Lifelong Rubyist makes some Python code 5x Faster

I’ve been writing Ruby code for the past 10+ years, and recently due to my masters courses, I’ve been writing a lot of Python. While there are many differences, one area of similarity is their performance characteristics and how code can be optimized. In this post I’m going to look at a bit of Python code I optimized recently, and then compare the process of making this code faster to the process of how I make Ruby code faster.

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RubyKaigi 2017 Day 1

This is my third RubyKaigi and my first in Hiroshima. This is also the first time where I’m not speaking (though I am on the waitlist).

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Gaijin Guide to RubyKaigi

Okay Gaijin you think you’re ready for RubyKaigi? I’m no expert, but I’ve been a few times and I want to share what I wish someone had told me about attending the conference as an outsider.

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How August 2017 RubyGems Vulnerabilities were patched on Heroku

This is less a blog post and more of an FYI. This is pretty much verbatim of a snippit I wrote to respond to people asking about the Rubygems vulnerabilities. The TLDR; push to Heroku using any supported Ruby version and you’re safe. If you’re not using a supported Ruby version upgrade your app. The vulnerabilites were fairly low impact, but you should still take steps to protect yourself.

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Adding a Blog feature: 'Say my Name'

Do you have a hard name to pronounce? I know I do, and I’m constantly getting asked to say it for people. So much that I decided to add it to my blog. It was pretty easy and I don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner. This is a short post on the why and the how to add an audio clip to your “About” page.

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How I lost 17,000 GitHub Auth Tokens in One Night

How on earth does someone accidentally delete 85% of their users’ GitHub tokens? I was suspicious that something might be wrong when I got an email from a service I run called CodeTriage, it’s a free web app to help find open source projects and issues to work on. While I get plenty of emails from my service, I don’t often get ones with the subject line “Code Triage auth failure”. Before we can understand what happened, let’s look into why this email even exists.

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I spent $50 on Twitter Ads so You Don't Have to

If you use twitter, you’ve likely seen those tweets with the little *promoted* tag on them. Twitter has always been a huge source of traffic to my tech articles, so I wondered if a promoted tweet or two would be just as successful. To find I went down the twitter advertising rabbit hole for the first time. Keep reading to find out how well my promoted tweets performed.

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The Longest Email I Ever Sent (Programmatically)

This is a post about how I had a bug in a background job that ended up sending huge emails to customers. Learn about how I found & debugged the issue, mitigated the problem, and then finally fixed the underlying causes.

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Coder Frozen in 2009 Awakens to Find Frontend Development not Awful

I’ve not seriously touched frontend code, in years. Frankly, it scares me. To that end “front end devs are not real programmers” is totally BS. I want to talk about some of the recent changes in tooling and APIs that are available so that front end development might not suck as much as it used to. You will not learn to be a CSS or JS guru with this post. If you’ve written much front end code, this will be mostly full of face-palm level obvious statements. Therefore, feel free to read for the laughs.

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Is WEBrick Webscale?

WEBrick is the “slowest” webserver in Ruby, how could it possibly be webscale? To answer this question and explore Is Ruby Too Slow For Web-Scale?, we will compare WEBrick to a real piece of “webscale” tech: NGINX.

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