Posts

What's Wrong With the Way We Think About Web Development?

Web development has an abstraction problem. The low-level implementation details have leaked all the way into code we reguarly write. It’s analogous to writing C or assembly where you need to shape your thinking in terms of the underlying architecture. Good abstractions capture thought ideas with only as much bend as is absolutely needed to eliminate ambiguity. The ideation of a web app is in terms of the content the user can see and the interactions they can make with the website – simple. When it goes to implementation however, the developer has to think analytically and separate what goes into the frontend from what goes into the backend. This feels very artifical and low-level. ...

On Camus' "The Stranger"

This blog post tells my reflections on reading Camus’ novel The Stranger. I reference the content of the novel and it is unlikely to make sense to you if haven’t read the novel yourself. For a tl;dr of the novel, I would recommend reading the Wikipedia entry. I’ve never read a novel like this before. There is only a series of events, narrated with a hint of indifference. The murder of a man, Mersault’s separation from his fiance, his death sentence, and of course the death of his mother. None of these incidents were profound enough to throw the man into some odd kind of reflections on his life. He never regretted any of his actions, and as he proved to the chaplain towards the end, he didn’t change his religious beliefs despite much attempt. ...

Dead simple SMTP server for development and testing

Local development setup When we have some code that sends emails, we probably also want a stub that we can use locally – which won’t send actual emails, let us inspect the content of each outgoing mail, and let us conduct tests. I needed something like this when we were building the skeleton of a guided project for a training [1]. One of the tasks was for the students to send an email notification upon some action. ...

Writing an SMTP Server from Scratch (WIP)

A few months ago, I wrote an SMTP server from scratch to learn about the protocol. It soon came to me that the knowledge of SMTP internals is not as common as it should be. Upon not finding a satisfactory blog on the topic, I read through the RFCs and tried to create my own server. I am writing this blog as a relatively concise summary of that. Before we go on to writing our server, I want to give some context that should be treated as a prerequisite. ...

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