In my previous post on this subject I described an approach
to versioning the API of a REST/HTTP web service. This approach has
significant advantages over the approach that is currently most common
(i.e. embedding a version token in the URL). However, it does have
some downsides. This post is an attempt to outline those and […]
Managing changes to APIs is hard. That is no surprise to anyone who
has ever maintained an API of any sort. Web services, being a special
case of API, are susceptible to many of the difficulties around
versioning as other types of APIs. For HTTP based REST style web
services the combination of resources and content […]
Today I said to Elliot, “on average …” (What I was talking about is
not very interesting. Trust me.) Of course, Elliot immediately asked
what average is. It turns out that describing average to a four year
old is really hard.
My first inclination was to describe the function that is used to
calculate the arithmetic mean of […]
There is big news from the work front, SystemShepherd 5.0
has been released. This is what I work on day-to-day and it is great to
see it finally officially released.
SystemShepherd is a seriously cool bit of software designed to help
you manage your software-as-a-service offering more effectively. If
you have a system that you need to manage […]
Today I was working at my local coffee shop1. I notice a guy
near me with a large “Python Powered” sticker on his laptop. I
wandered over, said “hi” and asked if he got to use Python
daily basis.
He replied, “Yes. I have my own company so I get to use what ever
technology I like.” […]
The canonical way to deploy a Rails application is using
Apache and mod_proxy_balancer to act as a reverse proxy
request to a cluster of Mongrel processes running your
application. It is easy to setup, debug and monitor. As it turns out
the only problem with this setup is mod_proxy_balancer.
To see what I mean lets start with what
Google […]
I just released a small Emacs minor mode, rspec-mode
that provides some convenience functions related to dealing with
RSpec.
So far this minor mode provides some enhancements to ruby-mode
in the contexts of RSpec specifications. Namely, it provides the
following capabilities:
toggle back and forth between a spec and it’s target (bound to
\C-c so)
verify the spec file associated with the […]
I just spent a long time diagnosing an RSA public key exchange
problem. Google was of very little help so hopefully this article will
get picked up save someone else the trouble in the future.
The problem is this an RSA public key PEM or DER generated by
Ruby’s OpenSSL::PKey::RSA are unreadable by
OpenSSL, Bouncy Castle and probably other crypto […]
For any tech people in the Denver/Boulder area I wanted to point
out that there is a BrainJam unconference happening this
Friday (April 11th). Looks like a lot very interesting people have
signed up so far, and I will be attending, so I have high expectations. If you are able to join us find me and […]
I am going to be at MountainWest RubyConf tomorrow and Saturday.
I looking forward to meeting and hanging out with lots of interesting
peoples in the Ruby community. Oh, and the
schedule looks very interesting.