Encoding and Encryption
I occasionally come across the need to encode/decode a string to/from base64. Given that I primarily program using JavaScript, the atob and btoa functions have been my go-to.
For a long time I thought the names of these functions were strange. They seem like they are trying to be words — and that's what they were to me (each a single odd-sounding word) the first few times I used them1 — but I soon came to see them for what they were at face value: functions for converting from A to B and vice versa, but lowercased for reasons™.
Having learned how to say the names of these functions out loud without embarrassing myself, the only thing left to close off the matter was to figure out what A and B were. Luckily for me, I already had the answer; introducing Alice and Bob.
Briefly, Alice and Bob are a recurring pair of characters, often used in examples where messages are being sent over a network using some form of encryption. To my young programmer mind, encoding to base64 was not too distant a concept from encryption for me to jump to the conclusion that — where atob and btoa are concerned — A is for Alice and B is for Bob.
Over time, I developed the characters of Alice and Bob to match what the functions do. One of them was security-concious, encoding all the messages they sent. The other was care-free, sending plain text messages left and right. I could never remember which was which.
Goodbye Alice and Bob
I've been trying for years to switch from using Postman to an alternative. Most attempts at switching have involved reading a few pages of documentation and scouring open issues on GitHub before culminating in an "I don't have time for this" rage quit2.
While embarking on my most recent attempt at switching off of Postman, I was reading through the Bruno docs and came across this section regarding libraries that are built-in and available for use when scripting:
The denial lasted a few seconds, but I've now successfully crossed over from an alternate universe into the one you and I currently live in, where A is for base64-encoded ascii and B is for binary string.
Footnotes
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Copying and pasting off of stack-overflow, as was tradition in the pre-AI times. ↩︎
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I always reserve a healthy portion of that rage for Postman itself. ↩︎