Recap: Refresh the Triangle Holiday Meeting
Yesterday, I had the honor of speaking at the second meeting of Refresh the Triangle. We were hosted by Shoeboxed.com, a local start-up, and their space accommodated the crowd of about 30 people nicely.
My talk was on techniques for securing web applications, and common security holes to look out for. After a very inspiring similar talk at Refresh DC, I was definitely excited to share my knowledge about security with the mixed group of designers and developers and show off the glaring holes in some Ruby on Rails and PHP sample applications. As a presentation geek, I wanted to try out a more experiential technique, using demonstrations instead of slides. The crowd got involved, asking great questions about topics like Cross-Site Request Forgery and laughing at the insecurity of “Upload King!” and “Festival of Bookmarks.” The demo code and security resources are available for you to enjoy.
As is Refresh custom, a post-meeting meeting at a local pub inspired great discussion and showed what a vibrant group of web professionals we have in North Carolina. We’re very lucky at Viget Labs to be part of both Refresh DC and Refresh the Triangle, and we invite you to visit the Refresh the Triangle site to suggest future topics or find out about upcoming events!
Tyrant is a "meta" Rails application designed to run other Rails applications.
Recent Comments
Hi Matt - thanks for the great post! This looks like a very cool way to configure a server - I have one question and excuse my ignorance (Linux newbie): Why do you need to create a “deploy” user at first (as opposed to just using the root account)? Is that actually necessary for running setup_env, or only needed later for regular deployment? Thanks!