I’ve been working on a project where I inherited a database with over 9,000 users.  The passwords are stored as an MD5 hash, with no salt.  For obvious reasons, I wanted to transition the old authentication scheme and architecture over to authlogic.  This post by Ben Johnson pointed me in the right direction. The problem [...]

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We ran into a problem today where capistrano wasn’t correctly cleaning up old releases on a 15-minute multi-host deploy. It seems like the default deploy:cleanup task wasn’t written with multiple hosts in mind. Essentially what it does is list the contents of your releases_path for the first host in the list of hosts and assumes [...]

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Over the last few days I released my first open-source plugins on GitHub. google-define – Extracted from a side project I worked on, it’s basically a wrapper class for parsing definitions from Google (define:perplexed). last-fm – This plugin was inspired by a previous gist, which itself was taken from an app I wrote to aggregate [...]

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I recently had to use the FormStack API in the context of a Rails app. You need to make these calls over SSL, and API returns either XML or JSON. I chose JSON because it’s much easier to work with in my opinion and I hate XML. Below is a simple example. Check out the [...]

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I finally got around to setting up a more sophisticated deployment system for some of my apps. These apps include some built on a custom PHP framework and others that are Python / Django apps. I figured I’d share my experience… Why is a high-level deployment infrastructure important? Deployment is something that should be simple, [...]

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Send this to your significant other/parent/relative/friend so, instead of that sweater, you get one of these nuggets of awesome this Christmas. The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master Write better, cleaner, more maintainable code. Learn how to manage your projects and focus on shipping your product. With insight that covers the gamut of software development [...]

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Motivation: SD News is a “social news site” (basically a Hacker News clone), written in Rails, that I work on as part of my efforts with a Christian publishing company I run with some friends.  As part of the administrative backend, I wanted to be able to send posts to our Twitter profile.  The site [...]

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I like Python. I like Ruby. I like C, C++, and Objective-C. I like Java. I also (actually) like PHP. I like programming – get it? Use whatever gets the job done and done well. Use whatever achieves the performance and scalability you require for a given task. Use what makes sense given a specific [...]

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What exactly are they using it for? Front-end?

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I’ve spent more time with Django the past couple days. Read my installation guide and my first impressions to get caught up. I wanted to address a couple issues I came across as I was exposed to certain architectural designs of Django. It might be helpful to note which books available today cover Django 1.0. [...]

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