User management is part of nearly every application and it is not easy to do it in a proper secure way. One of the possibilities is to use an existing solution such as AWS Cognito.

Nearly every project I worked on in the past has this part done inhouse. In these cases it is not unusual to see plain text passwords stored in the database. Or passwords hashed with MD5 hash which is deprecated. And even if everything was done correctly, there are still many other things that can pop up.

It is easy to say that someone is not good or weak. But it is not easy to make the decision to fire him / her and it is even harder to tell him / her.

This story actually happened 2 years ago. We had a developer we were not happy with. Underperforming or not delivering at all. In the end it was clear he is not a fit and we should say goodbye to him.

When number of requests to an application grows, it might be hard to read logs and group them together to one single request. This can be solved with trace ID that is unique for each request.

Learning new technologies goes always better if you have something to test it on. When I wanted to start using AWS I decided to move there my blog (you are currently reading). And these are the steps it takes.

Container should be able to perform only a very limited set of operations and it is highly recommended to use different user from root. To achieve this both docker file and kubernetes config must be changed.

Write simple Node.js backend using TypeScript, Express and Terminus and run it in Digital Ocean Kubernetes cluster. In the end you will have application which is running in multiple replications and has access to environment variable passed to the application by Kubernetes secret.

This week, 1 - 4 November, Web Summit conference held in Lisbon, Portugal. Me and two other colleagues from Kontentino were there to present Kontentino and listen to some speakers.

A brief tutorial how to create a Node, TypeScript and GraphQL server from scratch with MySQL database. The ouput is a very basic GraphQL server, which you can run, send a simple query to it and get a response. The whole project is available on GitHub.

On couple of my projects, I started using GitHub Actions. I also wanted to use it for pentest-tool-lite, where I want to run TypeScript lint after each push and publish it to npm after release is created. I had some problems which I recently solved, so I am sharing my solution.

Currently I have one full time job and in my free time I am working on two StartUps. One of them is based in US and the second one is in Slovakia. Both are the same size (3 - 5 people), main project is a web application, but the approach is different.