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 quick intro to Github for WordPressers

Yesterday, I was honored to speak at WordCamp Portland about using Source Control systems with WordPress. The talk was meant as little more than a 10,000 ft view of some of the reasons you might want to consider using source control, and some of the possibilities that it presents. As always, the 10,000 foot view is good for a comic introduction to something, but not for any real understanding. Thus, I wanted to...

Using Github as a Small-Scale CDN (w/Rails)

I love Github. Like tomato sandwiches, Celtic music, beer, and programming- Github is something that, try as I might, I just can’t make myself sick of.1 Recently, I took the Git survey, and it contained an interesting question along the lines of “What do you use Git for?” The answers were things like “configuration files” and “large binary files.” I use Git and Github for a...

Ruby Can’t Scale!

This weekend, during my wife’s birthday celebrations, I talked with someone about my recent programming exploits, including how much fun I’m having programming web applications in Ruby on Rails. The response: “Sure, Ruby’s fun, but it’s not really useful. It’s a cute scripting language, but it can’t scale.” Until recently, this was an opinion that I agreed with. Hell,...

Integration Dream: RubyMine, PivotalTracker, and Github

I’ve been turned on to JetBrains’ RubyMine quite a bit lately. Despite my affinity for more “old school” development environments like Emacs (which I used for many years in my former development life), I’ve really been enjoying working with RubyMine. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s winning my most recent “Screw this IDE crap, I’m going back to a text editor!”...