Today I Learned

Welcome to my Today I Learned (TIL) section! Here I jot down quick notes about what I learned each day, from coding tricks to tech experiments. Scroll down to see all my TIL posts!

XSS is way simpler (and scarier) than I thought

So today I came across Cross Site Scripting or XSS which honestly sounds like a Counter Strike mode but is actually one of the oldest and most annoying vulnerabilities on the web. Once I understood it, I felt a little unsafe about every comment section I’ve ever used lol. What is it actually XSS is when a website lets someone sneak their own javascript into a page, and your browser just… runs it. no questions asked, zero trust issues, straight up “sure i’ll run that.” The browser assumes any JavaScript that’s part of the page came from the website itself, so if the site accidentally treats user input as code instead of text, it’ll execute it. It’s not movie hacker stuff, it’s just a website not checking what a user typed before showing it to everyone else. ...

Managing Multiple Git Identities on One Machine

TL;DR: Want separate Git emails per project? Just don’t use --global. The Problem: So I ran into this situation where I needed one project folder to use my university credentials while keeping my personal Gmail for literally everything else in VS Code. Classic identity crisis, but make it Git. Honestly thought this would be a nightmare to set up, but Git actually makes it pretty straightforward once you know the trick. ...

The Vim Journey Begins (because I chose pain)

So, I watched MIT’s Lecture 3 on Vim today and honestly way better than the other tutorials I watched. Also found out there is this whole “Editor War” thing between Vim people and VS Code people. Apparently Vim wins if you live in the terminal, VS Code wins everywhere else. Today’s achievements: hjkl for moving around (my arrow keys are no longer needed) :wq to exit (got it first try, which means I am already better than like 50% of people) w and b to jump between words like I know what I’m doing dd to delete entire lines (dangerously satisfying) Everything is just keyboard letters somehow? No mouse needed, which is lowkey CRAZYY! So yeahh, Vim is hard. Everyone says it gets good eventually (hopefully). I am choosing to believe them for now but the plan is to just stay consistent so I don’t quit by Week 2. ...