Today I was typing up another blog post and had to use him/her as a gender neutral pronoun reference. This is something that’s always bugged me as it’s awkward to write and awkward to read. “They” is not a suitable alternative because it’s plural and therefore grammatically incorrect in a...

I’ve been an avid gamer since, well, ever. Like many developers, an interest in video games (and creating them) is what first lured me to the world of programming. While I’m not a part of the game industry I follow it closely and have greatly enjoyed discovering such online video...

I don’t really read books these days. I read plenty of blogs and web development related things via Google Reader, but I almost never just sit down and read something in my free time. Sometimes I’m filled with guilt about it: surely I should be reading more, enriching my life...

I’ve been following the progress of Mozilla’s BrowserID for some time now, and I’m a big fan. Having dove much deeper than most into the quagmire of fragmented authentication I’ve reached the same conclusion that Mozilla has: ultimately, authentication is a function that should belong to the user agent.

As a new developer to Ruby you might wonder how certain methods seem to be magically available without being strictly defined. Rails’s dynamic finders (e.g. find_by_name) are one example of this kind of magic. It’s very simple to implement magic such as this in Ruby, but it’s also easy to...