The Lord of the Rings: Secrets, SSL, and Firewalls – A Developer's Quest

A developer shares their journey of securing a side project by implementing environment variables for secrets, using a trusted SSL provider, and segmenting traffic with a firewall. This approach helps to keep credentials secure, encrypt traffic, and lock down the network without creating unnecessary complexity. To apply this, use environment variables or a secret manager to load secrets at runtime, use a trusted SSL provider like Let's Encrypt, and configure a firewall to default to deny and only allow necessary traffic.