Devlog #11

Synaptik Labs

Two more videos were uploaded. I was hoping to upload one per day, but the hack event I blogged about yesterday put a stop to that. I am still in the process of getting a development environment back up and running. Prior to the hack, I kept my dev environment mixed with my personal stuff. Moving forward, I'm going to keep them completely separate. The main reason for doing this is because I don't really know how the hacker got into my machine. Over the last few days I've been trying to think of all the different ways it could have happened. One possibility is that they entered through an exploit hidden in an npm dependency. I typically never shutdown my express or angular servers and have always left my computer on over night so it is very possible a backdoor was hidden in something I was using.

The hope is that keeping my dev work on a separate VM would prevent this situation from happening even if I kept it on over night.

Code Along Blog

We completed our integration with Firebase although we aren't 100% sure if the update process works correctly. The idea is that if you create an account in our application, then change your Google profile, our app would then see the updated information the next time you access the site. Unfortunately, that didn't seem to happen. It is possible that Google caches the data some how and doesn't update everything for awhile. I guess we'll find out during the next stream.