In September 2014, I gave this talk at Baruco in Barcelona, Spain. The talk focuses on: how session authentication works in Ruby on Rails, the crypto used to protect the data, the security implications and how to share the session with applications written in other languages than Ruby (with an examp...

The week of June 23rd was a good week for gophers in San Francisco. Go was a big part of Google I/O on Wednesday and Thursday, and on Monday Google run a Go SummerFest, a special instance of the GoSF meetup. I gave a talk at Go SummerFest and then later on another one during I/O. For more informatio...

Go aka golang is an amazing language but also a language that is really easy to learn due to its small scope. If you have some coding experience, you will be able to have fully working code in a matter of minutes otherwise you might want to read my free book (WIP). Very much like with many other pro...

I like to read and I have a great community on Twitter so I asked them what they think others and myself should read in 2014. Here is the compiled list of the recommended books. The good news is that most of these books are under $10, so why not picking a couple for the new year? A big thanks to all...

I wanted to share sessions between my Rails and Go applications. I wanted to let an authenticated Rails user make JavaScript API calls to an endpoint written in Go. How hard could it be? Since I own both apps, I thought it would be as simple as sharing the secret session key and re-implementing Rail...

I just give a talk at Wicked Good Ruby Conf in Boston. I’m sure the talk will be online soon, but I figured it would be interesting to discuss it a bit further in a blog post. The format was a bit different than usual, I had a 40 minute slot and divided in 2, I made my points for 20 minutes and invi...

Over the years many people have asked me the same question: I’m starting this new project, what technology do you think I should use? Categories = [] +++ Update: Speaking of HN, here is the thread for this post

The Go language is one of my favorite programming languages. However, sometimes doing simple things can seem a bit harder than it should. However, most of the time, the problem is just to find out how to do things the easy way. While Go’s documention isn’t bad, the real key to finding out how to do ...

Engineers love to improve things. Refactoring and optimizations drive us. There is just a slight problem: we often do that in a vacuum. Before optimizing, we need to measure. Without a solid baseline, how can you say that the time you invested in making things better wasn’t a total waste? True refac...

A few days ago, I was wondering if using Go would be worth it when developing new web APIs. I obviously knew that Go would be faster than Ruby, but I wasn’t sure how much faster. I also wondering about the amount of work required to write get a full API implemented. I therefore wrote the same web AP...

Ruby 2.0 has a cool new feature that many people talk about: TracePoint. TracePoint essentially allows you to hook into Ruby’s events and listen for events. Being curious and since I just started a brand new Rails 4/Ruby 2 app, I decided to write a little middleware and see what Rails is up to when ...

Today I struggled to get OmniAuth and Google apps to work properly together. I just wanted to add authentication to my application and restrict access to only my Google Apps domain users. I was hoping it would be straight forward since I could use Google’s OpenID service. Turns out it wasn’t that ha...

The structure of a programming language reflects the challenges and solutions the designers decided to address. Each designer coming with his/her own background decides to tackle some specific issues in a novel way and/or often decides to borrow existing paradigms from other languages. We can’t, the...

If you are currently a software engineer you need to realize two things: Now is an awesome time to be a software engineer (probably the best time ever). Your job might not be well suited for you. I’ll show you why we are lucky bastards, why we aren’t so good at picking the right jobs and some hints ...

During RubyConf 2012 in Denver, Colorado Matt Aimonetti gave a talk entitled Ruby Vs. The World. ##Description of the talk: Ruby is an awesome programming language, it’s so pleasing you probably haven’t seriously looked at other languages since you switched. The programming world is evolving fast, n...

During Aloha RubyConf 2012 in Honolulu, Hawaii Matt Aimonetti gave a talk entitled mmm..mruby or why yet another Ruby implementation. ##Description of the talk: mruby is Matz’ new Ruby implementation, it’s not cooler than node.js, it doesn’t natively support Hypstermedia, it looks just like the good...

During PulsoConf 2012 in Bogotá, Colombia Matt Aimonetti gave a talk entitled Tower of Babel: a tour of programming languages. ##Description of the talk: Programming languages affect the way one looks and solves problems. But comparing programming languages isn’t as simple as drawing a table compari...

Scala is a very interesting programming language. It has for goal to provide both Object Oriented and Functional Programming paradigms. Now Scala isn’t the only recent programming language out there mixing the two paradigms. Ruby, JavaScript and Clojure are other examples of popular languages implem...

When you first get started with the Ruby programming and you come from a different language, the only tricky piece is often Ruby’s approach to block/closure/anonymous functions. Sure the metaprogramming seems a bit odd, but you don’t have to use it. That’s why a lot of developers think that Ruby is ...

Have you ever wondered what the differences are between #dup and #clone in Ruby? They both create a shallow copy of an object (meaning that they don’t copy the objects that might be referenced within the copied object). However, #clone does two things that #dup doesn’t: copy the singleton class of t...

While it’s true that there are still a lot of places where software isn’t leveraged and many places where software needs to evolve, software is nearly everywhere!. The type of software we write today needs to interact with other software via some sort of network. Any web developer out there is used ...

Yesterday, RubyMotion was released and let’s be honest, it is one the best alternatives to Objective-C out there (if not the best). RubyMotion is a commercial, proprietary fork of MacRuby that targets iOS. This is not a small achievement, MacRuby relies on Objective C’s Garbage Collector (libauto) w...

mruby is the latest Ruby implementation in an already quite long list: MRI REE JRuby Rubinius MacRuby Maglev IronRuby And many other less known implementations. This time, the main man behind the project is the Ruby creator himself: Yukihiro ‘Matz’ Matsumoto. I already covered the announcement, you ...

Today, two big Ruby news came directly from Japan: The Open Source release of Matz' mruby on GitHub. The announce of MobiRuby, an upcoming solution to develop iOS and Android applications using Ruby. Probably due to my involvement with the MacRuby project, people have been asking me what I thought o...

Most modern web applications start as a monolithic code base and, as complexity increases, the once small app gets split apart into many “modules”. In other cases, engineers opt for a SOA design approach from the beginning. One way or another, we start running multiple separate applications that nee...

Ruby on Rails undisputedly changed the way web frameworks are designed. Rails became a reference when it comes to leveraging conventions, easy baked in feature set and a rich ecosystem. However, I think that Rails did and still does a lot of things pretty poorly. By writing this post, I’m not trying...

Yesterday I did some quick digging into how ORM objects are initialized and the performance cost associated to that. In other words, I wanted to see what’s going on when you initialize an ActiveRecord object. Before I show you the benchmark numbers and you jump to conclusions, it’s important to real...

During LA RubyConf 2012 in Los Angeles, CA Matt Aimonetti gave a talk entitled Ruby: time to move on. ##Description of the talk: Let’s be honest, Ruby became mainstream a few years back and it isn’t the cool underground programming language it once was. It’s quite likely that your cousin’s boyfriend...

Today, I asked on Twitter what non-technical books I should read in 2012. I was nicely surprised to see so many of my followers send recommendations. Here is a list of 25 books that like-minded people suggested I read. Hopefully you will find a book or two to read too. Feel free to send more recomme...

Recently I asked a friend of mine to give me pointers on how to develop a curriculum (he used to teach an education PHD program), after discussing his response on Twitter, people asked me to put it somewhere, so here it is: Process to develop a curriculum: Purpose. Know why you’re doing what you’re ...