DEV Community: Oana Ciurea

Sibiu Web Meetup #27 – Introduction to GraphQL

Oana Ciurea — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 11:41:29 +0000

The big comeback of Sibiu Web Meetup with its first edition for 2023 on 25 May brought to the attention of the attendees an Introduction to GraphQL presented by an old speaker-friend of the meetup, Ben Bruda.

What is GraphQL
GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data. GraphQL provides a complete and understandable description of the data in your API, gives clients the power to ask for exactly what they need and nothing more, makes it easier to evolve APIs over time, and enables powerful developer tools.
It is just what Ben proves with its presentation using an easy-to-understand real-life example, namely a book e-shop. He showcases in simple facts how web developers can use GraphQL to respond to specific client requirements and deliver applause-worthy results.

Main advantages
He reveals the advantages of GraphQL as being the following:

It uses POST only
It uses single endpoint
It only gets the needed fields
It gets nested fields
It sorts the nested list fields
It defines input types
It is well documented

In the frontend, productivity improves and there are no incongruities in the communication with the backend. Here, in the backend, the development philosophy is to invest effort in something robust and future-proof so that you enjoy the peace and quiet of seeing it work smoothly. So, while there is a higher upfront cost owing to more work for a complex implementation, more work required to get it started, you have less patches, clean and reliable code.

A presentation with a history
For more curious minds, there is also a back-in-time look on GraphQL in the presentation, about under-fetching, over-fetching as the pains that led to the creation of GraphQL, as a tool that brings out only the targeted data, nothing more, nothing less. And this is where GraphQL makes the difference. How they did it? We only leave the founders’ saying

Let’s build an ideal API for the front-end then work backwards to the backend.

And we will let you find out the rest of the story in the presentation.

Interested in more topics on web development? Visit Sibiu Web Meetup dedicated section on the blog.

Don’t Cut the User from User Experience

Oana Ciurea — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 06:51:12 +0000

In the context of a massive digital transformation of almost any activity, User Experience is a topic of ongoing interest not just in web development and web design, but in way more areas of competences, such as marketing or human resources, and all industries that seek to extend their product portfolio to serve USERS.

Sibiu Web Meetup #17 tackled this topic and left us with some conclusions that we'll share here.

Quality user experience can sometimes be more than just a fluid journey through the software product. There are domains where user experience is crucial, making the difference between success and fail or even life and death, such as in healthcare.

User Experience is a mindset - this is what we could easily conclude when listening to our invitee Andreea, a UX professional on duty. Why is it important? How to keep it in the web experience at all times and all phases of the development project? How not to lose it from sight during the development process? How to allow the user create his or her own experience in the application or device they use? All answers to these questions revolve around two main concepts: user research and usability testing. It is by keeping them in mind and in practice that we can ensure a quality user experience.

But we will let you discover more about all this on your own from the recording we keep for our subscribers on our Youtube channel.

As for ourselves, we can notice in our development and QA teams that usability testing is gaining the attention and investment needed both from the part of developers and clients. Also, focusing on the user also eliminates conflicts in the team and contrasting personal opinions, because everybody works for the user's benefit.

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Typing Behavior as Authentication Method

Oana Ciurea — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 14:10:29 +0000

Have you ever thought of the way you type as a criteria of establishing your unique identity? Well, our unique typing behavior is a way of identifying a person and it is currently exploited by identity and access management solutions.

Recent years studies show that written communication via digital devices is preferred over verbal communication (phone calls) among teenagers and young adults. So the exploitation of their typing behavior came only natural and are being integrated just as natural in the software solutions we use.

Such solutions assess the user’s typing behavior in terms of typing speed, keys pressing and releasing times, movement of the mouse, the position of the device. Using such data, a typer profile is created that is unique for the user and can be used an authentication method.

We discussed the subject in depth with one our guests @SibiuWebMeetup. Check out the video

DID YOU KNOW?
Does the idea of human typing behavior as a way of identification and authentication might seem new or even futuristic?
Well, it appears that it was first exploited in the second world war when the military intelligence noticed that the way the Morse code is transmitted can say something about the sender, in that particular case, if the sender was their soldier or the enemy’s. They called the methodology “Fist of the Sender”.

Interested in more topics on web development? Visit Sibiu Web Meetup dedicated section on the blog.