DEV Community: Hayley Denbraver 👩‍💻🥑

Be a Part of the Next Technological Shift: Edge Computing!

Hayley Denbraver 👩‍💻🥑 — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 19:35:07 +0000

What is Edge Computing?

Consider where the computing power has been located throughout the years.

In the 1950s, computers were housed in government, educational, and commercial laboratories. All computing work was done in these centralized locations. The next step was connecting to these mainframe computers through a terminal. These terminals had little computing power themselves, but allowed people to access the mainframe. Eventually personal computers came along, bringing computing power into individual homes.

Computers were then connected to one another in private networks. Businesses had their own servers on location and shared drives where documents were stored and could only be write-accessed by a single computer at a time. These servers and shared drives were managed onsite.

The internet was built by connecting these smaller networks together. Cloud computing came next. Instead of having a server in your closet, servers, storage, and more are enabled through the internet. In the cloud, you don't own your server and maintain it yourself, you rent a server from a cloud provider and control it

Edge computing can be thought of as the cloud coming to your doorstep or a localized cloud. Maybe it is like having the cloud in your closet.

Edge locations are highly distributed. When you use an edge location nearby, you get the benefit of high bandwidth and extremely low latency. The compute power is located at the edge location, so even slim IoT devices can do amazing things if they are connected to an edge location.

What Can I Expect from Edge Computing?

Anything that can benefit from high computing power and real time decisions is either made possible by edge computing or made better through edge computing. This technology has the potential to impact a variety of industries including advertising, healthcare, education, travel, entertainment, construction and more.

AR (augmented reality) games? Edge Computing.
Smart cities? Edge Computing.
Telemedicine? Edge Computing.

How Can I Be Part of the Next Technological Shift?

Sound interesting?

If you want to be among the first to build edge applications, please consider joining AlefEdge's ambassador team. You will have early access to our upcoming APIs, support from the DevRel team, promotion of your projects, and an honorarium in the form of gift certificates and other prizes.

Want to try our first public API? Check out our tutorial.

#SheCoded Take 3

Hayley Denbraver 👩‍💻🥑 — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 00:52:35 +0000

This is my third #shecoded post. My entries from 2020 and 2019 were actually pretty similar, and described how I got started and why I like coding. This year, I wanted to share something a little different.

She has ALWAYS been coding

Women may be under-represented in the industry, but women have always been coding.

We were some of the earliest computer programmers.

You may have read about Ada Lovelace or how women dominated the field at first.

But maybe you haven't heard about how knitting (and other fiber crafts) can be expressed in terms remarkably like code, with loops, conditional statements, etc. Or how women during wartime used fiber arts to encode sensitive information.

Stereotypical "women's work" is extremely technical. Cooking is applied science (I will fight you on this). I don't know if you have ever read a sewing pattern, but there are amazing, independent women designers selling patterns all over the internet. They rival every technical writer I have ever met.

We have always been here. Doing technical things. Understanding complex topics. Creating things for our communities and ourselves. If you think we aren't technical, maybe you have simply misunderstood or undervalued our contributions and our history.

"Knitting" by Erin E Flynn is licensed with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

Creative Conference Talks

Hayley Denbraver 👩‍💻🥑 — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:04:38 +0000

Hello DEV community! I wanted to make a post with my favorite tech talks I have given over the years. Mostly I wanted to do this because I am job searching for a developer relations role.

However, this is also a chance to share about my style and a few devices that I like to use to make my talks memorable.

Style

In my opinion, your talk style is important because it is not possible to ensure that your audience remembers everything from your live talk. That just isn't how learning works. With this in mind, I like to incorporate certain elements/devices/ideas into my talks to help my audience remember what I am saying and engage with the ideas I am presenting. Here are a few of these devices, along with an example talk.

Memorable Analogies

This example is from COVID era conference talks (it's online and was pre-recorded). This meant I had time to do a few takes, make an edit if I needed to, and utilize a zoom background.

My talk is an introduction to software security. There is nothing earth shattering here, but it is an overview of the things to consider when you are trying to make your application more secure. It is memorable however, because of how I chose to talk about these introductory topics--through the lens of detective fiction.

I love detective fiction (especially Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple). I draw parallels between the genre and the security topics. Examples include: What do I know about my neighbors? and Should I trust this mysterious package?. The analogy is interesting and memorable, and helps illustrate my point.

You might just have fun, even if you aren't new to security.

Commitment

I gave this talk a half dozen times between 2018-2019. The premise? I am giving a post-mortem account of the failures of Jurassic Park (and talking about engineering ethics and chaos engineering along the way).

The first time I gave this talk I hesitated over whether I should fully commit (pretend this is all real and that I was hired by Ingen as a consultant). Basically, I wondered if I should be in character. It seemed too weird and risky. But I took the extra step and committed to the premise. The result was a talk that people still reach out to me to tell me that they loved.

I promise, you won't die because you added passion or commitment to your talk. It may not land 100%, but chances are good that you will end up with a talk that is remembered.

Story

I think technical talks can get bogged down in the details. That isn't to say that details aren't important, rather that not every detail will be retained. Focus on your story, and share your notes/slides for the details.

Draft out your narrative arc. What is the journey you want your audience to take?

I love to add some whimsy to my talks (why not?) and will sometimes make up a story in case it helps demonstrate my larger point. (These are never presented as real, but as narratives to help the audience understand.) I have included an example below:

Personal Experience and Memory Hooks

The following talk is one of my first talks. One of the reasons it is still one of my favorites is that it is a talk that was unique to my background and experience.

I also liked it because it uses a memory hook. A memory hook is a sensory description that helps your audience remember your talk because it is almost like they experienced what you described themselves. In this video, the memory hook is set up towards the beginning and comes back into the talk at the end.

A Final Note

This is how I like to do tech talks, but there are many valid and interesting ways to tell your story. If this style isn't for you, that is 100% ok. The most important thing is to be yourself and talk about something you think is interesting. If you do that, you're golden.

"Microphone" by visual.dichotomy is licensed with CC BY 2.0.

On World Mental Health Day

Hayley Denbraver 👩‍💻🥑 — Sat, 10 Oct 2020 18:56:22 +0000

Today October 10th, is World Mental Health Day. A former colleague of mine posted some thoughts that I found to be really helpful. In turn, I wanted to write a little bit about my experience.

I am tagging this as 'career'. Mental health issues have the ability to throw people off course and to make people feel alone. You are never alone.

Your mental health is part of your physical health

Several years ago I had a sudden increase in anxiety symptoms and started to have severe panic attacks, sometimes without any idea what the trigger was.

I sought help fairly quickly and it turned out that the problems had been triggered because my thyroid was extremely over-productive. If I had let things simmer, I could have easily ended up in the hospital fighting for my life against a thyroid storm.

For me, my mental health issues were strongly tied to other things that were going on in my body. This isn't the case for everyone, but I think this experience highlights something very important.

Your mental health is part of your physical health.

It is common to see mental health issues stigmatized in a way that physical health issues are not. Sometimes people don't take what is happening to them seriously because they see it as all in their head. So in case you were unsure, let me tell you:

Your mental health deserves the same respect as your physical health. Mental health issues do not make you a bad person, in the same way allergies do not make you a bad person.

Your physical health is part of your mental health

I want to be careful here. You can not yoga your way out of a mental health problem. I also don't want to shift the stigma that currently exists in mental health onto a person's physical health. Health care access is not universal, free time is not free, and food deserts exist. We have a long way to go as a society.

But I do want to share that my mental health has responded to changes in my physical health, both positively and negatively. Understanding this has helped me address physical issues faster (because my mental health may take a hit if I don't). I also know that taking hikes around my neighborhood helps me feel better not only physically, but mentally.

It boils down to this:

You deserve the resources to be proactive about your physical and mental health. Investing in your physical health reaps mental health gains. Even small steps should be celebrated.

Be kind to yourself, today and always.

"Nature montagnarde" by gelinh is licensed with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

DevRel and community building with the Golden Ratio

Hayley Denbraver 👩‍💻🥑 — Tue, 26 May 2020 19:23:20 +0000

Developer Relations is a term you might not have heard before. DevRel teams are the bridge between a community and a company. We facilitate feedback, create education opportunities, provide support and assistance to the community, and more. I know that sounds fuzzy, but that is because it is. If you are new to the topic, Mary Thengvall's post will help elucidate things.

DEV Community, I would like to introduce you to the Golden Ratio.
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The Golden Ratio is, hands down, my favorite Twitter account and they have taught me a lot about authentic community building.

The Golden Ratio is a community run by Dr. Jen Golbeck. She is a Computer Science professor and has done a lot of research into social network analysis. She and her husband Ingo, affectionately known as GR Mom and GR Dad, have some of the cutest rescue dogs ever.

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I followed the account for the dogs, but I stayed for the community.

Today I am going to share three things I have learned from them about creating a positive environment for a community to flourish.

Don't be afraid to have fun.
Root for your community members.
Don't shy away from tough stuff.

Don't be afraid to have fun

One thing I love about the Golden Ratio Community is that Jen and Ingo seem to genuinely have fun with the account. The community follows suit and we are all the better for it.

Whether it is dressing up their most recent rescue as his namesake, Chief Brody of Jaws fame...
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or giving their most cooperative dog a series of odd jobs...

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...there is always fun going on!

Fun is an important part of setting the tone for a community. When we invite people into a community, we are asking them to spend their limited time with us. Fun can be a fabulous draw and fun can help retain people. Informative, technical, or complex content does not have to equal dry and boring! Dogs make it easy to lean into fun, but a little creativity can go a long way for any technical topic. I fully believe that we can engage with interesting technologies and topics in ways that are memorable and fun.

Root for your community members

The Golden Ratio community has shown me how important it is to celebrate the success and accomplishments of community members. In the Golden Ratio community, there has been a through line of support, encouragement, and celebration. This has included community couch-to-5k programs, amplifying art and other content produced by the community, and more.

The largest-scale example of the Golden Ratio community rooting for and celebrating its members is the recent Golden Ratio Commencement. Across the world, graduates from highschool through doctoral programs are missing out on celebrating with their friends, family, and teachers. Jen Golbeck, who participates in commencement every year as a university faculty member, wanted to do something for the students in the community who were missing out on a milestone.

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The community rallied behind its nearly 3,000 graduates. Click the tweet below to see a thread thanking all the volunteers (over 200!) who contributed to the celebration.

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Dr. Golbeck gave a commencement address, which included an ASL translator 🤟, and read the names of the graduates. The address is the same, but there are videos for the high school grads, college grads, post graduate programs, etc. You can see the whole project here.

I think this is a really wonderful example of rooting for your community members and engaging the entire community in something positive.

Don't shy away from tough stuff

It has been a true joy to witness old, neglected dogs get a new lease on life. It can be magic.

Click through to see the transformation picture!
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But when you are rescuing senior dogs, you do so knowing that there will be heartbreak. GR Mom, GR Dad, and the community have definitely had their share of loss in the last year. Since the inception on the squad, we have lost Maggie (12), Riley (7), Queso (15), and Jasmine (13).

Most of the dogs were seniors, and poor Riley had kidney problems that didn't respond to treatment, but there is simply no way to sugar coat loss.

Obviously boundaries are reasonable and you need not share everything with your community, but authentically engaging with difficult topics can be a gift to your community members. Most of the difficult discussions within the Golden Ratio community have centered around the loss of the dogs, but there have also been discussion about how to compassionately care for older dogs, how to ask for help, and how to deal with disappointment while pursuing your goals.

We are all people and we are trying to do our best. It helps to know you are not alone in the tough stuff. Difficult topics within developer communities might include discussions on imposter syndrome, unethical algorithms, privacy debates, the future of open source, harmful tech culture, racism, sexism, and homophobia in tech, and more. These issues don't go away just because we choose not to see them. Engaging with these issues may be difficult, but that doesn't mean it can't be done and that doesn't mean it isn't worth it.

Final thoughts

I thoroughly recommend giving The Golden Ratio a follow on twitter. It will only improve your twitter feed. You will get adorable dogs every day and you will get an awesome example of a positive community.

I would also encourage you to take a look at the communities that you are in or that you lead. Are there ways to incorporate more fun, celebrate you members, or deal with difficult topics? Ask yourself what you can do to improve the community, and remember that there are some delightful golden retrievers rooting for you.

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What have you been learning lately?

Hayley Denbraver 👩‍💻🥑 — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 21:12:12 +0000

I have the desire to dig into something new. I have a background in Python, have worked a bit in security, and have dabbled with containers, serverless, etc.

What are you learning and why do you like it? Any advice welcome. 😄

The TL;DR for my Emergency Contact Twilio Hackathon Project

Hayley Denbraver 👩‍💻🥑 — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 21:44:46 +0000

This is the highlights, the headlines, the TL;DR of my Twilio Hackathon project, In Case of Emergency. You can read the full article here.

Everyone should make sure that their emergency contact information and important medical details are up to date and accessible in an emergency (AKA right now).

My application

Introducing In Case of Emergency, the Twilio app that makes it easy to keep emergency contact information up to date! I can also customize my information, making sure not to leave out anything that would be important in an emergency.

Technologies

My application uses the following:

A Twilio account and a paid Twilio phone number set up to receive SMS messages
An Azure account and an Azure Functions app
VS Code including the Python and Azure Functions extensions
Twilio's Python SDK
I used Black to format my python files.

Features

In Case of Emergency provides the following via text to emergency personnel or a Good Samaritan who finds you in need:

Medically relevant information(allergies, known conditions, blood type, anything that you personally would want a doctor to know in an emergency)
Medications and any relevant dosing information
Names and phone numbers of your emergency contacts

Best of all, you can keep all of your information current by editing the relevant environment variables in Azure Functions. You can always add an item to your list of meds. You can remove an item from your medical details when it is no longer relevant (for instance: pregnancy, injury, ). Add and edit contacts with ease.

Try it out!

I want to share the project with the DEV community, but I do not want y'all to have access to my medical details or my emergency contacts. Boundaries are healthy. 😉

But you don't have to take my word for it that the project works. I have set up a sample phone number and PIN (distinct from my actual emergency number and PIN) that is tied to data that is not personal. You can text the sample number yourself and see how the tool works.

1. Text '12358' to 1-206-312-4357. If you don't send this code to the number, all it will do is instruct you to follow directions on the ID.

2. Text 'meds', 'contacts', 'details', or 'shameless' to get further information.

Texting 'shameless' will give you information on how to connect with me. I am currently on the job market for a Developer Advocate role and if you like my style, let's connect.

This is what will show up on your phone when you follow the above instructions!

Get your own

Read my full post for information on how to deploy your own Emergency Contact system using Twilio and Azure Functions.

Final thoughts

Thanks to Twilio and the DEV community for hosting this hackathon. I would love for this project to be considered for either the COVID communications or the X-factor category.

And to the DEV community, please be safe and well whether you are coding, sewing masks, taking care of loved ones, playing Animal Crossing, baking bread, or any or all of the above. Remember to take breaks and be kind to yourselves. This too, shall pass.

Flexible and Extensible Emergency Contact Information with Twilio and Azure Functions

Hayley Denbraver 👩‍💻🥑 — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 21:22:07 +0000

I have retired this project and the sample no longer is functional. I hope people still enjoy the walkthrough of my app.

Thank you to Twilio and the DEV team for naming this project one of the runners up for the Twilio Hackathon. I am honored and delighted. See the other winners here

Everyone should make sure that their emergency contact information and important medical details are up to date and accessible in an emergency (AKA right now).

I am proud to announce my submission to the Twilio Hackathon, In Case of Emergency! 🎉

Background

I love to run! I am not particularly fast, but I am incredibly stubborn.
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Life lesson: persistence can get you really far.

Whether you are running around the block, or running all day, you should make sure to be safe. For me, this has meant carrying pepper spray, wearing reflective gear in low light, and running with a RoadID. A RoadID is just a customizable medic alert bracelet, designed for athletes. By wearing an ID your emergency contacts and any important medical information easily accessible if something were to happen on your run. RoadID isn't your only option, but it is the one I currently use.

I have a bit of a problem however--my emergency information changes a lot! Over the last couple of years I have developed new allergies, started or stopped medication, and had my emergency contacts change their phone numbers. The info on your alert bracelet is only good if it is current.

Running isn't what it used to be (I find myself running circles in a closed parking lot all by myself these days), but safety on the run is still important.

Additionally, everyone should make sure that their emergency contact information and important medical details are up to date and accessible in an emergency (AKA right now).

Do your roommates know who they should call if you are sick? Is relevant information accessible if you are unable to advocate for yourself?

I have been kicking around the idea of a Twilio app that could help keep my ID current and can include any information that I want. No longer would I be bound to the line limit or to the inexorable passage of time. The Twilio Hackathon was the perfect chance to bring my idea to light.

My application

Introducing In Case of Emergency, the Twilio app that makes it easy to keep emergency contact information up to date! I can also customize my information, making sure not to leave out anything

Technologies

My application uses the following:

A Twilio account and a paid Twilio phone number set up to receive SMS messages
An Azure account and an Azure Functions app
VS Code including the Python and Azure Functions extensions
Twilio's Python SDK
I used Black to format my python files.

Features

In Case of Emergency provides the following via text to emergency personnel or a Good Samaritan who finds you in need:

Medically relevant information(allergies, known conditions, blood type, anything that you personally would want a doctor to know in an emergency)
Medications and any relevant dosing information
Names and phone numbers of your emergency contacts

Try it out!

I want to share the project with the DEV community, but I do not want y'all to have access to my medical details or my emergency contacts. Boundaries are healthy. 😉

1. Text '12358' to 1-206-312-4357. If you don't send this code to the number, all it will do is instruct you to follow directions on the ID.

2. Text 'meds', 'contacts', 'details', or 'shameless' to get further information.

Texting 'shameless' will give you information on how to connect with me. I am currently on the job market for a Developer Advocate role and if you like my style, let's connect.

This is what will show up on your phone when you follow the above instructions!

Get your own

Could you use something like this in your life? You can get your own. You will need:

An Azure account.
A Twilio account and a Twilio phone number.
To clone my GitHub repository and make any changes to the code to suit your situation.

Steps to success with Azure

Azure recently updated their UI, so some of these images are slightly out of date. Currently you can use the old UI, look for the informational alert.

Sign up for your free Azure account. You will get some credit to try it out for a month.
Download VS Code and the Python and Azure Functions extensions.

Authenticate your Azure account in VS Code. Once you have installed the Azure Functions extension, you should see a notification on the extension tab that will help you through the process. Now your VS Code install and your Azure account are connected.
Create a new Azure Function App through the Azure Portal in your webbrowser.
- Click functions to navigate to all of your Functions Apps.

Add a new Function App.

Configure the settings for your new App. The defaults should be sufficient, though check your region. Here is the summary of my setup before I deployed a trial function app. (This screen shot is not from this specific project.)

Once you feel good about the settings, deploy! Azure will take a minute to deploy your app.
In VS Code, open the file containing the repository that you cloned and pulled down from my GitHub. VS Code should detect that you have a Azure function application. Follow any prompts that it may give you.

You will need to deploy your local project (the project you cloned from my repository) to your Azure Function App. You do so by clicking the button in VS Code that is indicated in the image below. (It is the upload button. This will also be used to deploy any changes you make in the future.)

When prompted, select the Azure Function App you just created and deploy!

Twilio account and phone number

Once you have a Twilio account, you need to purchase and set up a Twilio phone number.

You will want your phone number to behave in a certain way when someone texts you. Here is what it looks like to set it up:

When the number is sent a message, a GET request is made to my Azure function endpoint. I have obscured my URL, but if you want your own you can find yours in your Azure Function UI as shown:

Environment variables

Once you have the basic set up in Azure and Twilio, you will need to populate your environment variables. When you are viewing your Azure Functions application in your Azure Portal, you will be able to configure your function (add environment variables). The link to that functionality is circled in the picture below. I have also circled where you can monitor your function. This will be particularly useful to troubleshoot any issues you may have with the environment variables, etc.

The image below shows what you will find when you are configuring your function. The variables that are not circled come pre-populated.

You can add and edit variables by clicking the links indicated by the arrows in your configuration UI. Variables indicated in red should be found in your Twilio account (AUTH_TOKEN and ACCOUNT_SID) and are necessary to use the Twilio API. The variables indicated in blue you will need to create, and include things like your Twilio number, etc.

The trickiest environment variable is EMERGENCY_INFORMATION. It can be long and, if not formatted properly, can be a problem. It must be in JSON format. Don't add a single quote to the outside of the structure. Only use double quotes, JSON doesn't understand single quotes. You can take the template below and populate it with your information.

{
"meds": [
    ["Med A: ", "Notes for A"], 
    ["Med B: ", "Notes for B"]
    ],
"details":[
    ["Blood type: ", "Blood Type"], 
    ["Allergies: ", "Allergies"], 
    ["Other information: ", "Other health information"]
    ], 
"contacts": [
    ["Contact 1", "Contact 1 number"],
    ["Contact 2", "Contact 2 number"]
    ]
}

When you are done adding variables, you will need to save them before they will be applied to your function.

Let me know!

If you give the above a try, please let me know. I would love to hear from you and can be contacted most readily on Twitter.

A parting word on security

Some real talk--this application strikes a balance between making sure information is accessible in an emergency and risking exposure of private information. I have done a number of things to protect my privacy, but if you spin up your own version, you need to consider what you are comfortable with.

Here are a few security steps I took in building this project:

The Twilio number associated with my ID has not been published on dev.to and it was never checked into my version control. You don't publish your keys in git, don't put your phone number in there either, even at the beginning. If you put important information like this in git, people can browse the history and find it, even if you later remove it.
I did not hard code any of my medicines, medical history, or my emergency contacts. Again, you want someone to be able to access it in an emergency, but you don't want to publish your personal business for the whole internet to see.
I included a PIN on my ID. My ID will instruct someone to text my Twilio number with my PIN to initiate the exchange. If a number has sent the PIN, it can navigate the options. If it has not, it only will get a message saying to check the ID for instructions. This protects me from someone accidentally texting me and stumbling on my medical history.
My Twilio account and my Azure account are protected by 2FA. This helps protect my environment variables including: my Twilio phone number, my PIN, my emergency contacts, my personal medical information as well as the logs present in both my Twilio and Azure accounts.
I have limited the phone numbers that can hit my function and have not published the full URL. That means that if you somehow had the correct URL, you would be unable to set up a Twilio number to hit it and get my medical information.
I am only working with my own information and have weighed the pros and cons. Additionally, I gained consent from my emergency contacts to include their phone numbers in this endeavor. One of my emergency contacts is also an experienced developer and we did a code review in order to get another pair of eyes on it.

Final thoughts

Thanks to Twilio and the DEV community for hosting this hackathon. I would love for this project to be considered for either the COVID communications or the X-factor category.

Empathy in the time of COVID

Hayley Denbraver 👩‍💻🥑 — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 20:57:43 +0000

I am writing this from my home is San Diego. It is raining outside, my hands are dry and cracked from hand-washing, and life just seems weird. Uncanny. Difficult.

I am worried, not only for my currently unemployed self, but for friends and colleagues who find themselves staring down the prospect of job hunting during a pandemic. And I simply do not know what to say to those who are ill or who have a loved one in danger.

However, I think 2020 can be a time of unprecedented empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. We (the industry, the nation, the world) are experiencing something together. Certainly we don't all experience it the same way. The pandemic doesn't erase issues of race, or class, or gender—in fact it has had a tendency to highlight them.

Yet, it is undeniable that we are collectively experiencing an Event. It might just be a little easier to empathize with others right now. At my previous job, I worked with people in several countries. The last few weeks were remarkable. It was clear to me that the lived experience of my coworkers across countries, continents, and cultures were more alike than they have ever been before. Empathy is a good (and under-practiced) skill for developers. What does our user need? Will this code make sense to a reader? How should I approach a boss, a teammate, a customer? How do I listen well?

Have you heard the saying that you when you pray for patience, you are likely to be given opportunities to practice patience instead? I think this is true whether your aspirations come out in prayers, minutely detailed bullet journals, or KPIs and OKRs. We have the chance to practice empathy and I suggest we take it.

The pandemic has given us an opportunity to practice the qualities that we aspire to include in our truest selves. This applies to your individual practice and to our community practice. We are strength training our character, with some seriously heavy lifting.

That is not to say that there is anything you should be doing (except social distancing and hand-washing--you should absolutely be doing those things). It is enough to make it through the day. 100%. Pacing yourself for the long haul and taking opportunities to rest are important. I will pace myself, I will rest.

I am also going to try to build some individual and community muscle during this unprecedented time. I think my practice is going to look something like this:

Reviewing the resumes of friends and lending my professional network as much as I can.
Working on projects that spark joy (to borrow from Marie Kondo). Coding is fun and I can showcase my skills in projects that are meaningful to me in one way or another.
Taking time to connect with my family and friends.
Doing code reviews, pair programming, and other collaborative things with friends (or future friends, aka. newcomers to the community) from the communities in which I am invested.
Practicing patience in the job search and moderation in spending. I may not find something quickly and I want to be kind to myself and others throughout the process.

It isn't perfect, but it is what I have so far. Do you have any thoughts on empathy or on personal, professional, or community growth in 2020?

Be well. Wash your hands.

Security tips for Djangonauts

Hayley Denbraver 👩‍💻🥑 — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 03:07:45 +0000

Lucky you, you user of the web framework for perfectionists with deadlines (AKA Django). The Django team has put a lot of thought into their security practice. I have summarized some of the best tips to keep your Django project secure. See all ten tips here

Throttle user authentications

Django provides a lot of security features baked in, but the authentication system does not inherently protect against brute force attacks. A malicious actor could hit your system with numerous login attempts, and potentially get in.

If this kind of attack is of concern for your project, use a project like Django Defender to lock out users after too many login attempts.

Protect your source code

Protecting your source code may seem to be an obvious step, but it is a multi-faceted step and is, therefore, worth exploring. One way to protect your source code is to make sure that it is not included in your web server’s root directory. If it is, there is a possibility that it is served or that, part of it, is executed in a way that you had not planned.

And although it goes without saying, if your project is sensitive, be sure to use a private repository on GitHub, Bitbucket, or Gitlab. Also, make sure to never check your secrets into your version control system, regardless of whether you intend to use a private repo. It is possible that a private repository does not always stay private and someone with access to a private repo cannot always be trusted.

Use raw queries and custom SQL with caution

While it is tempting to write raw sql queries and custom SQL, doing so may open the door for an attack. Django’s object-relational-mapping (ORM) framework is designed to make querying your database easy. Querysets are constructed using query paramatization. The query's parameters have been abstracted away from the query's sql code. A user attempting to perform a sql injection (execute arbitrary sql on a database) is going to find it much harder if you always use the ORM.

Django does allow the use of raw queries, but their use is not recommended. If you do use them, take extra care to properly escape any parameters. If you find the Django ORM to be insufficient for your needs, it is possible to use a different ORM within Django. SQLAlchemy is an example of an ORM that can be used with Django. If there is an ORM that better suits your project, making use of it is preferable to writing large amounts of raw sql.

Don’t let the perfect get in the way of the good

Every security step you take is a step in the right direction. Django may be for perfectionists with deadlines, but code doesn’t have to be perfect to reap security benefits. Implementing the concepts discussed above, to the best of your ability, can dramatically improve the security of your code and result in a healthier, more resilient project. Happy coding, Pythonistas!

I am a Developer Advocate at Snyk. This post originally appeared on the Snyk blog, with even more security tips. Find the full article here as well as a easily shareable pdf.

Nevertheless, Code is Magic

Hayley Denbraver 👩‍💻🥑 — Sun, 08 Mar 2020 00:06:02 +0000

I wrote my first line of code when I was 19, maybe 20. It ended up being a significant step in my professional development, but at the time, I needed to pass a single class.

I was a civil engineering student, and we had to take a course called "Engineering Computing". The class was taught by the most notoriously difficult to please professor and was generally thought of as an enormous hurdle you had to get over to get back to normal engineering classes. I don't think many of us took it seriously, except as something we needed to survive. This approach perplexes me now, but it is how we saw things at the time.

We worked with MATlab, which is not how I would teach it if they let me teach the class today. On a related note, University of the Pacific, let me teach this class as an adjunct and everyone will learn Python! We had to do all of our work in the computer lab because we didn't have individual MATLab licenses. (Open source is amazing y'all, if only I had known).

But even after jumping through those hoops, when I sat down to write a program It. Was. Magic.

I now know that there was a lot that was abstracted away from me. A lot of things were going on under the hood to make my programs work. But at the time, writing a program felt like speaking things into existence. X equaled 5 because I had declared it so and there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

I don't think I ever took another class that produced such a visceral reaction of surprise, joy, and delight. It didn't change my course immediately though. I finished the class, and went back to my "normal" civil engineering curriculum. I didn't feel like a "real programmer" because we had used MATLab and the mechanical engineers wrote programs in C++. They were real programmers, and I had enjoyed my vacation in Engineering Computing. Oh the stories we tell ourselves. Oh the assumptions we leave un-examined.

Fast forwarding a lot, but coding found its way back to me. After five years of programming professionally, and close to fifteen years since my semester in Engineering Computing, I keep coming back to a few things.

First, that there is magic and creativity in writing code. It can sometimes be a slog, but there is truly something special writing code and watching it come to life. You write, and something happens. That will always be cool.
Second, that I have to examine my assumptions–about why I write code, about what it means for my future, about how I use it to contribute to the world, and about its limitations. Because there are limits and I never want to forget or ignore important work that goes on outside of the liminal space of my text editor.
Third, that I never want to just code. Though, I don't really think anyone does just code. We work on teams, we plan, we triage problems, and more.

I enjoy my work in developer relations where I get to wear a whole bunch of hats. I do fun things like give a talk in which I address the failures at Jurassic Park or hack an app my cat wrote. And there is also a lot of behind the scenes stuff, like working with product, business development, and sometimes people and marketing teams. And yes, I write code. Sometimes at work, sometimes just for fun.

In the end, the reason I like being a developer is very similar to why I liked college, and why I liked my Engineering Computing class. I get to learn all the time, whether it is about software security, or being a better public speaker, or machine learning. And sometimes, it is magic.

Somebody Else's Python

Hayley Denbraver 👩‍💻🥑 — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 21:43:24 +0000

How do you manage your open source dependencies?

Confession - I love Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is zany and weird and sometimes (often?) really insightful about human nature. A classic example of this is his creation of the Somebody Else's Problem Field, a cloaking device of the highest caliber described as follows:

An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem.... The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye.

Continuing a bit later,

The Somebody Else's Problem field is simple and effective, and what's more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch (flashlight) battery. This is because it relies on people's natural disposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain.

Paraphrased from Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe, and Everything

So where might SEPs be lurking? Well, as a developer who uses and loves Python, I would like to suggest that Somebody Else's Problems might just be lurking in Somebody Else's Python.

Somebody Else's Python

You are more likely to know Somebody Else's Python as your open source dependencies. Don't get me wrong, open source is fantastic. It is the building blocks of many of our projects (both personal and professional) and of many of our communities. Open source is amazing!

Open source is amazing, but it should be used with consideration. If open source projects are in your production environments, you have to take responsibility for that code. It may be Someone Else's Python, but you have effectively cosigned a loan with it. You now share in any security issues in the software, known and unknown. It can be a bit sobering, and it can be hard to know what to do about it.

Fixing Vulnerabilities

The above risk vs. rewards calculation is one of the reasons that I really enjoy my work with Snyk. Snyk helps developers find and fix vulnerabilities in their open source software. I came into the company as one of a handful of Python enthusiasts, liking the product, and hoping/advocating for increased support for the community.

Today we were excited to announce support for fix pull requests. You can read more about it here. It is my hope that this functionality can help pythonistas confidently and securely use open source software.

Want to try it for yourself? Snyk has a free tier!

You may be working with Somebody Else's Python, but known security issues can be fixed and no longer be problems at all.