Last time, I walked through directly uploading an image to an S3 bucket from the browser with no server involved. That last bit is important. If you are using a server, then PreSigned URLs are a better choice as they do not require a world-writable bucket.

Want to upload an image directly to S3 from the browser? Here’s what you need.

Previously, I worked through how to get messages from an IMAP server and work with the message headers. Let’s look at extracting data from those messages.

There’s a really solid, tried and true, Internet wide messaging queue. It’s been around for decades and has first class support in Ruby. What is it? Email. That’s right, email.

Here’s something slightly random and the exact opposite of technical, the Bullet Journal.

I’ve tried just every to-do/productivity app/site out there. OmniFocus, Things, Trello, Evernote, Org Mode to name five. But, I never stick to them. They start of well enough, yet end up cluttered with things I’m never going to do. Or things I sort of did. Or things that are too nebulous to be meaningful.

If you are reading my blog, odd are you already know how to use ssh-add to manage you SSH keys. If not, you can read up on it.

Up to speed? ssh-add has a few other features that people, including me, forget about. Let’s take a look.

Recently, I had the task of speeding up the response time of an app that depended on a remote API. The issue was that the API could take a long time to respond in some cases, plus four seconds. Four seconds is way to long to wait for a web page…

For some reason, I can never remember the right command line option for setting the Host HTTP header with curl. It’s actually something I need to do fairly regularly, it comes up testing server configurations before making changes to DNS.

When you’re developing Rails apps or pretty much any other framework you can name, you typically work with a server running on localhost. This is all well and good until you need to access it from a different location.

I occasionally write about encryption in Ruby, yet somehow I haven’t managed to cover my friend Ara’s Sekrets gem.

Sekrets provides a simple interface to create and manage encrypted files in Ruby. It’s raison d’être is to make it reasonably painless to store sensitive data, API keys and the like, in Git repos and then access that data inside your Rails app, both in development and production.