DEV Community: Meggie

Why do we need HTTPS?

Meggie — Tue, 26 May 2020 07:12:06 +0000

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS)

It is the secure version of HTTP, the protocol over which data is sent between your browser and the website that you are connected with. The 'S' at the end of HTTPS stands for 'Secure'. Therefore, all communications between your browser and the website are encrypted.
Also known as ‘HTTP over SSL’, ‘HTTP Secure’, or ‘HTTP over Transport Layer Security’.

Reasons for using HTTPS:

Privacy
Integrity
Identification.

Privacy

It means that no one can eavesdrop on your messages.

When server send a message to browser which is not encrypted, i.e. you browse to a website without HTTPS, someone could be eavesdropping on your password or private information.

The green padlock on the URL bar of your browser tells you that there is no one watching over your message/data.
Integrity

It means that the message is not manipulated on the way to its
destination.

When the message is not encrypted - before it reaches to the client, someone can intercept the message.

This is often called a man-in-the-middle attack. The green padlock make sure that your communication is not being tampered with.
Identification

It means that you can check that this message is coming from the real server/source.

A digital signature attached to a message can identify the sender.

When you are browsing the web, identification means that the site that you are visiting is indeed the one you think it is.

HTTPS, via SSL certificates, ensures you are connected exactly with the receiver you would expect.

This SSL certificate is valid and has been issued by a legitimate Certificate Authority.

The article gives a short explanation regarding the purpose of https.

The First Step After Deciding To Become A Developer

Meggie — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 12:23:39 +0000

This post is specifically for anyone who has made their mind to focus on learning programming and sharpen their coding skills to get the first job in tech. Anyone who has made this brave decision to leave their monotonous or low-paying jobs and grab their dream job in tech. Yes, it is possible. It is possible for anyone!

It all sounds great, thanks for motivating but hey who are YOU to guide us?

I am a Dentist turned Software Engineer.

I graduated with an Indian degree in Bachelor of Dental Surgery. I studied for 5 long years, mugged fat books. Banged my head preparing dentures for patients. From wax carving the dental anatomy of all the teeth set in a human dentition to doing root canal treatments, tooth extractions, flap surgeries, preparing arch-bar and anchor clasps for the tricky orthodontic patients, to restoring/filling the tooth with dental materials, I did it all. Giving local anesthesia to patients, taking their case histories was like a mundane job to me. It all may sound interesting to some people, and this is what I signed up for when I was 18 and took admission in a dental school.

Things were going slow and steady. I worked for a few years as a Dentist in various hospitals, wrote medical articles, prepared white papers, associated myself to work as a coordinator with an NGO focusing towards women empowerment. However, things were not going at a fast pace which I was expecting, there were still some constraints which I will share in another post.

So fastforward I decided to quit my dental career and focus on getting into tech.

Why?

I didn't want to invest money in learning a new skill by going to college for the next couple of years.
I think IT is the only industry which welcomes a self-taught person. Other industries require a relevant degree, for example, management.

So coming right to the point, I want to share the first steps I took when I really got serious of making a career change. I was very focused on my actions and these are the two foremost advice I want to give to the people who're just entering into the programming journey is -

Create a Github account

Push whatever you learn every day.
- No matter if you can't do it from CLI — create a repository and upload your simple program files.
- What matters is getting the habit of learning and committing those programs every day.
The chart showing the green boxes shows the hard work and passion. It will represent your documented journey online. The silly projects, the good projects.

Make a Twitter account

Join the #100DaysOfCode #CodeNewbie communities on Twitter.
- I can say this with confidence that Twitter plays a big role in my journey. My feed is filled with people I admire, the people who're on the same path I am, or the ones who're just starting out so that I can offer help.
When I started my journey, I chose to go through the self-taught route, and let me be clear that it isn't easy. In Bootcamps, you get more centric guidance, a routine to follow, people you can go up to. But if you're a self-teaching yourself by online resources, you're learning alone.
There are times when you feel - to quit (or may actually quit), that you don't belong, that nothing is staying in your head. But once you scroll through the Twitter feed, you'll see that it's natural, and it's part of this journey. Some people are able to learn quickly, some take relatively more time. But nobody is going to ask after how many days you learned certain technology to build a particular project. What matters is to pick a concept every day. Try to understand it. Read and practice it from several resources.
Programming isn't easy. It takes time!
Even after getting a job, you need to learn every day because there's just so much to learn. You will only know 10% or maybe 20% of this wide world when you'll get hired, and then you need to keep pushing hard. You should be self-driven and motivated.
Don't be overwhelmed by thinking to cover 100%. Nobody knows everything.
Just focus on limited things, one programming language and that's it!
Build projects on your own, no matter how big or small. Make a portfolio, and apply like crazy.

Getting the first job as a developer is the hardest, but everyone can make it! If I did, so can you.

Practice, persevere and join the community of people who're following this route, you'll feel less lonely and more optimistic.

Why ads follow us everywhere?

Meggie — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 20:44:16 +0000

Have you ever wondered how you see the most relevant ads all over the web, whenever you've searched something recently? Let's say, you're searching for a pair of shoes or a nice party dress online and for some reason, you had to leave. However, items matching the products you were looking for keep following you across on other sites like Facebook, or some random site or keep appearing in other apps like search, email.

All these online targeted advertisements use data from your browser to make marketing more personalized. Special algorithms then look at your website visits and searches over time to predict your preferences and show ads you may be interested in.

This week I was searching for a vacation place in Europe and I started seeing - more ads from airline companies and the blogs telling the best places to visit in Europe.

There are many people who are still unaware of the fact that the social network tracks and records a list of their interests in order to target advertising. So, let's know more about it.

Who is tracking?

Many companies try to track you, but the main culprits are Facebook and Google.

Why?

Have you ever wondered how Google and Facebook are generating profits even after offering their app services for free? How do they earn their profits?

At their core, Google and Facebook are advertising companies — ads contribute more than 80 percent of their revenues.

So what will make an ad company attractive to the advertisers?

“Ad clicks!”

Advertisers love the company which helps them boost their sales. So advertisement companies start showing ads in a patterned manner rather than showing irrelevant ads. This was possible only by tracking users and creating a profile on them.
So gradually we became the product of these companies even without our approval.

If You're Not Paying For It, You Become The Product!

How targeted ads work

One may expect Facebook to have a profile on you, based on your actions within Facebook. It, in fact, tracks you across the web, on various other websites through the social plugins (the like and share button you see in almost every website).

Google tracks you easily by the huge google ecosystem deeply embedded in our life. Google knows what you are thinking (chrome, google assistant, google search), where you are headed to (Maps), etc.

The personalized ads are a result of cookies and an IP address. Cookies are text files in your browser that track the information you’ve searched. For example, when you searched for a Nike shoe of size 37, the cookie is stored like this:

_amazon_search: c2hvZT1uaWtlO3R5cGU9RjtzaXplPTM3

Here the search value is encoded, it can be decoded to show the final value like this: shoe=nike;type=F;size=37

Your IP address is kind of like your house address and shows where you are located. The balance between both of them is what gives the information to advertisers.

There are two ways online ads can target you: through social networks and through your browser.

On social media sites, there are ads that function based on who logs in. If I log in as Meghna, there is information collected about me that is used to target ads. For example, if I post a lot of pictures of myself coding, or sitting with a laptop, social media networks could then scan the pictures.

As a result, the next time I log into Facebook, I could see ads for programming courses, or some tech-specific tools to purchase.

Advertisements also target you through your browser. The cookies and IP address records websites you visit, how long you were on it, etc.

How much?

Now we know that companies do track you, but how much do they know?

Google knows:

Where you have been, your web activities, all the apps you use, all of your YouTube history, all your calendar activities, email, notes, files in drive and photos stored, even after you have deleted them. So practically, Google knows everything that needs to be known about your digital life.

What can you do about it?

You do have the option to ask Google to stop tracking your web and other activities by pausing everything.

Next step is to stop using the Google search engine. One can start using other search engines like DuckDuckGo, Startpage - they show search results from Google, but it doesn’t let Google know who searched.

Next backbone of Google in data collection is Chrome. Google Chrome is based on the open-source project Chromium. So you can use other chromium-based browsers such as brave. Mozilla Firefox is also a good privacy-focused browser.

Install ad, tracking script blockers such as uBlock Origin and Ghostery to remove the tracking scripts, Facebook social plug-ins.

How to stop targeted ads

Turn off cookies
Use a browser plug-in to limit data tracking.
Turn off targeted Facebook ads
Go incognito
Limit site linking: Avoid using the “login with Facebook or Google” feature on websites you visit.

Conclusion

Once we searched Google, but now Google searches us.

Nothing is free in this world, the more data Google gets on you, the more profitable it will be.

The loop of more data => more ad clicks => more profit, ignites the competition in tracking you more.

Next up: do you know how content-creators sell space in their website to ad companies? I will cover it in my next post. Stay tuned!

ES6 Arrow Functions

Meggie — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 16:09:10 +0000

They are next-generation JavaScript syntax for creating functions.

Normal JavaScript function syntax:

function myFunc() {
    ...
}

ES6 fat arrow function syntax:

const myFunc = () => {
    ...
}

Why we prefer ES6 arrow functions?

They can shorten the JavaScript function syntax, since:

Omits function keyword
Solves a lot of issue with this keyword in JavaScript.
- this keyword is important when we add method to an Object.
- Arrow Functions bind their context and not change in runtime so this actually refers to the originating context.

Practice time!

function printMyName(name) {
    console.log(name);
}
printMyName('Meggie'); //Meggie

Rewritten as:

const printMyName = (name) => {
    console.log(name);
}
printMyName('Meggie'); //Meggie

We can also shorten the syntax more!

How?

If we’re passing only one argument, we can omit the parenthesis too to shorten the syntax.

const printMyName = name => {
  console.log(name);
}
printMyName('Meggie');

Similarly, see another function -

const multiplyNum = num => {
    return num*2
}
console.log(multiplyNum(5)); //10

If there’s only one line of code returning something, we can omit the curly braces {} and return keyword too, and bring the whole code in one line!

const multiplyNum = num => num*2;
console.log(multiplyNum(5)); //10

Conclusion

ES6 arrow functions are a new cool way to write JavaScript functions in less lines of code.