Thunderbolt Labs: Blog

Giving Back To Open Source, Security Edition

Note: This post details recently patched security vulnerabilities in a few popular Ruby libraries. If you use Rails, i18n, Doorkeeper, or Sorcery please go make sure that you are up-to-date and then...

Efficiency with Sublime Text and Ruby

What does a developer do when he likes the usability of a graphical editor like Textmate, but wants the configurability of Vim or Emacs? The answer is Sublime Text. I used to write my programs in Textmate...

Getting Started with Machine Learning

“Being a data scientist is when you learn more and more about more and more, until you know nothing about everything.” — Will Cukierski via @drelu Machine learning, “big data”, and “data science”...

Ruby, Math, and Science – Just Add Water

As a specialist in any programming language, it’s quite easy to use your current expertise as a magic hammer to solve many of the problems you come across. In many languages syntax can be a burden....

Behold Madison!

As of August 20th the Thunderbolt crew has descended upon the land of cheese and honey one of our favorite tech conferences: Madison Ruby. Thunderbolt has a lot of love for the city of Madison and...

Testing Pundit Policies with RSpec

The fine folks over at Elabs recently released Pundit: a new authorization gem that uses “regular Ruby classes and object oriented design patterns to build a simple, robust and scaleable authorization...

Conventions Are a Silver Thread

Having a set of conventions around the format and naming of Use Cases on any non-trivial project is critical for ensuring a common understanding across the team and will greatly improve project organization...

5 Simple Rules to Good OO in Rails

Rules are a novel idea. Rule aren’t guidelines or suggestions or hints; rules are the law. When a developer says they have a set of rules for how to approach a particular concept there is generally...

Thunderbolt Labs Hackathon’ed in Baltimore

How does a developer or designer improve their craft? Most just practice constantly. How do you know if really have what it takes to deliver something workable in the shortest amount of time possibly...

Art vs. Engineering

A friend recently asked what I thought of a recent Techcrunch article on the practice of pair programming. The fundamental question is of whether the task at hand requires an artist or an engineer.