Tax March Reform
On April 15, 2017, I did two things: I paid my taxes, and I participated in my first political march. While the Tax March did not represent my most urgent as...
Hi, I’m JD. I work with Postgres at Hydra. I’ve previously worked at Crunchy Data, Heroku, WegoWise, my own Ruby on Rails consulting company, and Agora Games. I studied Computer Science at RPI.
While my most important language is English, I’ve programmed in Ruby, SQL, Rust, C, C++, PHP, Perl, Lua, and, of course, JavaScript.
Recent Posts
Boycotting Facebook
I am a big fan of voting with my wallet. Unfortunately, we don’t pay directly for Facebook. We pay for Facebook by using it—its advertisers depend on us chec...
Quickly Install an ArchLinux VM in 15 minutes
Today we’ll be looking at getting ArchLinux up and running in VirtualBox as rapidly as possible.
Stop punching the duck
So there you were, minding your own business, doing some behavior driven development, thinking everything is great. You test your controllers, you spec your ...
Early bird dilemma
One of the (many) problems I have with society today is that the early bird is rewarded, while the “late bird” is frowned upon. Meanwhile, $300 million is lo...
A Note to Recruiters
If you’re a recruiter (that is, anyone looking to hire me), please read this before contacting me, or you risk losing a potential lead forever.~
Bluepill, chef, and resque
Bluepill is an alternative for process monitoring, competing in the same space as heavyweight monit and hubristic god. Like god, bluepill itself and its reci...
Moving attachment_fu from filesystem to S3 storage
Most of this transition is fairly easy, but many users will find a small hiccup when it comes time to upload your files to S3.
Stardates in Toto
I was messing around with the date and instead of going with the 6th day of the 6th month of the year 2010; a glorious Sunday!, I decided to implement starda...
count, size, and length: associations vs named scopes
I was looking into this today and it was a bit different–and much more complex–than what I expected, so I figured I’d pass on the results.~
Announcing a DNS tool without the bullshit
I’ve created a simple DNS tool that allows you to easily link DNS results to share with others. Using a third-party tool is a great way to show that the DNS ...
ERD diagrams from Sequel Pro
If you need a diagram of your MySQL database and you’re on a Mac, generating an ERD diagram is quite easy - and completely free. Sequel Pro can export Graphv...
Storing IP addresses as integers
Tying long sessions to an IP address is a good way to ensure some security for your users. But inevitably, you’ll want to store that IP. While you could, of ...
Snow Leopard: Upgrading for Rails Developers
Upgrading to Snow Leopard is not as easy as Apple would lead you to believe; at least not if you’re a Rails developer. Here are a few select errors you might...