. Your users will think that your site is ugly or worst because they can’t tell who is doing what to the pages.
If you care about your users, always protect them and serve them with HTTPS. It will also prevents intruders from being able to passively listen in on the communications between your website and your users. Another benefit we gain from HTTPS is the ability to work with new powerful web platform features: Continue reading →

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Business, webdev

How To Rapid Prototyping?

One of the strength points that startups got over big companies is the ability to run fast and try new things. That’s why it’s important to improve your prototyping abilities.

Rapid prototyping composed from quick iterations of these three steps:

  1. Prototype – Draw, sketch or code something that can be reviewed.
    Convert the description of the solution into mock ups that everyone can see and review. You should take into considerations what is the story that will drive the user interaction. What will be the best experience?
  2. Review – Share the prototype with stakeholders (=users, developers and designers) and evaluate whether it meets their needs and expectations. If you can, let them try it and watch what they are doing. Try to mimic the real world as much as you can. For example, if it’s a mobile web app, let users try it with 3G networks (or even 2G) and see what is working and what is not.
  3. Refine – Based on feedback and data that you collected, identify areas that need to be refined or further defined it in the prototype. Now jump to step #2 and see if the result improved or, like in some cases, they did not.

The key to a successful rapid prototyping is revising quickly based on feedback. You should say ‘no’ to a lot of suggestions and let the data leads you. This approach helps teams experiment with multiple approaches and ideas on their way to a new product. It also reduces the risk by putting everyone on the same page (or in this case, the same image).

What to Prototype?

Use the 20/80 rule.

As a starting point, you can impress your colleagues when you suggesting it… You can start by saying something like: “Let’s work with Pareto distribution“. At this point of the meeting, everyone will look at you with admiration.

But more importantly, it’s helpful – For real.

Focus on the 20% of the key functionality that will be used 80% of the time. You wish to showcase how your product will work and later how it will look like. So ignore all the ‘little’ features that are not part of these core functions.

Continue reading →

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Android, Chrome, mobile

Earn More Revenue With Firebase And AdMob

grow your userbase

Firebase is a mobile platform that helps you quickly develop high-quality apps, grow your user base, and earn more money. In the slides below, we will focus on the growth part. In other words, we will talk about ways to acquire and engage the right users at the right time.
There are several features that Firebase is giving developers out of the box in order to help with growth:

Continue reading →

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