Matt Blodgett

Introducing Kenny

2013-06-13T13:36:00.001-04:00

Kenny is my tool for webmasters who run sites secured with HTTP basic authentication. Kenny can track down and show these folks where logins for their site(s) have been leaked on the public Web.

Ride into the danger zone, y'all. - Kenny L.

I envisaged Kenny as a project in which I could explore several technologies:

ASP.NET MVC 4
Bootstrap
Entity Framework migrations
GitHub and the current state of Git on Windows
AppHarbor

And that's exactly what I did: Kenny is now a real thing, and all these technologies were crucial in its construction.

Webmasters can add the sites they want to track.

Kenny will search the public Web for logins and collect them in a list where the webmaster can test them for validity and review the source of each leak.

I had a ball working on Kenny, and I learned a lot about some technologies I’d been itching to work with. I plan to follow up this blog post with another that goes into some details about the different tech I used, what I learned, and what was cool about them.

In the meantime, check out the source code and play with the demo on AppHarbor:

The Boy Scout Rule

2013-01-30T22:06:00.000-05:00

One of the software development principles I live by is the "Boy Scout Rule".

The Boy Scouts of America have a simple rule that we can apply to our profession.
Leave the campground cleaner than you found it.
If we all checked-in our code a little cleaner than when we checked it out, the code simply could not rot.

Whenever I dig around in my company's rather large codebase hunting down a bug or perhaps adding a feature, I look for little opportunities to leave the files I touch a little cleaner than I found them. Ancient commented-out sections of code, unused variables, unused methods, and other detritus left behind by the organic change of a codebase are all ripe targets. ReSharper is the poker stick with which I pick up the litter around my campsite.

It's my little way of fighting back against the tendency of a codebase to decay and become noisy over time. And, not to mention, there's just something fun about deleting code. I encourage everyone to experience the joy of deletion.

DHH on Hiring Remote Workers

2011-12-31T14:13:00.001-05:00

If we were only trying to hire in Chicago, we’d never have the world-class team we have today.
. . .
Being in the same room occasionally is great, but I would much rather work with A players remotely than B players in the same office, if that's the choice.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

TLC on Software Methodologies

2011-10-22T16:51:00.001-04:00

The Microsoft Stack Did Not Kill MySpace, People Did

2011-03-25T18:56:00.002-04:00

An article on the High Scalability blog provocatively titled Did The Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace? caused a bit of a flap on Hacker News today.

While perusing the article, I immediately remembered highlighting a certain passage from Peopleware, indisputably one of the great classics of our field. I grabbed my copy off the bookshelf and found the passage on page 5 under the heading The High-Tech Illusion:

The main reason we tend to focus on the technical rather than the human side of the work is not because it's more crucial, but because it's easier to do. … Human interactions are complicated and never very crisp and clean in their effects, but they matter more than any other aspect of the work.

If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you're like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, "The light is better there."

I know the Internet inside out

2010-02-11T12:45:00.001-05:00

…this is apparently what Microsoft was doing to enhance Web search at the same time that Larry Page and Sergey Brin were founding Google.

PowerShell Tip: Pipe to the Windows Clipboard

2009-12-06T14:59:00.001-05:00

Through this blog post, I discovered the wonderful clip, which allows you to pipe to the clipboard from PowerShell (or cmd).

The IT department at my company has a weird scheme that they like to use for assigning computer names, so I find myself running a PowerShell command like this several times a week when I need to summon my cryptic computer name:

$Env:COMPUTERNAME | clip

Wired | Tired | Expired

2009-11-10T19:48:00.001-05:00

This should make sense to a significant (and some would say unfortunate) segment of the developer population:

Wired	c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe recycle apppool "MyAppPool"
Tired	cscript c:\windows\system32\iisapp.vbs /a "MyAppPool" /r
Expired	iisreset

The State of ORM at Microsoft

2009-11-08T15:07:00.001-05:00

I just watched a pretty good presentation by Microsoft’s Eric Nelson that untangles the mess that is Microsoft’s ORM strategy. It’s appropriately titled:

ORM, EDM, ESQL, Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities - Confused?

This topic is of particular interest to me, as I’ve begun work on a new application using the latest and greatest Microsoft stuff after having been out frolicking in Railsland for a while.

Some light reading seemed to indicate that the ADO.NET Entity Framework was the officially blessed product going forward, and this presentation confirmed that and provided a nice explanation of how the various technologies listed in the title fit into the picture.

Inherits="WTF?"

2009-11-02T19:11:00.000-05:00

My kingdom for a comprehensive reference for the format of the string that goes here:

RottenFlix Live!

2009-10-12T18:43:00.002-04:00

I thought I should write an update on where I've gotten with RottenFlix since the last post.

Plans

In my last post, I mentioned some plans that I had for enhancements.

In the future, one major enhancement I'd like to make to RottenFlix is to redesign it to use Web Workers. My original design of RottenFlix fetched all relevant movie ratings up-front with no action required from the user, but it was just too slow and it blocked the UI awkwardly. With Web Workers I'm pretty confident I could go back to my original vision and make it fast and usable.
There's also the issue of new movie titles that are brought into the page via Netflix's own Ajax effects. RottenFlix does not currently handle those movie titles. I could probably make this work, but I'm not sure how.

Reality

Well, after banging my head against the wall extensively on both of these issues, I've reached some conclusions.

It's not actually possible to use workers within Greasemonkey. After much experimentation, googling, and finally Stack Overflowing, I had to accept the fact that my dream of a multi-threaded RottenFlix was dead. Bummer.
This one has a happy ending. After a long fruitless journey down the Live Query path, I stumbled upon a short paragraph in a Dr. Nic blog post that shed light on why Live Query wasn't working for me and never would. Luckily, that post also pointed me at setInterval(), which worked beautifully for my scenario. I'm happy to report that RottenFlix now accounts for movie titles that are added to the page dynamically, and it only took 3 lines of code! (Look at the first 3 changes in this diff, if you're curious.)

Plans?

Now that I've settled these issues, I'm not sure where RottenFlix will go from here. I built this thing for myself, and I'm very happy right now with the functionality. It might benefit from some UI polish. We'll see...

Rotten Tomatoes + Netflix + Greasemonkey = RottenFlix

2009-07-31T14:31:00.002-04:00

I give you RottenFlix, my first published Greasemonkey script.

What is it?

RottenFlix is a result of the time-honored tradition of scratching your own itch. I'm a huge movie fan and a devoted member of Netflix. I've also been a user of Rotten Tomatoes for many years and have come to rely on it heavily for movie ratings; I'll rarely commit to watching a movie until I've looked up its rating on RT. While browsing Netflix for intriguing movies, it became tedious and annoying to have to constantly leave the site to look up ratings on RT, so I developed RottenFlix to alleviate this pain by making RT ratings available in the Netflix interface with a single click.

You can find more details as well as screenshots here.

What I learned

Along the way, I learned a great deal about Greasemonkey and its various oddities, including integrating third-party JavaScript libraries, and troubleshooting cross-domain Ajax requests with GM_xmlhttpRequest. I picked up a few new jQuery tricks as well.

Caveats

One thing to be aware of if you install RottenFlix: because Rotten Tomatoes does not have an API for fetching movie ratings, I had to reverse-engineer the scheme that they use to map movie titles to URLs on the site. So I essentially have to make certain guesses that are not always correct, though I'd say at this point that my code guesses correctly about 90% of the time. When a guess is incorrect, you'll see a little "?" where the rating would normally appear, and by clicking the "?" you'll be taken to a search results page for that movie title on RottenTomatoes.com where you can easily find the correct movie yourself.

Plans

In the future, one major enhancement I'd like to make to RottenFlix is to redesign it to use Web Workers. My original design of RottenFlix fetched all relevant movie ratings up-front with no action required from the user, but it was just too slow and it blocked the UI awkwardly. With Web Workers I'm pretty confident I could go back to my original vision and make it fast and usable.

There's also the issue of new movie titles that are brought into the page via Netflix's own Ajax effects. RottenFlix does not currently handle those movie titles. I could probably make this work, but I'm not sure how.

Advertising is Failure

2009-06-16T03:00:00.001-04:00

Jeff Jarvis at BRITE '09 conference

On the Market

2009-04-19T15:39:00.001-04:00

Crazy times we're living in! Well, as luck would have it, my torrid love affair of the past five months with Ruby on Rails has come to an end. So...I'll be on the market for a short time while I decide where my next home will be.

If you're interested in hiring the guy behind this blog (and this résumé), now's your chance.

I had a ball with Rails, and I'd be interested in continuing down that path with my next gig, but...there have been some interesting developments in the .NET sphere since I've been away, and I could easily go back in that direction as well.

Ruby Inspires Great Code

2009-03-21T16:37:00.001-04:00

Ruby is ﬁlled with examples of great, intuitive APIs..., and it seems that developers who write their own code in Ruby strive for the same level of obvious, inspired by the beauty of the language. We all want to provide that same feeling of happiness to developers that they get just from using the Ruby language directly.

- Excerpt from The RSpec Book

I can say from first-hand experience that the above is true. There's something about Ruby that inspires you to write code that's more expressive, obvious, and intuitive.

IKEA v. the Amish

2009-03-11T15:15:00.001-04:00

There are at least two separate groups of software developers: craftsman and industrial programmers. Neither of them is better than the other, but they are widely different and service very distinct markets. An analogy that I've been told is reasonable is the difference between IKEA and an Amish Craftsman in Mid-Ohio. People go to them for two different things. You don't go to the Amish Craftsman to build you something on the cheap, made of inferior materials, poorly constructed and that was intended to be replaced in a couple years. Likewise, you don't go to IKEA to buy a piece of furniture that has the potential to become a family heirloom. Different goals and a place for both. Nobody I've talked to has said they think of IKEA as a craftsman workshop, just like nobody thinks of the Amish workshop as an industrial factory pumping out cheap product.

- Corey Haines

Testing ScribeFire

2009-02-27T13:54:00.002-05:00

I've been searching for a free blogging client to use on OS X since my beloved Live Writer (possible my favorite piece of software Microsoft has ever produced) is Windows-only.

So here's my first post from ScribeFire, a blogging client implemented as a Firefox extension. See you on the other side, blog post.

Pop the 'Why?' Stack

2009-01-18T18:39:00.001-05:00

You should discuss...the feature and pop the why stack max 5 times (ask why recursively) until you end up with one of the following business values:

Protect revenue

Increase revenue

Manage cost

If you’re about to implement a feature that doesn’t support one of those values, chances are you’re about to implement a non-valuable feature. Consider tossing it altogether or pushing it down in your backlog.

- Aslak Hellesøy, creator of Cucumber

(If you follow the link, you can also read the transcript of an IRC session in which Aslak helps someone pop the "why?" stack for a "login" feature.)

TDD and Double Entry Bookkeeping

2008-12-07T23:28:00.002-05:00

I want you to think of TDD the way accountants think of dual entry bookkeeping. I want you to consider it as an essential part of your profession. I don't want you to think of it as optional. I don't want you to think of it as a luxury. I want you to think of it as absolutely necessary to your professional and personal self respect.

- Robert C. Martin

Rails! And BDD! And OS X! (Oh My!)

2008-11-13T22:14:00.001-05:00

I announced this on Twitter last week, but I thought I should do it in blog form as well:

I'll be the first employee and fifth member of Mutually Human Software, a small Ruby on Rails shop in Grand Rapids.

Yeah, there's a "t" missing from my first name. Wanna fight about it?

As much as I'm looking forward to working with Ruby & Rails (which is a lot), I'm looking forward just as much to using modern development practices like behavior-driven development, pair programming, and all things agile.

I'm starting the new job next week. Wish me luck!

Now Hiring: Ruthlessly Honest Dick

2008-11-12T17:34:00.001-05:00

Mission Accomplished

2008-11-04T15:22:00.001-05:00

I Gotta Give This Seaside Thing a Try

2008-11-01T23:23:00.001-04:00

JITting CSS?

2008-10-23T14:35:00.001-04:00

This post by Eric Meyer blew my mind. Let me get this straight: is he basically talking about using JavaScript to JIT CSS3 to CSS2 (or some widely supported subset thereof) and HTML5 to HTML4 so we don't have to wait for browser platforms to support them "natively"?

I think my brain just exploded. $deity bless John Resig and all the JavaScript pioneers that are carrying the Web forward.

The American Gothic of Book Covers?

2008-10-19T20:53:00.001-04:00

They don't look too excited to be working with SharePoint. Where's the pitchfork?