Refreshing Google API Access Tokens in Auth0 Apps tl;dr just show me the tutorial! As I’ve written before, I love using Auth0 to provide authentication-as-a-service in the apps that I build. One of the things I love about it is how easy it is to set it up to use 3rd party identity providers (e.g. Google, GitHub, etc.). Not only does it make […]
Authorizing Feathers API Requests for Vue/React/Angular Apps Using Auth0 Recently I’ve been building a progressive web app (PWA) using VueJS as the frontend framework, FeathersJS as the backend API, and Auth0 as my authentication-as-a-service provider. Knitting these three components together turned out to be more difficult and time-consuming than I anticipated–not because it is difficult, but because of some fundamental misconceptions I had about […]
Why I Choose FeathersJS as my API Framework of Choice when Working with College Students In my last post I discussed frontend frameworks, and why I choose VueJS when working with my students. In that post, I answered some more abstract questions about whether or not this choice is even important (probably not all that much), and whether or not, as professors, we should even be using frameworks (absolutely, yes). […]
Why I Choose to Use VueJS with my College Students Currently, VueJS is my app development framework of choice when working with college students. As an academic, I am no less susceptible than anyone else to be drawn into debates about which framework, or language, or platform (if any) is “the best” to teach to students. I offer these thoughts so that my students might […]
Building a Collaborative 900-pixel App-Controlled LED Light Show: Part 2 In Part 1 of this series, I introduced this project: I’m building a light show for my office in order to attract people to my office and to offer a creative, motivating outlet for people to learn to code. I spent most of the first post describing the calculations and components necessary to power 900 […]
Building a Collaborative 900-pixel App-Controlled LED Light Show: Part 1 I’m moving into a brand new office in a couple of weeks. I work at a university and mostly teach programming and web development. I was brainstorming about ways to make my office a place where I and others would really enjoy hanging out. I typically use my office almost exclusively as a place for […]
Should I go to Japan to see the cherry blossoms? Yesterday, I got a message from a good friend who asks: Hi! So we found $500 flights to Japan during cherry blossom season. We’ve lived in DC and SF, which both have amazing cherry blossoms. Do you think it’s worth whatever other premiums I imagine we’d be paying to visit during that time period? As […]
Initializing Arrays In JavaScript WITHOUT Using Loops For fun and relaxation, I sometimes work on coding puzzles at sites like HackerRank (here’s a good summary of various coding challenge sites). Today I was working on what HackerRank calls “the staircase problem.” Basically, if you’re given some integer n, output a “staircase” of symbols that is n stair steps high. For example if n = […]
Installing Kafka and Zookeeper on Vagrant Ubuntu 16.04 Step 1–Set up Ubuntu 16.04 Virtual Machine First, follow steps 1 through 3 in my previous tutorial. NOTE: in your Vagrantfile you may need to use /usr/vagrant/api as the directory instead of /usr/ubuntu/api. I’m not sure why, but some installs use vagrant as the root user, and others use ubuntu. I’m sure there’s some reason why, but I […]
Setting up an API Testing Server with Ubuntu 16.04, Vagrant, VirtualBox, NodeJs and FeathersJs Recently, I’ve been using Feathers to generate REST and realtime data APIs for my Angular(2+) and Ionic(2+) apps. During development, it’s useful to have a local virtual machine that’s running the API. It’s pretty straightforward to swap out the live URL for the API server with the local dev API URL so that I don’t […]
