On Building Polite Apps – and Secure Ones

The beauty of the LinkedIn Publishing Platform is that it gives professionals a way to share their personal opinions about topical professional news and interests. This week, read perspectives from our engineers on why programmers should consider making their apps uncommonly polite, what it's like to be a woman in tech, and a security concern in common JS code. Read on for more insights.

“This Should Be Simple, Right?” by Brendan Drew, Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn How omelets relate to compensated summation – or, why floating point numbers aren't really numbers, and why that means we have to keep track of our estimated error as we go.

“(Please) Enter Your Name” by Ketaki Deo, Web Developer at LinkedIn It’s easy to forget to be polite when a coding project is fostering frustrations. But sometimes inserting a few kind words into the code can make a big difference to end users.

“Monitoring Postfix Logs with ELK” by Tin Le, Senior Site Reliability Engineer at LinkedIn One engineer shares a unique way to manage email notifications to ensure smooth performance.

“htmlEncode and htmlDecode in jQuery ” by Roman Shafigullin, Staff Security Software Engineer at LinkedIn Here are a few reasons to avoid some code that’s very commonly used for HTML encoding and decoding, but also very problematic from a security perspective. (In other words, don’t always follow the crowd.)

“Why Interning At LinkedIn Includes Accessibility” by Jennison Asuncion, Senior Staff Technical Program Manager at LinkedIn Some thoughts on why accessibility considerations need to be built into corporate hiring and internship programs from the start.

“Diversity” by Alexis Zheng, Product Strategy at LinkedIn How your existing network could lead you to hire similar people – and how to combat this potentially dangerous tendency in the interest of increasing diversity.

“Idiocy, Caching, and Reducing Round Trips” by Matt Hackmann, Senior Web Developer at LinkedIn One developer explores a high CPU usage alert and finds a caching problem.

“Women in Tech Movement” by Allison Hall, Associate Web Developer at LinkedIn Some thoughts on being a woman in tech – and becoming part of the movement.

“In Software Development, Nothing is Real” by Steven Foote, Senior Web Developer at LinkedIn On discovering that “object” oriented programming isn’t about tangible objects at all.