James Socol - Coffee on the Keyboard (Page 3)

Best Practices for Happy Webhooks

I love webhooks. I love automating things and minimizing the shit work [http://zachholman.com/posts/shit-work/] I and my users have to do, and webhooks have been an invaluable solution to a real problem. I will also say right up front that I haven’t implemented outbound webhooks all

Python StatsD Client Version 3.0

I just pushed version 3.0 of my Python StatsD client [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/statsd/] which contains a few doc updates but one significant, backwards-incompatible change: the default statsd client instance has moved. There are now two (and possibly more in the future) places to find a ready-to-go

bitly

What's Next

Friday was my last day at Bitly. Starting now, I am concentrating on TodaysMeet [https://todaysmeet.com]. TodaysMeet has been a side project of mine for a long time, and lived for several years without much input or attention from me. Recently, though, it’s been growing, and I have

On Mozilla and Brendan Eich

Two things have been clear to me for the past week: Losing Brendan from the Mozilla organization and community is a terrible blow, and we’re all worse off for it. Brendan could not continue as CEO. It feels cheap and easy to talk about this now, as if to

Next for NextUp

In late 2008 or early 2009, Ben [https://twitter.com/iambencurtis] and I were in a recurring status meeting—these days we’d call it a stand-up—that tended to run long. So we mashed up his designs and a little JavaScript and put up NextUp, a PTI [http://en.

automation

Don't Do, Write

Setting up a new server? Adding a new user? Installing a new package? Running a new service? Don’t do it, write it. It doesn’t really matter how or where you write it. Write a new Fabric [http://fabfile.org/] task, update a playbook [http://ansibleworks.com/], update a

dinner

TIC #sttp

Today I cooked (“TIC”) dinner. I am always looking for simple things I can do in 1-2 pans and 10-20 minutes with no left overs. I used * Pasta * Butter * Beech Mushrooms† * Garlic * Thyme * Salt * Pepper * Water * Large saucepan * Skillet † I picked these up on the way home. I did * Salted

bitly

Onward.ly!

Later this month I will be joining the Bitly [https://bitly.com] team! [https://www.coffeeonthekeyboard.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/pufferfish.png] I am extremely excited to be joining such an amazing group working on a product that touches so much of the web, one that I’ve used

culture

Valley vs Alley

In an interview in New York recently, I got one of my favorite questions ever: “Besides technical things and coding, what’s something you’ve done that you’re proud of or happy about?” In the Bay Area, I knew people who would ask candidates, “If you had a Sunday

identity

Pseudonymity and Consequences

For the past few years, whenever anonymity and pseudonymity come up, I’ve thrown a sidelong glance at TodaysMeet [https://todaysmeet.com/]. TodaysMeet is a tool for semi-private, semi-anonymous, ephemeral back channel conversations (in other words, passing digital notes during lecture) and has become particularly popular in secondary education. Most

cas

Simple out-of-process lock with Python and Memcached

On TodaysMeet [https://todaysmeet.com/] I need to check that a name is not in use before creating a new record. Unfortunately, because names can be reused over time, I can’t create a UNIQUE key in the database and enforce it there. That means there is some tiny amount

administration

Using supervisorctl with linux permissions but without root or sudo

I love supervisord [http://supervisord.org/], it’s been a fantastic way to manage things like gunicorn [http://gunicorn.org/] and celery [http://www.celeryproject.org/] processes. But I didn’t like that I needed to use sudo to restart a running server, e.g.: sudo supervisorctl restart todaysmeet-web A

Quo Vado?

“Where am I going?” I didn’t intend to be annoyingly coy or secretive. There is no bag, and certainly no cat to let out of it. I’m not going to some super secret stealth startup. I’m taking some time to spend on some of my own projects.

Life

A New Chapter

Nearly four years ago, I moved West [https://www.coffeeonthekeyboard.com/my-new-job-257/] to join Mozilla. About a year later, I moved East [https://www.coffeeonthekeyboard.com/moving-to-new-york-452/] to come home to New York. I consider those two of the best changes I’ve ever made. Now Spring is here again

Our Daily Errors

Over the past 24 hours, support.mozilla.org [https://support.mozilla.org] has recorded a few dozen errors. That’s pretty good. In the past three days, it’s more like a few hundred. These are sporadic, little, intermittent errors that, for most practical purposes, don’t happen. The odds

browser

Just One WebKit

Disclaimer: My opinion, not my employers, blah blah. You know the drill. Every once in a while, something happens that makes a few people scream: “If only everyone used WebKit, everything would be so much better.” I have two problems with this. One you’ve heard a hundred times (monoculture

Elegance

There’s an old H. L. Mencken quote that’s popular among mathematicians and programmers: > For every complex problem, there’s an answer that is simple, clear, and wrong. But both in math and in programming we strive for elegance, anyway. We want the beautiful, obvious solution—even if

remote

Working from Home

I’ve started this more times than I can count. Including twice this week. You’ve read–maybe you know first-hand–the benefits and drawbacks of remote workers and distributed teams. My team works really well, remotely, but that doesn’t mean it’s all sunshine and roses and unicorns.

Code

Actually Starting an Open Source Project

I’m a little late to the party, but I just got around to reading Starting an Open-Source Project [http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2013/01/03/starting-open-source-project/] and, as someone who has started several reasonably successful projects, I wanted to publicly disagree with, essentially, the entire article. The article outlines

forms

Web Advent

I wrote a blog post for Web Advent [http://webadvent.org/2012] this year! It’s about making better forms for mobile users [http://webadvent.org/2012/better-forms-for-mobile-users-by-james-socol]. Web Advent is the latest incarnation of PHP Advent. It’s always a great collection of writing and writers. Check it out

django

Mozilla's Security Best Practices

This list of resources is meant as a companion to the talk I gave at DjangoCon 2012, but it should stand on its own as a useful list for Django developers. Best Practices? What are “best practices,” anyway? The internet loves to debate these things. For us, think of it

django

Mass Assignment - Security Part 10

NB: This is the tenth post in a series [https://www.coffeeonthekeyboard.com/best-basic-security-practices-especially-with-django-697/] of posts on web application security. > “Mass assignment”? That’s a Rails [http://rubyonrails.org/] thing! GitHub [https://github.com/] was the recent, high-profile target of an “attack”—it wasn’t so much a vicious

django-nyc-security

Intermission

I sincerely hope to start the Advanced section of the security series [https://www.coffeeonthekeyboard.com/best-basic-security-practices-especially-with-django-697/] tomorrow or Wednesday, but it’s been a full and hectic weekend and I didn’t have as much time to write as I’d hoped. I still need to finish the first

django

Stay Up to Date - Basic Security Part 9

NB: This is the ninth post in a series [https://www.coffeeonthekeyboard.com/best-basic-security-practices-especially-with-django-697/] of posts on web application security. Rounding out this week is the last, but perhaps most important part of the basic security series: staying up to date. Keeping everything up-to-date is a pain. You have to

click-jacking

Click-Jacking and a little Phishing - Basic Security Part 8

NB: This is the eighth post in a series [https://www.coffeeonthekeyboard.com/best-basic-security-practices-especially-with-django-697/] of posts on web application security. Click-jacking is a process of “stealing” clicks on your site, redirecting them to other places, either by using an XSS vector [https://www.coffeeonthekeyboard.com/xss-cross-site-scripting-basic-security-part-2-711/] to replace the targets