Just wrapped up the core setup for my e-commerce API (Impextech): Auth, Products, and Users. Everything is running on Node.js, Express, and TypeScript. Instead of just getting it to work, I spent this week focusing on security, keeping the code clean, and fixing some annoyances in my dev environment. Here’s a breakdown of what I built and a few "gotchas" I learned along the way. I split everythin
MongoDB is a document database that stores data as flexible JSON-like documents instead of fixed rows and columns. It is commonly used for web applications, REST APIs, content management systems, and real-time analytics where the data model changes frequently. This tutorial walks through installing MongoDB Community Edition on Ubuntu 24.04, enabling authentication, creating an admin user, creating
What if your Kubernetes cluster simply refused to run unsigned images? I spent some time experimenting with enforcing image provenance in a small Kubernetes setup using MicroK8s. The idea was simple: Only container images with valid cryptographic signatures are allowed to run in the cluster. For this I used: GitLab CI/CD (build + signing pipeline) Cosign / Sigstore (image signing) Kyverno (admissi
Most teams I have worked with have one auth test in their suite. It looks like this: test('valid token verifies', () => { const token = signSync({ sub: 'user-1', aud: 'api://backend' }, secret); const result = verify(token, options); expect(result.valid).toBe(true); }); That test is fine. It is also a smoke test, not a regression suite. It catches the case where verification is completely b
The on-call alert at 02:14 said auth_5xx_rate spiked from 0.01 to 31.4. Not a deploy window. Not a traffic spike. Just thirty-one percent of authenticated requests failing for ~four minutes, then back to baseline. The cause was a JWKS rotation on the issuer side. New keys came in. Old keys went out. Caches in our service didn't refresh fast enough. Tokens signed with the new key were rejected beca
Power BI is a powerful business analytics service developed by Microsoft that empowers users to visualise data and share interactive dashboards across their organisation. While Power BI can handle data from various sources, its true potential is unleashed when connected to robust data sources like SQL databases. SQL databases—such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQL Server—are the industry standard for