Things I’ve learned from organizing a large-scale event

DevCon Summit 2015, a 2-day developer conference that had over 1500 attendees, ended a few days ago. I was part of the organizing team which consisted of 60+ volunteers - The largest team we’ve ever had at a DevCon event. It was a really bumpy ride for everyone. Mistakes were made, and a lot of things were learned during the event. The event opened my eyes and made me appreciate how hard events productions can be....

November 16, 2015 · 7 min · 1449 words

Creating Signed Cookies in Capybara

I struggled with this for a while, but I finally got it. Backstory I have a series of Rails applications that authenticates through a single OAuth provider app. After authenticating successfully, the OAuth provider creates a multi-domain signed cookie that can be read by all of the apps, so the user will only have to authenticate once. It’s sort of a Single Sign On (SSO) solution that our team thought of a year ago....

September 24, 2015 · 2 min · 303 words

Heneral Luna. Not your usual Pinoy movie

Just watched Heneral Luna and it definitely lived up to the hype that it got from the people in my network. As someone who found Philippine history to be boring during school (let alone almost fails the class), I probably would have been more interested if this movie were to show during my school years instead of just now. The story telling is incredible, the pacing is just right and it had a good amount of comedy mixed in between the scenes....

September 20, 2015 · 2 min · 232 words

Things I learned about switching jobs frequently

I entered the professional world last November 2011. I’ve been working for more than 3 years already and I’ve had 4 jobs during that time span. While it looks pretty bad and intentional on paper, everything just happened coincidentally. I lasted a few months to almost a year in the jobs that I had previously, but I just got past the 2 year mark with my current job. I felt like collecting my thoughts here and make a couple of points about what I’ve learned after all that has happened:...

June 10, 2015 · 4 min · 647 words

How to allow approved mobile applications to authenticate seamlessly inside OAuth 2.0

I have an existing API server built with Rails, Devise, and the Doorkeeper gem. There’s also a mobile app that wants to use the API for authentication. By default, what will happen is that the client (or mobile app in this case) is going to be redirected to the server’s sign in page and then back to the client. This kind of flow is fine if you’re in a web browser....

December 17, 2014 · 3 min · 433 words