Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time enjoying the Darknet Diaries podcast and it’s compelled me to finally share the entire story of the most intense year of my 20 year professional career. I was the sole developer hired by a company going through a circus-like ownership transition while criminals actively worked to defraud the 300,000 users of this 14 year old, high end marketplace.
We experienced late nights, numerous technical challenges, worked with abuse response teams, learned a lot of lessons about phishing and fraud, high emotions, death threats and at least one person lost a business that depended on the site. Here’s the story from start to finish, including how to prevent many of these problems on your own site. Buckle up.
In August I taught a course titled Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL - Intro to Advanced in Greenville over the span of 3 weeks. Here is the compilation of slides from the class.
If you've spent any amount of time on this site you may have noticed that I'm fond of PostgreSQL...and Ruby on Rails...and that I dislike the general trend among Rails developers to ignore all of the amazing features in PostgreSQL that make your application better in favor of risking data integrity just so that all logic can remain in Rails. So here's my top collection of Rails gems to get at all that untapped power in PostgreSQL that you didn't know you had.
Beginning August 18th I will be offering a three week evening class aimed at professional programmers who want to learn Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL, with the goal of becoming proficient with both in a very short time.
An overview of Ruby, jRuby, Rails, Torquebox, and PostgreSQL that was presented as a 3 hour class to other programmers at The Ironyard in Greenville, SC in July of 2013. The Rails specific sections are mostly code samples that were explained during the session so the real focus of the slides is Ruby, "the rails way" / workflow / differentiators and PostgreSQL.
This is a presentation that I recently gave at UpstatePHP in Greenville evaluating the framework landscape in PHP. We discussed why there are so many, history, goals, benefits, concerns and ultimately a recommendation.
I've always been a proponent of the "right tool for the job" approach to programming. Different languages are well suited for different situations. Over the past 2 years I've spent a great deal of time with Ruby on Rails after coming from a background of PHP, Java and Perl. Here's how I got started and some of the lessons I learned along the way.
Web frameworks are great, don't get me wrong here. They provide a structure and consistency across projects that will transcend developers over the life of a system while dramatically simplifying the code base amongst other wonderful side effects. But what's the downside?