Author: Chad Michel
RBAC vs ABAC
Most modern systems have some form of authentication and authorization. Authentication refers to figuring out who someone is (think of user login). Authorization refers to figuring out what a user can do within a system. Just because a user can log in does not mean they can do anything inside a system. In many systems,…
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More SQLite and Swift
In my previous blog post, I mentioned using SQLite with an iOS application. In this post, we will extend that example to support text searching. While SQLite is a single file database that is pretty straightforward to work, it contains a powerful full-text search feature. To use this full-text feature of SQLite, you will need…
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SQLite and Swift
When building an application, you often need some way to store associated data. Applications usually store less data than cloud applications, but many of the same constraints still exist. You still need to store data. Some of the data is relational, such as contacts or addresses. And having the ability to store relational data in…
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Azure Communication Services
Sending SMS (text messages) is pretty straightforward. I have previously written blog posts on how to do this with Twilio and AWS SNS. Now Azure has a service that can send SMS messages without using another service. To start, create an Azure Communication Service. Once your Communication Service is created, you need to get a…
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How to Copy VS Code Configs to a Different Machine
I work with many students through our various education programs and Nebraska Dev Lab. During the last few days, I have done a lot of code walkthroughs, basically showing students how to implement a feature one line of code at a time. When we got to the frontend buildout, I started using Visual Studio Code….
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Safari Push Notifications?
At Don’t Panic Labs, we have built many iOS and Android applications over the years. Many of them have been built using some sort of cross-platform technology, like Ionic. But why so many mobile applications? Not one reason, many reasons. Sometimes customers want to be in the Apple and Google app stores. Sometimes they want…
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Twilio Verify
The Twilio Verify API allows us to verify users while not requiring them to enter (or remember) a password. This is a huge benefit for many systems. Having fewer passwords is better. Twilio Verify is extremely easy to set up. First, you must have a Twilio account. This is pretty straightforward. Once you have an…
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Things You Will Probably Learn in the First Year of Being a Developer
You will learn a lot during your first year as a software developer. But the biggest surprise may be how vital communication is to the success of software projects. Many of the things learned during the first year boil down to communication. Project management, task management, standups, iteration planning, and retros are all really about…
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Top to (More) Bottom with Angular and .NET Core
Our previous activities got us an Angular application making an HTTP call to a .NET Core backend to retrieve a shopping list. In this activity, we will extend our .NET backend to use SQL Server. First, let’s create a Shopping database. Next, we need to create a ShoppingListItems table. Now that we have a database…
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Azure Application Gateway
Azure’s Application Gateway service is a load balancer. It allows for the distribution of traffic across multiple servers. This isn’t a tool we often use at Don’t Panic Labs; we tend to use more of Azure’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) tools. However, Application Gateway is still a handy tool to have in your toolbox….
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