Tech Blog

We're excited here at Lonely Planet to be sponsoring one of Nashville's largest tech conferences coming up November 14-15, 2015! The keynotes from household names Yehuda Katz, Douglas Crockford, and Ed Finkler should be amazing. This year they're prediciting close to 500 attendees.

Be sure to give shout outs to the 3 organizers, William Golden, Jason Myers, and Kevin Old. Those guys have been working hard to make Nodevember 2015 even bigger than last year.

Early bird tickets are still on sale now, register at http://nodevember.org. The conference will take place at Libscomb University. Other sponsors include, Walmart, HCA, Leankit, EventBright, Modulus, Lipscomb, Jet Brains, and Stratasan.

You can see videos from last year on Nodevember's Youtube Channel. Look for LP Devs in our Lonely Planet t-shirts and say hey.

Lonely Planet was well represented at the sixth iteration of Hack Nashville, the Southeast's premier hackathon. In addition to being the Headline sponsor, Lonely Planet had seven employees hacking away that weekend. Here are their stories.

or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Components

Account security is a difficult problem to solve that is of growing importance. With more and more personal information being stored in online services, developers need to provide security options to drastically reduce the likelihood of unauthorized account access. A password on its own provides a very low level of security. This is especially true, since most users won't use a truly strong password. Users tend to be angered by requirements for passwords with adequate entropy. One solution to this issue is multifactor authentication.

I was fortunate enough to have my talk selected for JRUBYCONF.eu this year, held August 1st. JRUBYCONF.eu is held alongside and as part of the larger European Ruby conference, eurucamp. This was my first time traveling outside the United States as well as my first time speaking at a tech conference, so the excitement (as well as nervousness) I felt in the days leading up to my departure was quite intense. Fortunately, the conference organizers did an absolutely amazing job taking care of everything on their end, from hotel rooms during the three days of the conference and airport pickup to having sound and projection work flawlessly. They even hired a professional stenographer, providing transcriptions of the talks. And while I had concerns about not being able to speak German, it turned out that everyone I met spoke flawless English.

Inspired by Mark Otto's post Github's CSS I thought I would quickly jot down how Lonely Planet's CSS is structured. I thought it was interesting to read some of the parallels and it's good to share how we work.

Anyone who has attempted to maintain a UI Style Guide over a long period of time will attest that it is a very difficult process. They are generally prioritised below the maintenance of your applications themselves and as such are likely the first candidates to fall behind and the last to be brought out of tech debt.

In response to the OpenSSL vulnerability (known as Heartbleed and labelled CVE-2014-0160), Lonely Planet conducted a thorough review of our infrastructure and where necessary, updated software with the appropriate security patches, replaced affected infrastructure, and replaced our Lonely Planet SSL certificate.

Every software project I've worked on has, over time, built up technical debt, and the platform we work on here at Lonely Planet is no exception. Even just trying to keep libraries up to date and employ new recommended techniques means that the code gets inconsistent and some becomes stale, which means that over time we'll start moving more slowly because the codebase becomes harder and harder to add to. We have a few techniques to try and avoid paying too much "interest".

Our team has been interested in trying to figure out how to measure our ability to improve both personally and as a team. Our teams purpose is to deliver high-quality software as quickly as possible. This is hard to measure, so the next thing to consider is what the best proxies are. We decided that we would instead measure and improve each developers skills and hope that this would lead to team progress.

At Lonely Planet's Melbourne headquarters, we occasionally sample some of the beverages on offer at local spots like The Reverence and Station Hotel, and we've even talked about getting a beer fridge in the office, but did you know that you can tap some rare and delicious brews right on your Mac?

After upgrading to Capybara 2 we spent a lot of time giving love to our neglected child. Feature/Acceptance tests. We had a lot of them and it was always the place we spent the least amount of time, we would write a few step definitions and throw in a few Capybara calls but more often than not we would write some javascript to interact with the page.

We recently upgraded a Rails 3 project here at LP to Capybara 2 from 1.1.2. Ran into a few minor bumps along the way which we've shared below. Hopefully it helps others choosing to upgrade.

Broken Promises: Counter-intuitive Exception Handling with jQuery's Deferred or, why "always" doesn't always mean always

I've spent the last couple of months learning the lovely language of Ruby. It has many delightful features, and I can see why all the cool kids are using it. Convention over configuration works often enough to be very useful. The language itself is, mostly, wonderfully concise and easy to read. Built in support for testing and deployment makes life so much easier. The amount of time it takes to create an application and get it into a usable (by users!) state is astounding for those of us coming from a Java/PHP background.

There are many reasons to limit Work in Progress (WIP). This is explained well by Tonianne DeMaria Barry and Jim Benson in their Personal Kanban blog.

Kanban provides a snapshot of how things really are without trying to assign blame. This provides the opportunity to make genuine improvements, because issues are visible and can be owned by the whole team.

A target of ours has been to improve the monitoring of our applications. I'm sure this is true for nearly all Software companies. We have applications written in various languages, the main "must-monitor" ones in Ruby and Java. This article explains how we implemented statsd into our Ruby applications.