Pragmaticity in Software Development

Pragmaticity becomes critical once the product is live and every decision reverberates through the user experience.

A: "I think a signed JWT is enough to migrate between both apps; it's robust enough, we only have 500 users."

B: "It would be safer to create a table with a salt, TTL and a JWT linked to it to prevent brute‑force attacks."

This dialogue illustrates the tension between the ideal of absolute security and operational cost. Pragmaticity invites us to weigh impact, risks and delivery time before adding future complexity.

"The solution for a problem in a 500‑user context, assuming you have 50,000, could make you lose them all." For such a small volume, duplicating tables, TTLs and salt management can delay migration, multiply failure points and distract the team from the feedback those users already generate. Pragmaticity after launch suggests measuring real incidents and hardening controls only when traffic and attack surface justify it, freeing resources for visible, rapid improvements.

A pragmatic approach in Node.js issues a short‑lived JWT signed with a rotating key and tracks its use. The snippet below generates a token valid for 15 minutes — enough for the migration without extra tables:

const jwt = require("jsonwebtoken");
 
const signingKey = Buffer.from("super-secret-key", "utf8");
 
function issueToken(userId) {
  return jwt.sign(
    { sub: userId },
    signingKey,
    { algorithm: "HS256", expiresIn: "15m" }
  );
}
 
// Example
console.log(issueToken("user123"));