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AWS Cognito is an identity provider we can use to manage users in our systems. Cognito supports a simple oauth2 sign-in flow. Following this flow makes it pretty straightforward for users to sign in or sign up. Before doing anything else, you must create an AWS Cognito user pool in the AWS Console. For this…

Before hosting a video, you usually need to encode it into bitrates that perform well for various situations. AWS has Elemental MediaConvert, a service that generates videos for online distribution. When you first get started, a wall of options emerges. But when you walk through the wall, it isn’t that bad. First, we have to…

In my earlier blog post about Azure Media Services, we transcoded our video for better hosting on the web. In this blog post, we will host the video for playback. This starts with creating a streaming locator, which will handle the requests from our video player. One thing about streaming locators is that they can…

Building software often requires running many experiments. Some of these experiments can involve making HTTP requests to a backend. When developing a new API, I usually end up with a pretty comprehensive collection inside Postman, the tool I use to test APIs. If you’re like me, your Postman collection can be something you forget about…

It seems like we all use Git for source control. I know that since around 2012, everyone at Don’t Panic Labs has been using Git, and it has been amazing. Compared to what was there before, the difference Git made was like night and day. With Git, branching and merging are pleasant and super easy….

In an earlier blog post, I described how we could create an Electron tray application. In that post, we got a simple Electron application running. In this post, we will augment the application with Angular to provide structure and utilities helpful for building an application. This should be very straightforward, but if you try to…

SQLite is an interesting database technology. While not a technology we would often use on the backend, it is great for mobile projects because of its lightweight nature. A feature many people don’t know about is its ability to perform fuzzy text searches (full text). This ability is pretty much baked into SQLite; it only…

GitHub has released a tool called Copilot. This tool has an on-the-nose name as it is designed to be a co-pilot for developers and help them write code faster. The service doesn’t cost much, only $10 per month for a developer. This isn’t much, especially if it makes you more productive. To test it out,…

The ability to dynamically generate surveys and store the data without writing a lot of code is pretty powerful. There are various tools to help with this, and many products are built around this as a business model. But today, I will look at SurveyJS, a library that gives us some of these dynamic abilities…