Phillip Edwards
All Posts by Phillip Edwards
Getting Started with Libsodium in Python and Go
The Networking and Cryptography library (NaCl pronounced “salt”) is a software library that provides the core operations required to build cryptographic tools. Sodium is a fork of NaCl with an extended API; it’s portable, and binaries are available to be used by various programming languages and operating systems. It comes in the form of a library called libsodium. Although there are several Python and Go cryptography libraries, it is primarily a matter of personal choice...
Fixing Common Problems with CORS and JavaScript
Many websites have JavaScript functions that make network requests to a server, such as a REST API. The web pages and APIs are often in different domains. This introduces security issues in that any website can request data from an API. Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) provides a solution to these issues. It became a W3C recommendation in 2014. It makes it the responsibility of the web browser to prevent unauthorized access to APIs. All modern...
How to Write a Secure Python Serverless App on AWS Lambda
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. Modern authentication systems generate JSON Web Tokens (JWT). While there are several types of JWTs, we’re concentrating on access tokens. When a user successfully...
Discovering macOS Settings with PlistWatch
In the Apple operating systems macOS and iOS, software applications store essential configuration data in an information property list (plist) files. The plist files are managed by the operating system. Although macOS does have utilities for reading and writing plist files, they are low level. It’s a manual and time-consuming process working with plist files. There is, however, a little known tool called PlistWatch that enables changes to plist files to be monitored in real...
Elasticsearch in Go: A Developer's Guide
Elasticsearch is a popular datastore for all types of information. It is distributed for speed and scalability and can index many types of content which makes it highly searchable. It uses simple REST APIs for ease of access. Go has an official Elasticsearch library which makes it simple for Go developers to work with data stored in Elasticsearch programmatically. Today we’re going to take a look at how you can easily build a simple app...
Building and Securing a Go and Gin Web Application
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. Today, we are going to build a simple web application that implements a to-do list. The backend will be written in Go. It will...
API Key Best Practices and Examples
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. When you’re using a REST API, especially one that incurs costs or has usage limits, you need to use an API key to access...
Offline JWT Validation with Go
Note: In May 2025, the Okta Integrator Free Plan replaced Okta Developer Edition Accounts, and the Okta CLI was deprecated. We preserved this post for reference, but the instructions no longer work exactly as written. Replace the Okta CLI commands by manually configuring Okta following the instructions in our Developer Documentation. Modern authentication systems use and generate JSON Web Tokens (JWT). There are many different ways that JWTs are used but, in this post, we...
The Definitive Guide to WSGI
Python has a number of different frameworks for building web applications. The choice of framework limits the choice of available web servers. Java also has a number of web frameworks but they are all based on the common servlet API which means that any framework can run on any web server which supports the servlet API. You’ve probably seen WSGI mentioned before, but you might not be exactly sure what it meant or did. In...