Diary of A Developer

I've always loved how Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter and all the major social network platforms maintained sanity of uploaded profile pictures through the use of instant resize at upload time. Of course not only profile pictures need to be made to conform to a specific dimension, if you find other scenarios during development when you need to ensure that your images are of a specific height and width, or aspect ratio then this article will help you do just that. You may also just want to give the user ability to resize before final upload, this article will help you do just that. Step 1: Download CropperJs Plugin There are lots of plugins that could help to achieve our objective, and I've tried a few. I find this one very robust and easier to use. Here's the github link Step 2: Import the CropperJs Plugin Using your script tag, import the downloaded plugin's Javascript file and link the CSS file too. Note, that for speedy loading, CSS files should be loaded in t...

With the magical things developers can achieve with JavaScript these days, there is almost no reason to develop on the web without JavaScript. The drawbacks of the traditional web development approaches are just too unbearable. JavaScript introduces superb user experience with AJAX and developers can now update an element on a page without post back! Although JavaScript solves  most of the developer's head ache, it introduces its own issues. Foremost of these are security flaws of which we have the 3 giants: XSS, CSRF and SQL Injection. I remember implementing a solution for a leading financial company in Nigeria, and though I insisted on stringent security measures for the Web API, the guy in charge maintained that there was no need for it, and the project went ahead without it. Yes! there are lots of systems trusted by the public that are in use without adequate security. I'm afraid these are time bombs waiting to explode. The effect of not adequately securing a syste...

Background HTTP Request and Response Header are very cool components of the web. They allow for transmission of some intricate information concerning how the a particular request should be handled. Sometimes however, developers "abuse" the system and hijack this feature for transmitting small amounts of data to and from the webserver. I am one of these system abusers, lol. It just happens that sometimes, our software solutions give us little choice than to do some awkward things. Before you start castigating yourself, its not really a bad practice, so far you only send little amount of text data. Issue Most of my web apps now run on Javascript front-ends, and this comes with its own challenges. I developed a software that sends data to the server to generate a PDF file and the server responds with the filename of the file generated for the client to download. As you could rightly guess, things worked quite perfectly until I migrated to production. The frontend now res...

Background Whether it is shortage of required skills, platform unavailability or even laziness, anything could make you want to cut some corners in development. And please get me right, by cutting corners I do not mean writing code that is cumbersome and difficult to maintain or leaving out important possible outcomes to favour low turnaround times. There's this popular quote that drives this best practice home: Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live. Issue We had this project I was working on with a team. Its kind of like a payment aggregator, functioning in similar manner as your regular payment gateways like Paypal, UPL, Interswitch. You can find the project here ( a1pay.net ). I was the front-end guy, which meant that I was basically responsible for presentation. However, in a twist of events, I was also saddled with handling the POST request from our 3rd party payment gateways, consume an alrea...