Tag : code

As with most social online applications, you can think of the data as more like a graph than very simple objects that stand alone. This kind of an application and data is my favourite kind of system to architect and here is why. I warn you, this might get geeky..

PLEASE NOTE: This vacancy has now been filled.

We are looking for a talented and enthusiastic UI developer with expert-level HTML/CSS/JS skills and a creative outlook to join our development team in building social/community platforms. Though primarily responsible for the coding and development of rich user interfaces, you will also be expected to work alongside designers, strategists and core developers with a view to creating rich web applications.

Are you someone with a passion for client-side programming, a strong interest in emerging technologies (HTML5/Canvas/CSS3) and have a good eye for line-height and margins? Then we're interested in talking to you.

First things first, this post is going to out me. Despite working at a digital agency, one that calls itself a "social technology" company no less, I don't know a whole lot about coding. In fact until last Thursday's Internet Week event Coding for Dummies hosted by BBH Labs and Google, I didn't know my <p> tag from my padding. Luckily for me, it turns out I'm not alone...

I’ve been working on an iPhone app for the last few weeks, which I’ve really enjoyed. Every now and again, though, you hit what seems like a bug in the iOS SDK.

 This seems to happen much more frequently than it ever did when I was coding in C#. As a result, my default debugging approach – that any problem with my app must be my fault rather than something in the framework – has shifted slightly. I’m now much more likely to question the framework itself, and with a quick Google search it’s common to find other developers who have experienced the same problem.

Here’s one that bit me recently. NSString has a method calledstringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding, which purports to make the string safe for use, say, as a parameter to a URL. There are several characters that are reserved in parameters toURLs – for example the slash character, or the ampersand, because these are characters that are used to delimit the URL itself. Therefore we encode these, and this is done using the percent encoding scheme.

I’ve recently been doing a bit of Rails auditing, and I thought that I’d just run through the main things I check; all fairly generic attacks that aren’t specific to particular Rails websites.

SQL injection
Actually, I haven’t seem much of this, probably because it’s one of the more well known attacks and people generally seem to be aware of it.