Tech Talks: Rails Security Vulnerabilities, Rack Debugging, and more!

Join us for our monthly gathering, hosted by Braintree (https://www.braintreepayments.com/)! We will feature one short and two longer talks, sandwiched with networking and food and drink. Bike parking is available at the venue—please bring your bikes with you up to Braintree's suite.

We are dedicated to a harassment-free experience for everyone. All attendees are expected to abide by the Fog City Ruby Code of Conduct (http://fogcityruby.github.io/).

We'll ask you to write your pronoun on your name tag. Want to learn more about why we do this? Read this guide from Bryn Mawr (http://www.brynmawr.edu/pensby/documents/AskingforNameandPronouns.pdf)

Submit a talk for a future meetup: Fog City Ruby CFP (http://www.fogcityruby.com/cfp/)

Speakers of all programming and speaking experience levels are welcome to submit talks, and we're especially excited to host speakers who come from populations that are underrepresented in tech.

SCHEDULE

6:30pm — Doors open, food, networking

7:00pm — Namibia Torres:
The Importance of Non-Verbal Communication During Interviews
How to create a great interview experience by developing your non-verbal communication skills.

7:15pm — Gregg Horton: Preventing Security Vulnerabilities in Rails

As a mature and stable web framework, Rails is built to withstand and prevent some of the most common security threats, but even seasoned developers can fall victim to introducing new vulnerabilities. This talk will cover simple solutions to mitigate a rage of the most overlooked Rails security threats and how to use static code analysis to prevent these threats from making it into production.

7:45pm — Pan Thomakos: Debugging Adventures in Rack-land

I ran into a weird bug the other day. Editing an attribute in a web form would kick off an XHR request to the server and update a row in the database. But when the page was refreshed, the attribute on the page had not changed from its original value. Even weirder: refreshing the page a second time caused the attribute to show up correctly—and reflect what was in the database.

I’m not going to spoil the story here, but the issue led me into the internals of Rack middleware. Join me as we explore the details of this strange bug. Together, we’ll learn something about the wonderful world of Rack.

8:15-8:45pm — More hanging out and talking to nice people

SPEAKERS

Namibia Torres is a candidate experience expert and software engineer. She has conducted hundreds of interviews and trained professionals to become successful interviewers for their businesses. Namibia is the founder of Successful Interviewer, a company that works with businesses to improve their candidate experience in order to attract and retain great talent.

Gregg Horton is a full stack web developer working at Webpass, a Google Fiber company. Gregg has a long standing passion for web application security and has presented at HOPE on Art and Surveillance, as well as organized multiple Bay Area Hacker conferences.

Pan Thomakos leads productivity engineering and the Ruby/Rails/Javascript platform at Strava. He spends most of his time developing automation to eliminate manual tasks, and improving, upgrading, and maintaining the web technology stack. He is originally from Greece and spends his free time running, cooking, and playing with his kids.

SPONSOR

Thanks to Braintree (https://www.braintreepayments.com/) for sponsoring this month's Fog City Ruby!