I decided on BART this morning that I wanted to be inspired. So, I looked at pictures and articles about one of my favorite athletes: Cam Newton. Apart from being an incredibly gifted athlete and charitable with his time as it relates to kids, I just like the fact that he is who he is. Like me, he thinks different (ever seen his Instagram posts?). I loved this article from ESPN, and among my favorite quotes from the article is this one:
“People should be scared of a quarterback with his skill set more than anything else,” he said [Carolina coach Ron Rivera]. “That’s who he is. He’s a tremendously gifted athlete, a terrific quarterback, a smart football player … the list goes on and on. I don’t think he wants to be known as an African-American quarterback. I think he wants to be known as a quarterback, and a great one at that.” (Italics added.) …
“People want to tag me as a Hispanic head coach,” he said. “That’s great, but I want to be tagged as a head coach. It really should be about your merit more than anything else, what you’ve accomplished and what you’ve done.“That’s how we should judge people and base people.”
I hope that one day this is what people will say about me. Although rather than fear me, I want them to respect me as gifted for the work that I do….
Field Trip…
Today we had an inbound field trip. A security consulting company came to school and spoke to us about the top 10 security threats. One of the speakers was quite helpful and clear, and I learned the most from him. He even volunteered to meet with our cohort for a study group on security issues once per week. More than anything, it opened my eyes not only to things that I can change in my app to make it more secure, but also in my personal habits as it relates to security.
The app…
My goal for today was to get the Auth0 single sign-on API to work with my app. I decided that rather than trying to recreate parts of an integration using the API with the docs, I would download the Auth0 python sample file and modify it. Some parts were easy; such as cutting and pasting the javascript and CSS files for their modal window and updating the routes for those files.
It got a bit trickier as the day wore on. First, the sample loaded the environmental variables using a .env file and used npm to source them. I have been storing environmental variables in a secrets file and sourcing them in the console in my virtual environment. Also, I am not using Node.js (although I did use it to build a really simple Facebook bot a while ago and would love to use it for something in the future to try it out).
I decided to keep my method, which met that I had to change all of the references in all of the files, and then write a function to source the variables in my api file and then call it in my server file and bind it. Also, I had to take the functions, views and routes in their server file and modify them because I didn’t want all of that in my server file. Instead, I put it in a login api file. I also had to create different views and routes and call the functions from my server file. After all that, I ran it. I had a few errors, all of which I was able to resolve in 30 minutes. I was quite happy! (Yeah again for planning and pseudo-code!)
I did some additional work at home so now users can login with Google, Twitter or Facebook, or create a login specific to the website – courtesy of the Auth0 API. I also figured out what data is being stored in the session, and so my next step is to design a database to store it. Sleep beckons…
michdcode 