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Opinion and educational posts.

Understanding Moore’s Law: The Driving Force Behind Technological Advancement

Welcome to our exploration of Moore’s Law, a principle that has shaped the very essence of modern technology. Coined by Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel Corporation, in 1965, Moore’s Law has been the guiding principle behind the exponential growth of computing power over the past several decades.

What is Moore’s Law?

Moore’s Law essentially states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles approximately every two years, leading to a doubling of computational power while the cost remains constant. This exponential growth has been the driving force behind the rapid advancement of technology, revolutionizing industries and changing the way we live, work, and communicate.

10 Best Software Engineering Blogs

Welcome to our curated collection of the top software engineering blogs!  Whether you’re a seasoned developer looking to stay updated with the latest industry trends or a newbie eager to dive into the world of coding, you’ve come to the right place.

Our team has scoured the web to handpick the most insightful and informative blogs that cover a wide range of topics, including coding best practices, software architecture, career advice, industry news, and system design. We understand that navigating the vast landscape of online resources can be overwhelming, so we’ve done the hard work for you by vetting each blog for quality, relevance, and reliability.

Security Fundamentals for Web Applications

This article covers the essential topics for securing web applications.

Broken Access Control

Broken access control is when the application does not ensure that the user is authenticated and is authorized to access data or perform a function.

An example is if a user can access a different user data via an application, or access functionality of a higher privileged role.

Two important definitions in this context:

  • Authentication: If a user proves they are who they say they are, like entering credentials to access a website
  • Authorization: If a user has got enough privileges to access the data or perform an operation

Protections against broken access control

Always validate if a user is authorized for the action it’s requesting to perform.

Improving PageSpeed Insights Ranking

Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a tool that helps rank how well a web page does in terms of performance, accessibility, SEO, and user experience.

Lighthouse Ranking

Google uses Lighthouse to rank how pages perform. Lighthouse is an open-source tool that generates reports with weighted averages based on different factors.

The weight distribution for Lighthouse version 8 is:

  • Total Blocking Time 30% – TBT is the time that a page is blocked from responding to a user
  • Largest Contentful Paint 25% – LCP measures the time that it takes for the main content of a page to be available
  • Cumulative Layout Shift 15% – CLS measures how much a layout changes after the initial load. Think about those times when you are a couple of seconds into reading an article and suddenly something that just finished loading pops up and blocks the view
  • First Contentful Paint 10% – FCP is how long a browser takes to be able to display the first content of a page
  • Speed Index 10% – How long does it take for content to be displayed. Below 3.4 seconds is fast, ver 5.8 is slow and in between is average
  • Time to Interactive 10% – TTI measures how long it takes between a page to display content and become fully interactive.

How to find out the PageSpeed rank

There are a number of ways to find out the current rank of a page, each has its pros and cons therefore finding out the best depends on the context in which they are used.

Setting up a GoDaddy forwarding address on an AWS Route53 hosted domain

GoDaddy offers free Email forwarding with all domains acquired through them, but what if you don’t like GoDaddy DNS service and want to use Route53? Would still be nice to take advantage of GoDaddy’s free offerings right?

Activate email forwarding in GoDaddy

First, you need to activate the email forwarding offer and set up the forward in GoDaddy.

  1. Go to the GoDaddy My Products page
  2. Scroll down to the Additional Products section and under Email Forwarding select the Redeem option
  3. Choose the domain name for which you want to activate email forwarding from the drop and select the Redeem Credit option
  4. Back on the My Products page, go to the Workspace Email sections and click the Manage All link
  5. Find the domain name selected on step 3, and click the Create Forward option
  6. Fill in the details for the email forward. When done click the Create button
    1. Forward this email address: The address of the email account
    2. To these email addresses: The email address where the email will be forwarded to
    3. Catch-all: Enable this option if your emails sent to any account that does not exist to be handled by this forward

Once this is complete, the new address will show on the list for the domain with the following alert message: “Pending Setup: Validating MX Record”

Implementing Canonical URLs with CloudFront Functions: A Guide

AWS CloudFront Functions offers a lightweight and scalable solution for managing URL redirects and rewrites using JavaScript functions.

What is a Canonical URL?

A canonical URL is the preferred URL for accessing a webpage when multiple URLs can lead to the same content. This is important for avoiding duplicate content issues and ensuring search engines index the correct version of your pages.

For example, if your website is accessible via both https://www.example.com/page and https://example.com/page implementing a canonical URL ensures that search engines recognize one version as the authoritative source.

Check website for broken links

Let’s face it, broken links suck! They suck the usability out of a website into a 404 black hole, they suck the patience out of users with “oh, I found what I was looking for! … no, I didn’t” and they suck the life out of webmasters who have to play dead link whac-a-mole. So, are there any broken link checkers?

Unsurprisingly, yes! There are a lot of ready-made solutions out there.