This settles our dance of `Buffer` vs `String` down to simply this:
> You have a `String`. You should (almost) never have a `Buffer`.
Buffers are useful for talking about a specific set of bytes, without an
encoding. In our app, the places where this is useful are:
- crypto
- mysql
We don't actually speak MySQL in this repo anywhere, so that leaves us
with only crypto. Instead of requiring the mental overhead of "Do I have
a buffer or a string?" throughout all our code base, we can just push
that completely into the crypto code.
This *should* reduce bugs where we aren't sure if we have a `Buffer` or
a `String`. If you're not in crypto, you should just have a `String`.
Deepti
Phil Booth
Sean McArthur