OWASP Security Principles

OWASP have a new Security Principles document available. Inevitably applications are designed with security principles architects knew about, security folks included. However, as this project demonstrates there are far more than just a 'few' principles, most of which never make it into the design. For example, security design

Clean Code

node-di: a dependency injection framework for node.js

Uncle Bob is a proponent of inversion of control to counter what he defines as "bad design": There is one set of criteria that I think all engineers will agree with. A piece of software that fulfills its requirements and yet exhibits any or all of the following

Chef

Travis CI Chef Cookbooks

Chef cookbooks collection used for Travis CI environment/VMs, worker machines and so on.

Debugging

The network is reliable

A fascinating post-mortem on high profile network failures: This post is meant as a reference point–to illustrate that, according to a wide range of accounts, partitions occur in many real-world environments. Processes, servers, NICs, switches, local and wide area networks can all fail, and the resulting economic

Clean Code

Jeremy Ashkenas - Taking JavaScript Seriously with Backbone.js

An informative talk from the author of Backbone.js.

Debugging

Signs that you're a good programmer

A truly superb list of aspirational qualities for software developers. It includes symptoms of each particular quality and guidelines on how to acquire the desired traits. Signs that you're a good programmer 1. The instinct to experiment first 2. Emotional detachment from code and design 3. Eager to

Programming

Signs that you’re a bad programmer

A blood-curdling selection of negative traits and anti-patterns that programmers should recognise and avoid. Remedies are included for the ailing. Signs that you're a bad programmer 1. Inability to reason about code 2. Poor understanding of the language's programming model 3. Deficient research skills

How to Test Software (or: Teach Yourself to be a QA)

The breadth of definitions and their mis/re-interpretations from one team to another can cause confusion. There are some foundation principles that are unshakeable (test at different layers of the system, run Continuous Integration/Deployment, ensure requirements are clearly defined) but some can be downright confusing (e.g. Component

Clean Code

Know Your Onions (and Antipatterns)

Antipatterns (styles of design or process that may proliferate, but are ineffectual or counter-productive) can confound even the most battle-hardened of developers. Only knowledge can set us free, and to that end Source Making's list of antipatterns is a welcome reminder. Good software structure is essential

Clean Code

Clean Code and Clean TDD Cheat Sheets

Two excellent and concise cheat sheets. Uncle Bob would be proud. The first covers clean code – code that is easy readable and keeps changeable. The second is about Test Driven Development. Both cheat sheets list principles, patterns, practices and smells. Clean Code and Clean TDD Cheat Sheets | planetgeek.ch

bash

The Definitive Guide to Bash Command Line History

I found a comment in one of my environment files reminding me how to prevent commands prefixed with a space from being logged in BASH's history file: export HISTIGNORE="&:[ ]*:exit" Fortunately the comment pointed me back to the original source of the trick: The Definitive

Code review

The analogy of print and code reviews

Eerie similarities: First, from your editor, as from your butler, there are no secrets. If you have allowed yourself to be lazy, careless, turgid, or sloppy, there is no concealing it. Second, everyone – everyone – is capable of shoddy work, especially in the first draft. That is why writers need editing,

bash

Recovering from a forced push to a tracked repository

If a remote repository has been force updated (git push -f), the local repository's history must be rewritten to account for it (unless the master is incorrect, in which case a forced update may be the only corrective measure). A reset with the --hard flag will reset the

CoffeeScript

10 CoffeeScript One Liners to Impress Your Friends

Ricardo Tomasi has a neat post (published 18 months ago!) featuring some deliciously succinct coffeescript: You may have read "10 Scala One Liners to Impress Your Friends" at Marcus Kazmierczak's blog recently featured on HN. Although I don't know Scala (or Java), it all

API

UUID API

Here's a quick'n'dirty UUID API I knocked together. $ curl uuid.binarysludge.com/uuid a9ee575c-0329-458b-879e-dd85f1a2b2cb It conforms to the UUID spec v4 (random number based).

Fonts

Optimising PhantomJs's Load Time

PhantomJS's load time is heavily dependent on the number of fonts that it must load into its cache. Disabling fonts that aren't required can dramatically decrease load time. How to disable fonts (eHow) A word of caution - some programs may not render properly if fonts that

Chrome

Javascript Object/Array Addition

I discovered this maniacal behaviour in Chrome's console and was directed to a lightning talk by Gary Bernhardt from CodeMash 2012, descriptively entitled WAT - oddities in Ruby and Javascript. > [] + [] "" > [] + {} "[object Object]" > {} + {} NaN > {} + [] 0

cURL

Easy CLI JSON Formatting

Command line JSON interpretation can be confusing. Python's json library (2.6+) provides a simple prettifier: $ echo '{"json":"obj"}' | python -mjson.tool { "json": "obj" } Or facetiously (from the obligatory Internet Chuck Norris Database): $ curl -s "http://api.

Dropbox

Hacking the Dropbox Space Race

The story of how a few MIT students used Python, Mechanize, internal mailing lists and Gmail to automate Dropbox account creation (sign up to Dropbox, confirm the account, install the binary and share a file). Five days ago, Dropbox launched its first collegiate Space Race, and gave us MIT folk

Programming

UTF-8

UTF-8 recently marked the 20th year since its inception (its official anniversary being January 25, 2013), and in celebration here's a brief overview (from Wikipedia): The first 128 characters (US-ASCII) need one byte. The next 1,920 characters need two bytes to encode. This covers the

Agile

Relative Weighting and Planning (Agile Planning Poker)

There's an excellent article expounding the benefits of relative planning at Scrum Shortcuts: Unlike traditional estimation units such as ‘ideal days’, the measurement unit utilized during relative estimation is not time based but rather, size based. Size in this case does not have a direct relationship to a

estimation

Estimating a Full Backlog Based on a Sample of It

A fine description of the difficulties of software estimation: 1. It’s important to remember that the relationship between points and hours is not an equivalence. It is not that 1 point equals 4 hours (which is what our example showed above). It is that 1 point equals a mean

backbone.js

Backbone Marionette: Better Backbone Apps

Joe Zim's Javascript Blog has a great post on Marionette - the Backbone.js exoskeleton: Backbone.js introduced us to a more modular way of developing today’s web applications by separating our code into semantic and reusable pieces. Backbone’s main crutch was that it offered only the

Programming

Felix's Node.js Style Guide

Felix's Node.js Style Guide contains some choice directives: * Let's start with the religious problems first. Our benevolent dictator has chosen 2 space indention for the node core, so you would do well to follow his choice. * There are rebellious forces that try to steal your

system adminstration

EC2 timeslicing and reserved instances

Contrary to the implications in the AWS EC2 documentation reserved instances do not have more power or more generous resource allocation - they are a billing mechanism to ensure that customers with large server allocations are able to bring that quantity up at will. Over the course of years it is