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Samesite cookie struggles, automated reports, missed deadlines - Weekly backlog 2020/04

A few days ago I received a notification email from Shopify that on the 4th of February Google will roll out an update for Chrome that affects cookie management and this way, my embedded Shopify app as well. I didn’t really know a lot about these changes so I spent at least half of Monday to figure out what these changes are and how are they going to affect my app.

For those who haven’t heard about these changes, take a look at this post: https://blog.chromium.org/2019/10/developers-get-ready-for-new.html
Shopify also provided a short post about what should developers do to keep their embedded app going without issues but as usual, the instructions they write about in their blog post didn’t work for my app.

I already had some trouble building this app because of the tech stack I had to use and I felt the same pain again.

After a few hours of googling it turned out that the source of my problem is caused by the setup, I use on my server to run the application. Long story short, node, Nginx, and secure cookies are not the best (easiest) combination. It took almost a day to figure out the whole thing but hopefully, everything will work smoothly after Chrome update.

Although, I created reminders in my calendar to regularly check the stats for CreativeDevJobs I just realized that if I’m not in front of my computer when I receive the reminder I’ll probably forget to check it later. So I switched to automated reports and this way I’ll see the most important numbers in my inbox and while the email is there, it’ll remind me to do a more detailed analysis when it’s necessary.

I spent more time working on my freelance projects than I planned, so I haven’t finished working on the results of The Maker Report. I’m at 80% at the moment and hopefully, I’ll be ready by the end of this week.
Even though I haven't finished the tasks I planned for the week, I feel this was a productive 5 days.

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Todo for this week:

  • Add more holiday hashtags for February to HashtagCalendar
  • Publish the results of the Maker Report
  • Finish and publish a blog post about why I’m ditching yearly goals in 2020
on February 3, 2020
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    I still have a Samesite cookie problem. In certain cases I need to make a POST request from the HTTPS protocol to the HTTP protocol within the same domain. On that occasion, the Chrome browser kills my PHPSESSID cookie. Whatever I tried didn't work. To make it more interesting, Firefox doesn't create any problems, nor does it throw security warnings into the developer console.

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      I spent quite a lot of time figuring out the right combination. Though, in my case, findind the right config for my proxy was the harder task as I'm really far from being an expert in devops :D