Trolling, Sexism, and Dealing with Disappointment

This past week has been one is extreme disappointment for me as I survey the landscape of my beloved profession. From Portland’s own Postgres genius Selena Deckelman getting hazed on IRC to the incredibly immature sexism of Sqoot listing women as “a feature” of a hackathon I’ve just been feeling really depressed that there is this scale of stupidity toward our fellow programmers– our fellow...

Rails: SQL Injection over Configuration

It was an interesting weekend for the Github team, the Rails core team, and lots of Rails users who worked at all through the weekend. There are a lot of details about the weekend to discuss, but my main discussion point is one of philosophy and intention of the Rails project. We’ll get to that towards the end. First, a bit of background. Hacking Github This weekend, a Github user named Egor Homakov hacked...

A Web App Went Live Today

A new web app went live today, and I shed a tear. The Power of Good Questions Some history. Years ago, I was starting to question my decision to become a hydrologist. Not because I hated hydrology, I did– and still do– deeply love it, but because I couldn’t find a job. Since I’d been a programmer for 20+ years (indeed, I programmed all the way through 10 years in the sciences), I decided to see what...

Science in Corporate America

There’s a bill in Congress called “The Research Works Act”1 which threatens open access to science in a very disturbing way. The bill basically gives control of publicly funded research to private companies. There’s a petition to oppose this bill. I wanted to write up why I think we should sign it. The Research Works Act Unlike many bills, The Research Works Act has very short text: No...

New to testing? Just wash one dish

I have a team I’m working with of great tactical programmers. These guys take the craziest specs you’ve ever seen from clients and turn them into shit that actually works. Tactical programmers are great, they are needed in every organization. Nothing will get you to a deliverable better than a solid tactical programmer. One thing I’ve found with many tactical programmers– it’s almost a...