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...

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...

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)...

4th, 4, and 5: Why I Don’t Start At The Front

This post is mostly a whiny diatribe on how I’m a stupid idiot. Mostly, when I code, I focus on logic: algorithms, object models and other back-end stuff. All the stuff that’s hard and doesn’t give any sort of gratification to the front-end developers or users because, well, it’s not on the front-end. The stuff I like to code are the elegant binary-keyed dictionary structures that route water...