Boot.dev Blog - Pg. 15

Hashing Passwords - Python Cryptography Examples

Jan 29, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Building a from-scratch server or using a lightweight framework is empowering. With that power comes responsibility, specifically the responsibility to securely store user’s passwords.

Why is Exclusive Or (XOR) Important in Cryptography?

Jan 18, 2020 by Lane Wagner

If you are getting into cryptography, or just trying to understand the fundamentals, you may have noticed that the exclusive or (XOR) operation is used quite often, especially in ciphers. XOR is a simple bitwise operation that allows cryptographers to create strong encryption systems, and consequently is a fundamental building block of practically all modern ciphers. Let’s dive into the details and see what makes XOR so important.

JavaScript With Statement Explained – A Deep Dive

Jan 15, 2020 by Lane Wagner

JavaScript’s built-in with statement specifies the default object for the given property and gives us a shorthand for writing long object references. More precisely, it adds the given object to the head of the scope chain.

JavaScript Map Function Explained - A Deep Dive

Jan 12, 2020 by Lane Wagner

The built-in JavaScript map function returns a new array, where each element in the new array is the result of the corresponding element in the old array after being passed through a callback function. Later in the article, we’ll do a deep dive into some more advanced concepts regarding the map function and its uses.

BitBanged SPI in Go, An Explanation

Jan 09, 2020 by Lane Wagner

I’m going to focus mostly on some design decisions and also how I went about writing an SPI interface using Go on a Raspberry Pi. I assume my readers have a basic understanding of what a Raspberry Pi is, and how basic electronics work. If not, read on anyway and I will be sure to include some valuable resources below.

Top 8 Online Crypto Communities

Jan 08, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Crypto has been explosive in 2021. The gains have been even better than the memes! While dancing cat videos are fun, the wise will also take advantage of the various communities as an opportunity to learn more about the technology that supports decentralized money. I’ve put together a small list of the top crypto communities for you to check out this year!

Top 6 Golang Logging Best Practices

Jan 07, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Let’s discuss a few rules of thumb for logging in Go, as well as some features you may not have heard of that can make debugging easier. Best practices for logging in Go are not so obvious and sometimes we need to look closer to see what is the best choice, considering the unique situation of error handling in Go.

Cryptography Trends And News Going Into 2020

Jan 03, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Quantum Computing 🔗 Quantum computing may not be coming quite as fast as some in the field had certainly feared (or perhaps hoped). Google did, however, solve an impressive problem this year.

Intro to The AES-256 Cipher

Jan 02, 2020 by Lane Wagner

AES, or “Advanced Encryption Standard”, is an encryption specification that uses the Rijndael cipher as its symmetric key ciphering algorithm. AES encrypts a message with a private key, and no one but the key holder can decrypt the message. A great example of a good use-case for AES-256 is encrypting all the data on the hard drive of a computer when it’s not in use.

(Very) Basic Intro to Hash Functions (SHA-256, MD5, etc)

Jan 01, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Hash functions are used to securely store passwords, find duplicate records, quickly store and retrieve data, among other useful computational tasks. As a practical example, all user passwords on boot.dev are hashed using Bcrypt to ensure that if an attacker were ever to gain access to our database our user’s passwords wouldn’t be compromised.

Basic Intro to Key Derivation Functions

Dec 30, 2019 by Lane Wagner

A Key Derivation Function, or KDF, is a cryptographic algorithm that derives one or more secret keys from a secret value. If you’ve ever needed to store a password in a database or create a private key from a password, you may have used a KDF. Some examples of popular KDFs are Argon2, Scrypt, and PBKDF2.

Cryptology vs Cryptography - Definitions and Differences

Dec 16, 2019 by Lane Wagner

Many new developers are jumping right into writing code, usually for those fat paychecks, without learning much about the history of Computer Science. Alan Turing is recognized as the father of Computer Science, though many don’t know that his roots were in cryptology and mathematics. It was out of cryptology, cryptography, and mathematics that computer science was born.

Boot.dev's Lead Engineer Interviewed on "Running in Production"

Dec 09, 2019 by Lane Wagner

The podcast is available here. Before I begin, I must give thanks to Nick for having me on the show! In this episode of Running in Production, I talk with Nick about how we built boot.dev, an open-source password manager that specializes in cryptocurrency. Boot.dev uses Electron and has a Serverless component that uses Golang. It’s all hosted on AWS.

Building Alerts with Percolate Queries in ElasticSearch

Nov 14, 2019 by Lane Wagner

Once upon a time, a company I worked for had a problem, we had thousands of messages flowing through our data pipeline every second, and we wanted to be able to send real-time emails, SMS, and Slack alerts when messages matching specific criteria were found. A simple solution built using ElasticSearch’s percolate queries ended up being our saving grace.

Which Method of Iteration in JavaScript is Fastest?

Nov 08, 2019 by Lane Wagner

There are many ways to traverse an array in Javascript. In this benchmark, we will look at five different ways and the pros and cons of each. Keep in mind that these benchmarks were run in a Chrome browser on Codepen.io. Results will vary by browser/interpreter.

Singletons in ES6 - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Nov 04, 2019 by Lane Wagner

Singletons are fairly controversial as far as I can tell, especially in JavaScript programming. Let’s take a look at what they are, when to (maybe) use them, and when not to.

How to Create Constant Maps, Slices, & Arrays in Golang

Oct 21, 2019 by Lane Wagner

The quick answer is that Go does not support constant arrays, maps or slices. However, there are some great workarounds.

Systems and Processes that Aren't in Code are Terrifying

Oct 03, 2019 by Lane Wagner

My worst enemy is processes that a developer spun up years ago on a server everyone has forgotten about. I don’t know how to find these systems reliably, I don’t know where they came from, what depends on them, and if they are safe to delete. For example, the dreaded 15 6 2 1 * /home/lane/backup.sh. You may recognize this as a Unix cronjob, a job that is scheduled to run on a server periodically.

The Proper Use of Pointers in Go (Golang)

Sep 25, 2019 by Lane Wagner

Go has become increasingly popular in recent years, especially in my local area. It has been consistently displacing other backend languages like Ruby, Python, C# and Java. Go is wanted for its simplicity, explicitness, speed, and low memory consumption.

How to Recursively Traverse JSON Objects

Sep 22, 2019 by Lane Wagner

I’ve found that it’s pretty rare that I need recursion in application code, but every once in a while I need to write a function that operates on a tree of unknown depth, such as a JSON object, and that’s often best solved recursively. Even though recursion is rare, it is important to recognize when a problem is best solved recursively so that we can implement a good solution when the time comes.

How to Secure Your Bitcoin

Aug 30, 2019 by Lane Wagner

If you’re new to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, you may have heard the common phrase not your keys not your coins. While self-custody isn’t for everyone, it’s the only way to truly have exclusive control over your funds. If that’s what you’re into, read on.

Security in Dependencies

Aug 21, 2019 by Lane Wagner

Choosing the right dependencies is a difficult task. Assuming the developer of an application is the best programmer in the world, the “best” thing to do would be to write the entire codebase alone. This would eliminate the bugs, vulnerabilities, and malicious intrusions of inferior developers.

Encoding vs Encryption - They Aren't the Same

Aug 14, 2019 by Lane Wagner

While encryption does involve various methods of encoding data, the two are absolutely not interchangeable. In fact, if you get them mixed up it can result in serious data breaches and security vulnerabilities.

Automatic Cross-Platform Deployments with Electron

Aug 08, 2019 by Lane Wagner

This is a tutorial on how to set up an Electron app on Travis CI, so that new versions are deployed to GitHub Releases with a simple pull request.

Creating and Remembering a Strong Passphrase

Aug 03, 2019 by Lane Wagner

We all have hundreds of online accounts. Ideally, as many of those accounts as possible have unique passwords. Unique passwords however present a difficult problem.