this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Programming
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My only education is a super helpful guy from Reddit who taught me the basics of setting up a back end with nodejs and postgres. After that it's just been me, the references and stack overflow.
I have NO education about actual practises and protocol. This was just a tool I made to make my work easier and faster, which I check in and update every few months to make it better.
I just open vscode, run node server.js to get started, and within server.js is a direct link to my database using the SQL above. It works, has worked for a year or two, and I don't know any other way I should be working. Happy to learn though!
(but of course this has set me back so much it would have been quicker not to make the tool at all)
Have a look at an ORM, if you are indeed executing plain SQL like I’m assuming from your comment. Sequelize might be nice to start with. What it does is create a layer between your application and your database. Using which, you can define the way a database object looks (like a class) and execute functions on that. For instance, if you’re creating a library, you could do book.update(), library.addBook(), etc. Since it adds a layer in between, it also helps you prevent common vulnerabilities such as SQL injection. This is because you aren’t writing the SQL queries in the first place. If you want to know more, let me know.
Thanks, I'll look into it! I'm interested in why you got downvoted though! 😅
I didn't downvote but some people like ideologically dislike orms. The reasons I've heard are usually "I can write better SQL by hand", "I don't want to use/learn another library", "it has some limitations"
Those things can be true. Writing better SQL by hand definitely is a big "it depends", though.
I can see why people might dislike them. Adds some bloat perhaps. But at the same time, I like the idea that my input is definitely sanitised since the ORM was written by people who know what they’re doing. That’s not to say it won’t have any vulnerabilities at all, but the chance of them existing is a lot lower than when I write the queries by hand. A lapse of judgement is all it takes. Even more relevant for beginning developers who might not be aware of such vulnerabilities existing.
For a personal tool that runs locally I can handle some bloat in the name of safety!
Mostly just safety from yourself/your own little errors in input, but it can’t hurt for sure! Input sanitation is mostly relevant to fend off script kiddies. Relevant xkcd
Short story, haters gonna hate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Long story, see my comment to the commenter below you. :)
With that amount of instruction you've done well
There's probably lots of stuff you don't even know you don't know.
Automated testing is a big part of professional software development, for example, and helps you catch things like this issue before they go live.
I'm up to 537 lines of server code, 2278 lines in my script, and 226 in my API interfacing, I'm actually super proud of it haha.
But you're totally right, there are things I read that I just have no clue what they even mean or if I should know it, and probably use all the wrong terminology. I feel like I should probably go back to the start and find a course to teach me properly. I've probably learned so many bad habits. It doesn't help that I learned JS before ES6 so I need to force myself not to use var and force myself to understand and use arrow functions.
I absolutely know that the way I've written the program will make some people cringe, but I don't know any better. There are a few sections where I'm like "would that actually be what a real, commercial web app would do, or have I convoluted everything?"
For example, the entire thing is just one 129-line html file. I just hide and unhide divs when I need a new page or anything gets changed. I'm assuming that's a bad thing, but it works, it looks good, and I don't know any better!