Author Archives: Sarah

the truth about mobile development

For my talk at LA RubyConf, I decided to share some truths about mobile development, in general, rather than focusing only on how it is different with Ruby using the Rhomobile platform.
The truth is that mobile development sucks. With Ruby, sometimes it sucks less. The unavoidable problem is that at the end of [...]

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agile development in action

I don’t know who first said that if you aren’t embarrassed about your v1 product, you waited too long to ship. At Mightyverse, we repeated that to ourselves as we struggled to release the first version of our iPhone app. After 2 weeks, we hit 128 downloads and I enjoyed reading my co-founder, [...]

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rails security review checklist

I’m reviewing the security of a web app built with Ruby on Rails, so I put together a checklist for a security audit. This isn’t a bank or high security situation, but there were a number of engineers and quite a bit of open source code, so I thought a few checks were in [...]

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must we be arrogant jerks?

Much of Clay Shirky’s recent rant about women rang true to me. However, it took me much of the day, including talking with my friend Val Liberty to figure out what felt off about his rant. Over a whole day of dog walking, chatting over coffee and monopoly with the kids, we spent [...]

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how to look for a job

I recently gave the following advice about looking for a job. I thought maybe other folks would find it useful. It’s kind of a next generation job search, it’s an expansion of what Ted Leung called Job Search 2.0.

Write down your ideal job, then take a serious look at yourself and [...]

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markdown to textile with vim regex

So, I needed to change markdown to textile and google didn’t yield any handy scripts, so I sharpened my vim fu with Rubular, my favorite regular expression tester and came up with a few substitutions that took care of everything but lists and code blocks.
In vi, type ESC to go into command mode, then :%s/one/two/g [...]

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ruby and rails classes in january

I’ve gotten a number of requests for follow-on training in San Francisco for Rails and the Ruby language, so here are some classes coming up in January.
Ruby on Rails class
Another Ruby on Rails training at Marakana is coming up January 19-22 — the deadline for early bird discount is Dec 29.  I was pleased to [...]

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fear stays silent while passion speaks

Cisco CTO, Padmasree Warrior, gave a thoughtful keynote speech for the Women of Vision event. I watched part 1 in May. Reminded by Anita Borg Institute’s Year in Review, I enjoyed watching part 2 and part 3.
She titled her talk: “fear stays silent while passion speaks,” which struck me as an important way [...]

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Japanese geek speak

It was inspiring to meet Matz, the creator of the Ruby language, and other Japanese Rubyists at last month’s RubyConf. Matz kindly recorded various phrases about Ruby in Japanese. Since then I’ve been working on learning katakana as an easy intro (perhaps) to the Japanese language.
For those who are unfamiliar with Japanese, katakana [...]

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creating a custom rake task

There’s a nice Railscast introduction to rake for Rails, which goes into a number of other important details that aren’t covered in this post. Below is a little tutorial of creating a Rails rake task and getting it to run remotely on heroku.
Introduction to Rake
In lib/tasks, create a file called greet.rake

task :greet do
[...]

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