• I picked up several new Japanese expressions this week, but this one stood out to me: 売(う)り言葉(ことば)に買(か)い言葉(ことば). An English equivalent would be tit for tat. The origin of this expression is likely related to the expression 喧嘩(けんか)を売(う)る, to “sell” a fight, meaning to provoke it. In this transactional analogy, “buying” the fight is analogous to retaliating.

# Programming

• A good refresher on password storage best practices: We Didn’t Encrypt Your Password, We Hashed It. I knew about using salts (and peppers!) to secure password storage, but I have yet to add these extra security measures to the server-side app I am currently working on.

• I learned how to do SQL joins with their different flavors. I always procrastinated on learning SQL, for various reasons, but I got to a point where I had to choose between taking a step back and doing things right, or hacking my way through the feature I was working on without understanding the performance implications of the queries used.