So you want to hire a ninja, do you?

I took a trip to Portland recently to traipse through OSCON. I was mostly in the exhibition hall with all the great schwag and company booths– many which had posted job announcements. While there, I was once again frustrated by a trend I keep seeing. The trend can be described as an “arms race of job announcements,” and has gotten to the point where it’s difficult to find a development job...

Stop being stupid about belongs_to!

This is just a post that may help me stop being stupid. Writing it may help carve it into the permanent portion of my memory instead of the “forget about it and then periodically have to think twice and remember that you did something stupid” portion. It’s a small thing, more of an annoyance than a real problem. Something like my tendency to forget “end” after blocks (a Python holdover)...

Quick, “random records” module

There are plenty of times when I want to grab either one or many random records from a database in Rails. For instance, one random user, one random post, 5 random items, etc. Honestly, it’s one of those things I do in nearly every app I’ve written, so a while ago I created a module to add to any ActiveRecord class that gave me one() and some() methods. This way, I can just include Randomizer and have the...

Secure password generator-as-manager without single-point failure

Ahh, security. It’s it’s like flossing and using condoms. We all know we should do it but… well, it’s business time! We’ve all got the same issues. “Use strong passwords!” which means “don’t use just words” is something we all try to take seriously, but it just ends up being something like “c00lp455″ with even the most basic cracker program would...

Placeholder text with flair! Introducing The Kwisatz Haderach

It’s pretty silly, and wasted more time than I needed to, but I’m really very incredibly “oh my god I’m so sick of this I could puke” bored with Lorem Ipsum text. You know what I’m talking about, that placeholder text you use when you just need to fill a paragraph with something, and don’t feel like typing shaesthstnsahoestha? This: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur...