The bcrypt library on NPM makes it really easy to hash and compare passwords in Node. If you're coming from a PHP background, these are roughly equivalent to password_hash() and password_verify().

I've never really bothered with ORMs before, as feelings for them tend to be mixed. I've heard that you can spend twice as long learning an ORM as you can coding raw SQL. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I recently wrote about using an ORM and how it allowed me to support five different database platforms with minimal effort. There is, however, one feature that even Sequelize couldn't tackle for me: full-text search

The first version of Postleaf was written in PHP and lives on as Leafpub. It's a beautiful piece of software that I'm very proud of, but I decided to move the project to Node.js for a few important reasons. This is by no means a knock on PHP, which will always have a special place in my heart, but more of a changing with the times realization.

For me, upgrading to MacOS Sierra broke a lot of things that use SSH, including Transmit, Sequel Pro, and a handful of other apps. In fact, it seems to break any app that uses an SSH key with a passphrase. 🤔

To my awesome users:

Back in 2011, I released the first version of SimpleImage for PHP — an open source project for working with images.

It wasn't long after launching a major open source PHP project until I started hearing things like this:

For as long as I can remember, comments have been a staple of blogging software. After all, what's a good blog post without a relevant discussion to accompany it?

As a web developer, your code is often visible to anyone who wants to review it. If you're like me, you might get stressed out about the thought of people looking at your work and critiquing or criticizing your app's design.