Skip to main content

· 7 min read
Tamal Anwar Chowdhury

If you are like me, I had a GitHub account since 2014 and have been dumping all my projects into the profile ever since. But I didn't do anything beyond that.

I am a competent engineer, but when it comes to working with open source, I have no clue what that is. I tried many times trying to learn, but failed.

hacktoberfest image

In October 2022 I participated in the annual Hacktoberfest. This was my first time getting involved in open source. As of writing this article, there are just 7 days left for this year's hackathon. This article will help you participate in open source in general even after the event is over. So let's get started:

· 3 min read
Tamal Anwar Chowdhury

This is not a 'how to' post but an answer to a frequently asked question. My blog was originally made with WordPress. I came across Docusaurus, an open-source static site generator for documentation sites. I thought of using that for my blog because my tech blog also works like documentation.

The best part is, all the pages are statically generated and they load up instantly with a click of a button. Docusaurus is built on top of React and JavaScript, so it's yet another reason to use it.

· 4 min read
Tamal Anwar Chowdhury

A local development environment is where all the development happens, after which devs push it to a live production server. In this article, you will set up a local web development environment on your computer for building modern web apps in Node.js and React. This setup is also suitable for other frontend frameworks like Vue, Angular, and Svelte.

local web development

· 6 min read
Tamal Anwar Chowdhury

I am learning pen testing and ethical hacking as a hobby. When doing pentesting, it's common to setup a local Virtual Machine (VM) using Virtual Box to setup the attack boxes. However, one issue I face regurlary is how slow each of the tool installation and scaning takes. Since local VMs rely on my internet speed, often it takes a lot of waiting time for scanning outside servers.

digital ocean pentesting

Then I realized I can use a VM from a VPS provider such as Digital Ocean and use it for external pentesting. By doing so, I can use a faster CPU, RAM, and of course, fast internet speeds. Working with a commercial VM will help you speed up your processes when connecting to public servers like HackTheBox or PentesterLab.

In this article, I will walk you through setting up a pen-testing attacker machine with Digital Ocean.

· 8 min read
Tamal Anwar Chowdhury

When building web apps, you will come across dynamic data created by your app or fetched by a third-party API. JSON is the universal data format for software, so if you master JSON, you will be a dangerous frontend engineer.

mastering json in react

My article is all about mastering JSON with ReactJS so strap in!

· 9 min read
Tamal Anwar Chowdhury

In this quick tutorial, I will walk you through some of the best ways you can compress images for Reactjs for huge performance wins.

featured image

As you can see on the cover image, the original file was 65 kB, and after compression, I got it down to 5 KB, that’s over 80% saving for just one image file.

This file is from one of my side projects ReactionPoll, where I make use of a bunch of Facebook and Linkedin reaction icons. My original reaction set for Facebook was 155 kB and after optimizing them, I got it to just 35 kB!

· 5 min read
Tamal Anwar Chowdhury

You probably know about the react-ga npm package but the sad news is, it does not work with the latest Google Analytics 4 version. It works with the old UA-0000-01 tags, but not with the G-XXXXXX tags. I’m sure an updated version of the package will solve it, but for the time being, I found a better and a working method of adding GA to your React application. And it’s so obvious, you will feel like, "why didn’t I think about it before?"

featured

So how to add the new Google Analytics 4 in Reactjs app? You simply copy the Google Analytics script tag into the <head> section of your index.html file in the public directory.

Yeah, I know right, it’s that obvious. I found it by trial and error. If you stick around, I will show you a step-by-step guide and also give you a glimpse at how did I figure it out.

· 8 min read
Tamal Anwar Chowdhury

Every programming language has at least one bottom value but JavaScript has two: null and undefined (Crockford, 2017). We are going to focus on null for this article because there is so much that’s going on behind the scenes.

null js

What is null in JavaScript? null means no-value. When there is no value assigned to an object variable, it means the object doesn’t exist. If you want to delete the contents of an object from memory, you would assign that object to null.

By the way, null is not exclusive to just JavaScript, I have seen it on Java, C#, SQL and it works the same way it does in JavaScript.

· 6 min read
Tamal Anwar Chowdhury

Node JS is the first backend platform I learned and it helped me build full-stack applications. In this article, I will talk a little about Node and the concepts that go around this runtime environment. So to answer your question in simple terms,

What is Node JS? Node JS is a runtime environment for the JavaScript language similar to how you would use a Python interpreter to run Python code on your computer. Node JS is being used to run and execute JavaScript code in the server to build backend services.

According to the official Node JS website, “Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript runtime environment that executes JavaScript code outside of a browser” (Node.js org, 2020).

Right out of the bat you must have figured it out what open-source and cross-platform means.

· 12 min read
Tamal Anwar Chowdhury

Today I am going to help you save time and hassle by giving you a concrete answer whether you should learn JavaScript before learning Node JS or not. You have learned about Node JS and would like to dive in to become a backend developer. Since you asked, this means you don’t know JS or have little experience with it. Allow me to simplify this for you.

Should I learn JavaScript before Node JS? If you have taken another programming course before (like Python) then you have the proper programming foundation and can go ahead and start learning Node JS without taking a JavaScript course. You can pick up the fundamentals of JS while you build servers with Node. However, if this is the first time you are programming, then I would highly recommend you take a foundation web development course in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to get your ABCs down.