Brandon Harris

Interviewing As a Developer Today

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

My experience and conclusions regarding the standard interview process for developers

Automating Hugo Builds to an S3 Hosted Bucket

Sun, 21 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

My experience migrating from Jekyll to Hugo and automating deployment of my blog on S3 through Wercker

Active Record Is Not Null In Where Clause

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I had a difficult time finding out how to do this the way I wanted. Let's say you want to do a check for a value not being null along with other logic, say an IN clause. You're led down a path of forumulating a string that gets hairy

  
    ids = [1,2,3]
    SomeRecord.where("some_column is not null and id in (#{ids.join(','})")

That's kind of gross. I've done it, and I've seen it done. This is just a trivial example, if you have more conditions you can be tempted to expand that string. However, there is a cleaner way.

Rails 2 to Rails 3.1 : A Road to Hell

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Some say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. For a recent project for a client, we decided to upgrade their aging app from 2.3.14 to 3.1.3. Why? A lot of the plugins and gems that we were using were getting stale, and it was getting harder and harder to support the aging setup.

I set out my journey with the fantastic rails_upgrade plugin. I had done several upgrades in the past, and I knew a lot of the pitfalls, but I wasn't quite prepared for what I was about to discover.

We are the Privileged 150k

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The majority of the world dreams to make more than 100k a year. Yet, in the tech community, we refuse to train those dreamers. Instead we pine after "rockstars" and "ninjas".

I am happy to see the global tech community pay attention to our burgeoning tech community in Austin. The truth is, Austin has been part of the tech community as long as Silicon Valley has existed. I recently had lunch with a startup founder who eloquently pulled me through the trenches of his trek to his current successes. These include building one of the worlds first online credit card processing websites. Back then, they had to connect to FileMaker Pro as their database - oh the Humanity!

Thank You for Visiting

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Im assuming that as of the writing of this, you arrived here in search of Brandon Harris the wikipedia programmer.

If you happen to be interested in some of the topics that I occasionally post here, please feel free to subscribe or follow me on twitter.

Brandon did an AMA on Reddit

If you are looking to donate to wikipedia (please do!) this is the link that you are looking for

Thanks for visiting!

Rails Simple Page Caching

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Memcache is great, and Redis is even better. But you are still bound to a database, and running services. We are so caught up in making everything dynamic, that I think we don't often realize that we are still serving up mostly static html. The good news is that Rails has static html caching built in, and I rarely notice anyone talking about it.

The scenario: You want to input your page content via an administrative interface, but this data rarely changes. Another way to look at it, the content only changes if you or someone who administers the site has a need to change it. Rails page caching is your friend.

JSON Templates in Rails

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes, you just don't want to do call the "to_json" message on an object. It could be that the object has a lot of attributes, the json needs are very simple, or you simply don't like the default structure.

Fortunately, there is a very easy solution: JSON templates. This is built in, and you might have not even known it.

In my case, I wanted to plot a bunch of people and their locations on a map. I had the following model:

Matrox DualHead2Go, TripleHead2Go on Ubuntu, with ATI/AMD

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I recently purchased a matrox dualhead2go digital edition off of ebay on a whim. I did this because I wanted to make use of some extra monitors sitting around the office. I have also come to the realization that I have grown up as a developer and I have enough confidence to look anyone straight in the eye and say – “Yes, I need 3 monitors”.

My current setup is a Dell XPS 1640 running Ubuntu 10.04, with a Radeon 3670 graphics card. Yeah, enter the wonderful world of linux graphics drivers.

Painless Upgrade to Bundler and Bamboo Stack

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I just upgraded this site to use bundler and the heroku Bamboo stack.

The steps were:

1. Remove the .gems file, and create a Gemfile.
2. Patch the Rails 2.3 installation for bundler
3. Run heroku command:


heroku stack:migrate bamboo-ree-1.8.7

4.Run command:


bundle install

5. Commit all changes to git, and push to heroku.

I am really impressed with the ease at which this was done. Heroku continues to impress, and Bundler is the best thing to happen to Ruby since Rails.

Heroku Gem Gone After Push

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I recently deployed to heroku and was greeted with the dreaded “App Crashed” dialogue. In this particular case it was for a higher traffic production site, so I was frantic to fix it.
A quick


heroku logs

showed that the memcache gem was missing. I scratched my head a little bit and did a quick git log on the .gem file. It hadn’t changed in months. Time was ticking, so I looked up the current version that I needed for the environment and I added it in. Another git push and I waited.
All the gems were pulled in and the instance started successfully. In my haste to move on to the next task, I didn’t follow up too much and just assumed that this was a fluke.

Oracle, Rails and Ubuntu 10.04

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I recently setup an Ubuntu based server that needed ruby to talk to oracle and mysql. If you are a rails developer, you should be familiar with mysql, but what about Oracle? It isn’t quite as straightforward as you might assume, but it is within the grasp of mere mortals. Please keep in mind that due to changing version numbers, all version numbers are replaced with *. It is up to the reader to properly translate the following commands. Don’t simply copy and paste. I am making the assumption that you are installing on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) and you are using the 64-bit version.

Simple Sinatra ActiveRecord App with Migrations

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I make a lot of stuff using Ruby on Rails, so why bother with Sinatra? Well, its fast, has a very small footprint, and it’s fun.

I decided to build a simple posting app as a test for Sinatra. My example doesn’t do much, but it was fun to learn about all the little parts of Rails that I take for granted everyday.
The first thing I did was start with the hello world example.

Portfolio

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I have been dabbling in the freelance world, and have created a simple portfolio listing on this site. Take a look if you are interested to see some of the work that I have been doing in my “free time”.

Active Scaffold with Paperclip

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I always recommend Active Scaffold to fellow Rails developers. There is a learning curve, but it can cut a lot of development time out of your clients custom CMS.

Paperclip has pretty much dominated the Rails attachment market for the past year. My company has migrated to it, and there are countless tutorials and testimonials regarding it’s ease of use.

I am assuming that you are using the latest version of Rails (2.3.5 as of this writing), Active Scaffold, and Paperclip. First we will install all the necessary components, then we will configure the rails app.

Create Git Patch From Commits

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This is another of those excruciatingly easy tasks that isn’t well documented.


git format-patch sha1..sha2

Where sha1 is the older commit and sha2 is the newer commit. This will create patches for each modified file between those commits.

Viewing Gem Rdoc

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This is painfully obvious if you actually read about the tools that you use. I couldn’t find anything on my first couple of google searches, so hopefully this can fill in that gap:


gem server

Your gem server will probably start on port 8808, so go to localhost:8808 and you will see a list of your installed gems. From here on, you probably know what to do.

Dell Studio 15 "White Screen of Death" Karmic Koala Workaround

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a horrible feeling to watch your system die after an upgrade. You may have experienced this problem before. Fear not, there is a workaround, and you will be back into your computer in no time. Just follow these directions, they may appear slightly more advanced than what you might be used to, but this can be fixed.

Add “nomodeset” to the boot options in grub. Use vim (or nano, or whatever you like to use) to edit the boot options. If you are booting from your hard drive on a recent upgrade, you can hit “Esc” at the grub boot screen and select the kernel after 2.6.31.

No More Comment Spam

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I have been receiving a lot of comment spam. I would say around 30 comments a day. I wanted to try the simplest option possible, so I created a hidden field in the comment form that only a bot would fill out. This was working under the assumption that bots don’t read css. This worked for a little while.

My spam had been reduced to under 10 comments a day, which was still high, but maintainable. As time went on, it crept back up to 30 or more a day. The next step was recaptcha, which was a breeze to set up.

Flickr Down, flickraw killed my app!

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

10/29/2009 Update

Per Mael’s (Flickraw author) response, I was able to provide a better fix.


FlickrawOptions = { :lazyload => true, :timeout => 2 }
require 'flickraw'

You can see more options in the documentation.

10/21/2009 Original Post
As of the writing of this, Flickr has been down off and on for almost 2 hours.

I noticed that a handful of our websites weren’t working. I traced the problem back to flickraw, there was one line in the ApplicationController:

Nested Model Forms and attachment_fu

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I think that a lot of Rails developers have moved on to Paperclip . Most of us started with attachment_fu , and I am willing to wager that we still have projects floating around using attachment_fu.

I updated one of these older projects to 2.3.4, and created a new form utilizing the built in nested form handling as of 2.3.

My models look like this:


class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one :report
  accepts_nested_attributes_for :report
end

class Report < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :article
  has_attachment(
    :storage => :file_system,
    :file_system_path => 'public/reports',
    :max_size => 2.megabytes,
    :content_type => 'application/pdf'
  )
  validates_as_attachment
end

The idea is that an article can have a pdf attachment. The view code for the nested form should look like this:

BlipTV API In Ruby

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I recently needed to do some work for a client to integrate their site with blip. The blip tv wiki points ruby developers to a decent project.

However, my needs were a lot more intricate than what the current gem covers. I forked the project and added in the functionality that I needed (as is the case for most open source needs). Along the way, I found out that bliptv has a json api. I couldn’t resist and converted the bliptv gem to leverage the json api. Probably a faux pas, but it is faster than rss/xml parsing.

Why aren't you using Active Scaffold?

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I do a lot of work creating admin interfaces in rails. A lot of it is redundant, so it would be nice to use a canned solution. Django has an admin interface built into every project. This makes a developers life easier.

I thought “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a plugin that read all my table associations and provided a simple crud interface?”

That is exactly what Active Scaffold tries to be.

Flash on Linux 64 bit (Jaunty Jackalope)

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

For me, Flash support has been an achilles heel on my 64 bit install. I don’t want to use wrapper and work arounds. I also think that if I have a 64 bit processor, I should be using it.

I found this little nugget which works very well for me. Flash drops out very rarely, previously it would work after 3 refreshes.

I sincerely hope that the next Adobe Flash update provides proper support to us linux users.

Populate Object Instance Variables From Hash

Mon, 18 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I recently needed to write a class in ruby that I wanted to behave similarly to an ActiveRecord based class, but without the database ties. Particularly, I wanted to do this:


r = Record.new({:attribute1 => "a", :attribute2 => "b"})

It’s not too hard to hard code a simple class with attributes that are defined by a Hash, but in the pursuit of elegance, I wanted it to be more generic. I pulled up this little snippet:

Haxe - An Interesting Path To Open Source Flash Programming

Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I have my reservations about learning flash. It is proprietary, bloated, and doesn’t work very well on linux 64bit. However, there are a lot of rich web applications that need to be flash based. Youtube anyone? I landed on haxe.

I was slightly turned off by the fact that haxe can compile to javascript, flash, or Neko (which I am not familiar with). However, what turned my on was that haxe compiled to swf is apparently faster than AS3 compiled swf’s. That argument is probably a good topic for another post, I will have to run some benchmarking.

MyBrutes - Hacking

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

You can’t hack your brutes for more experience, stats, weapons etc. All of the videos online are simply ploys to get you to sign up under the posters brute so they gain experience. It is a pyramid scheme if you will.

If you don’t know what I am talking about, try it out by fighting my brute:

http://tastychickens.mybrute.com

It is a fun little game where you watch your character battle other characters. You only get 3 fights a day, but I often find myself looking forward to logging in and fighting my 3 fights.

Upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

My upgrade from Intrepid to Jaunty went smoothly. I run off of a Dell Studio 15 with an external monitor at work. Unfortunately, this creates a virtual screen size greater than 2048×2048 which is an issue with the intel graphics driver, not compiz, so I unfortunately cannot enjoy the bling. However, when I am remote, compiz works great. Metacity is great, but after being spoiled by the eye candy it is hard to go back. This is coming from a guy whose favorite window manager was Enlightenment

Git a remote branch

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Git has it’s own work flow apart from other change management software. Branching is particularly easy, but slightly different than what one is used to. Typically, we create local branches in git to test out new ideas. Occasionally, these new ideas are good enough to share with other developers and suddenly we want a remote version of that remote branch.

We have already done this:


git checkout -b my_new_awesome_branch

We want to do this:

Watch E Text Editor on Linux

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Now that e – text editor has been opened up, I am anxious to see it running on linux. It looks like there is some activity on github. I cloned it myself and will be tinkering with it.

A lot of people will say, “Who needs another editor? Use Vim or Emacs.” I personally prefer the cramped finger inducing keystrokes of Emacs, but I am always willing to play around in another editor. I found TextMate to have a very fluid feeling that a lot of editors seem to be missing, the drawback is that I am not willing to pay Apple premiums so I can run TextMate. Macs are great, but I am far too frugal to spend the money on one. I am also irritated by The TextMate developers approach to their precious editor. I can understand the Mac-only rationality from a small business perspective, but their entire approach reeks of Apple fanboyism. I am willing to wager that a lot of linux developers would pay for TextMate, I know that I would. Alas, I am resolved to search for alternatives.

Welcome

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I mulled around for a while about the design of this site. I eventually decided to use a variation on the iNove theme from wordpress, I think it looks nice and will complement the content nicely. This will be a typical technical blog about web development with some personal posts thrown in once in a while. Many thanks to Enki , Slicehost , GitHub , and all the great people who make open source what it is.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Brandon Harris

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Incident Response Simulator

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Interactive simulation of a worldwide P0 incident