Guides
Practical write-ups for the workflows cent-ai’s tools actually get used for — not generic tutorials, the specific mistakes and decisions that come up in real infrastructure work.
All guides
- Choosing a hash algorithm: MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512, and HMACWhich algorithms are safe for what, and why authenticating a message needs a keyed HMAC, not a bare hash.
- JWTs vs session cookies for authenticationThe statelessness trade-off, and why a JWT's payload is readable by anyone who has the token.
- What to do when you find a secret in a repoWhy rotation comes first, why deleting the commit isn't enough, and how automated scanning catches different classes of leak.
- What security headers actually do (and which ones you don't need)HSTS, CSP, and the rest of the security-header family — what each one actually mitigates, in plain terms.
- Understanding TLS certificate chains and why intermediates matterLeaf, intermediate, and root certificates explained — and why a missing intermediate breaks some clients but not others.
- Common YAML indentation errorsThe handful of indentation mistakes that account for most YAML parse failures, and how to spot them fast.
- Decoding Kubernetes Secret values safelyKubernetes Secrets are Base64-encoded, not encrypted — what that actually means for how you handle them.
- JSON vs YAML for configurationWhen to reach for JSON, when YAML actually earns its complexity, and how to convert between them.