Article Roundup - May 17, 2019

Announcing Microsoft Web Template Studio
Microsoft has announced a new extension for Visual Studio Code called Web Template Studio. It’s still in very early development and currently only supports Express.js and React.js full-stack web apps, but there are plans for a lot more. It provides a simple wizard-style interface and allows you to generate your initial project. It looks like an interesting extension that will make things easier for many developers, but I expect to hear a lot of people complain that it seems too much like Visual Studio. Take a look, the extension is available for download.

How to Use Gitleaks to Prevent Pushing Sensitive Info
Committing secret values to your git repositories is a big mistake. It’s even been said that as soon as that secret has been pushed you should consider it compromised and change it. Wouldn’t it be great to detect most of those values before you ever commit them? Gitleaks is a tool that is supposed to help with that. If you click through to the repo for gitleaks there is a link to GitHub’s advice around removing secrets values from your git repo’s history as well as tools to help you find and remove those secrets.

The Best Practices for a Great Developer Experience (DX)
You’ve probably heard about user experience (UX) at this point, but have you heard about developer experience (DX)? If your users are developers then you may even have a bit of cross over. Developer experience generally focuses around APIs, libraries, and things that are targeted at developers. It’s not a new idea, but I was involved in a conversation this week that got my wheels turning and lead me to this article.