Mark McSpadden

Last night I gave a presentation to the Dallas.rb group on Ruby message queues. If you’re interested, download the pdf or the demo apps and have a look. (Note: I’m also in the process of producing a voice over version of the presentation. Mostly just to see if it can be done.)

• Ruby Distributed Processing and Message Queues: Dallas.Rb March 2008

Demo Apps from the Meeting. These apps assume you have the starling and memcache-client gems installed.

Checkout doc/README_FOR_APP for some explanation of what’s going on.

• starling_demo
• starling_demo_workling

If you’ve got questions or corrections to anything you see, feel free to give me a shout!

If you work with Ruby, check out this survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=EJH5SAjDpxkqo1AodLt4iA_3d_3d

I’m in Austin at the Lone Star Ruby Conference and I gotta say Day #1 was so packed that I was too worn out to even talk about it last night. A quick breakdown before Day #2 starts…

First the Ruby:

• Some great talks about Ruby as a beautiful, fun, and exciting languague
• Interesting talk by James Edward Gray II about using Ruby as a Glue language to call non Ruby applications within the OS
• Testing…it’s your friend. It now comes in several Ruby flavors.
• Ruby community is cool. We’re nice and smart and taking the world by force.

Other Stuff:

• Day #1 went from 9am until 10pm. They even served us lunch and dinner here at the conference center. So pretty much one seat for 13 hours.
• I got to meet and chat with Gregg and Jason from RailsEnvy.com. The “videos”http://www.railsenvy.com these guys have made for Rails are great and, I’ve got to say, they really know their stuff.

If you’re a developer, you know what I’m talking about. You’re doing something seemingly trivial, when you see something, you’re not sure what it is, but it doesn’t look quite right. You squint at it. Then you realize, this is something bad, something big, something really big and bad.

1. Denial: “No, my code isn’t really doing that.”
2. Anger: “Why is my stinking code doing this!”
3. Blame: “It’s got to be something wrong with a library or a bad default setting.”
4. Generalization: “I can’t be the only person this is happening to. Is this is happening on every site?”
5. Acceptance: “Ok, this is wrong and it needs to be fixed.”

It happened to me yesterday, while scanning the logs of an internal app looking for bugs. I started noticing something that didn’t seem quite right. My application was logging all the details of login requests, including passwords. That’s right, passwords and their associated usernames were just sitting in my log files, clear text for the world to see.

So I started the panic…all the stages flew by in a matter of minutes. Then I did the constructive thing and hit up Google for an answer. And one was right there for the taking.

filter_parameter_logging :password, :password_confirmation

What does this do? Well as you probably guessed, it filters the given parameters from being logged in your log files. The request will still be logged, only the specified parameters will be logged as “[FILTERED]” instead of their actual values.

Now I know what you’re thinking, “Why isn’t this taken care of by default?” or “How did I miss this?” The first is valid, the second, well you can console yourself in the fact that for some reason it doesn’t seem to be common knowledge among rails people. Let’s fix that shall we…

Special thanks to Baldur Gudbjornsson’s blog for stopping the panic for me!

Seriously who talks like that? Unfortunately too many of us that build web apps speak this way through the copy we use on our sites. Trey Reeme recently re-inspired me to stop talking like a techie and start talking like a human.

So I’m trying to do better, but it’s not all that easy. I’ve been in tech-land a long time. So I thought I’d start a personal “techie to human dictionary” to help me out. You can checkout this page to see where I’m at. (Don’t get your hopes up, there’s only 4 entries.)

I’d much appreciate any feedback or ideas! I’d really like to see this thing be a real resource…so let’s get started.

Just wanted to post a quick note letting everyone know (all my 2 subscribers) that I’m back from the whirlwind that is SxSW. I had great time and heard a lot of great panelists…all leaving me inspired and fired up about what I do!

Over the next few days I hope to recap some of my thoughts from the conference…but right now I’m still letting it all soak in.

Special thanks to Brad Garland for invitig me to go, serving as my unofficial SxSW tour guide, and driving us to Austin and back.

Just confirmed today that I’ll be at SXSW in Austin! I’ll have more to say about the whole thing later…but I’m pretty stoked about going!

Maybe I’ll see you there….

Public Apology: I would like to tell Adam Keys that I am sorry for skipping Dallas.rb for the second month in which I planned on attending. The mailing list confirms that it was, as always, a stellar meeting and I am a lesser person having missed it. We’ll see if April can remedy my skipping streak.

I spent my Thursday evening in the company of about 30 other like-minded fellows (and one like-minded lady) at DemoCamp Dallas that was hosted by Sabre out in South Lake. Not gonna lie…little skeptical going in…but I had a great time and highly recommend you come with me to the next one!

There were six presentations of all-working-software-no-slides goodness that I just ate up. I just get stoked seeing people apply software technologies in ways that never have crossed my mind! Anyways…I’ll stop getting all nerd-giddy over here and just say the presentations were awesome.

As this was also my first “community” event, I also got to meet some really cool people. I am really looking forward to getting out from behind my desk more and becoming involved with people and events like this.

Bottom Line: If you like software, go to the next DemoCamp Dallas!

A Rails job to be exact. That’s right, after 18 months of freelancing and entrepreneurship I have decided to explore the options of full-time employment. I have very much enjoyed this past year and a half, but I also look forward to the new challenges that now lie before me.

I am currently looking for a Ruby on Rails job in the Dallas metroplex, so if you know anyone, feel free to pass my name along.

In conjunction with this search, I’ve set up a resume site at resume.markmcspadden.net. If you’ve ever wondered what I do or if you are just bored at work, go check it out and tell me what you think.

I’m excited about this next step and look forward to sharing it with all of you!

Warning: If you aren’t a web nerd like me…you should just skip this one.

After putting it off for over 6 months, I finally took the plunge and started using Capistrano (which I have affectionately nicknamed ‘cappy’) to deploy my web applications. If you aren’t familiar with Capistrano, its basically a scripting system that you can easily setup for deploying Ruby on Rails applications from your local machine onto remote servers.

Well was it worth it? YOU BET! After having deployed 4 projects in 5 days I can say it is well worth the hour or two it will take you on your first one.

How do you get started? Check out the online Capistrano book (don’t worry…for most apps you’ll only need the first few chapters) and if you’re a mongrel user check out this tutorial about mongrel, apache, and capistrano

Ok…that’s my nerdy proclamation for the day.