Recently, our very own Frank Rietta (yes that Rietta) had a chance to sit down (virtually of course) with Dave Kimura (@kobaltz on Twitter) of the Drifting Ruby screencast. For those who don’t know, Drifting Ruby is an educational site, blog, and screencast with all things Ruby. Drifting Ruby offers premium training with example-based content to up your dev game to the next level.

While PostgreSQL has a built in age() command, MySQL does not. Imagine we have a users table with a birthdate field and we need to figure out how old they are. We could accomplish this by subtracting the current date with the date the user was born on.

Update 3/21/2019, the video of this presentation is now available on the Rietta Inc. YouTube Channel, Applying Agile and Security in Software Development.

I am going to be speaking on Applying Agile and Security in Software Development at the IS General Speaker Series #3 at Kennesaw State University on Wednesday, February 27th, from 7:00pm-9:00pm at the Burruss Building Room BB109.

There will also be a talk by Philip Andreae on Payment Card Security.

KSU students may sign up for IS Engagement Activity #ISENG.

I am Looking forward to helping some students understand a bit more about the gritty real world life of development. Please spread the word.

There are different ways we can store currency in PostgreSQL, this blog post will cover the money and numeric types.

As I sit here at home with my wife Danielle celebrating the beginning of 2019, I am remembering how grateful I am for my customers and co-workers. In the last year, we’ve accomplished tremendous things. Launching new products, solving critical security issues before they were a problem, and so much more. I look forward to the new opportunities in 2019!

Having a good bin/setup is very essential to having a quick onboarding time as well as getting your environment back up and going in case of emergency.

But how often do you run this bin/setup if it’s only ran when you setup your repo? Most developers setup their environment only every once in awhile. What happens when changes to the codebase happen and the bin/setup isn’t modified as well?

Nothing is better than cloning a code repository, running the bin/setup, and everything about the project just works. It’s the developer equivalent of waking up before your alarm goes off and realizing you can sleep for another two hours.

A good bin/setup can mean the difference between a frustrating on-boarding process and a fantastic one.

When you have a completed bin/setup, you have an easy way to get new and existing developers up and running quickly, stress-free. It can also streamline continuous integration setup and maintenance. A good bin/setup gives you peace of mind when setting up a new machine and offloads the mental work of project setup to a verifiable tool.

Gem updates are tedious. Gem name changes are even more tedious. This quick script converts Factory Girl references to Factory Bot references.

The ability to deeply concentrate and sink your teeth into a task is more valuable than ever, and yet, our attention has never been more scattered at work. Slack, email, and social media beg for our attention, and a lot of the time, it’s the path of least resistance to give in to the urge to check Reddit. There is a better way to work. The antidote to the scattering of our attention and lack of using our mind’s full potential is deep work.

It’s ordinarily possible for a CA to sign a certificate for your domain without properly validating it. We essentially have to trust them to take security seriously and to not make mistakes in their process.