Marketing for Engineers

Marketing is “the exchange of goods and services aimed at satisfying the needs and wants of buyers and sellers.” That’s a business school way of saying it’s marketing’s responsibility to understand your customers' needs and wants, and to make sure they’re heard by your team.

We’ll outline the marketing planning process and the basic language of marketing to help you better understand marketing’s role in the product development process.

By Lyal Avery

PR (Public Relations) for Engineers

PR (public relations) can be an effective way to drive a lot of awareness around what you’re building, and help your team increase signups, lift sales numbers, or generate interest from investors. And unlike ads you might pay for, PR is earned media, which is free, and can feel more authentic because it comes from an unbiased source.

This is a tactical beginner’s guide to PR for developers, meant to help you get started with your press outreach and PR strategy. While we work more with the other kind of PR (pull requests), the following four steps have helped us secure popular articles and blog posts:

1. Create your hook
2. Assemble your press kit
3. Identify relevant journalists
4. Pitch your story

By Lyal Avery

The Most Overlooked Server Permission Checks

After reviewing the code for hundreds of backend server applications, we’ve seen some recurring permissions issues. Below we’ll break down what are the most common problems and how to address them.

We previously looked at common server authentication issues we see in code review and offered tips to avoid them. If you followed these suggestions, you should have improved your server authentication techniques and can assure all your incoming requests have a validated user attached.

By Tyler Mann

Pesky Server Auth Issues We’ve Found

For backend server applications, getting authentication right for your APIs is a critical component for ensuring the security of your service. It’s also one of the most common API security issues we notice.

Almost all popular web frameworks these days have a concept for authentication built-in that you can use to protect your routes and require a user to be logged in to access it.

By Tyler Mann

Using Font Awesome 5 With Webpack

Font Awesome 5 added support for using the icon library in a variety of different ways. Historically you could use their font and JavaScript files in combination (which meant including every icon, whether you used it or not) or downloaded the icons and import them manually into your project (which was a lot of work!)

By Lyal Avery