As you might have heard, Volkswagen was recently caught in quite a scandal: Its diesel-powered cars would report one (legal, standard) pollution number when the car was being inspected, but quite another number (illegal and nonstandard) when it was actually being driven and on the road. This scandal, sometimes called “Dieselgate,” has had many implications for VW as a company, and for the car industry in general, But how did VW manage to fool so many people for so long? What did the car’s software and hardware do (and not do) in order to trick emissions inspectors? In this talk, Felix Domke and Daniel Lange report what they have each found, providing us with a fascinating introduction into the intersection of cars, computers, regulations, and scandals.
RSpec is one of the best-known test frameworks in the Ruby world. With RSpec 3.0, the framework has made a large number of changes, mostly aimed at making tests cleaner, easier to write and understand, but also making RSpec itself easier to maintain. In this talk, Jon Rowe describes the changes and improvements in RSpec 3.0, and why these are changes that everyday developers (and RSpec users) should notice, care about, and even incorporate into their work.
Can your Web application handle lots of traffic? If so, then how much? The best way to figure out how much traffic your application can take is to load-test it. In this talk, Dustin Whittle describes a number of open-source tools that can help you to test the scalability of your Web application, at a number of different levels and in different ways.
How do you debug your Python programs? There are a variety of techniques, but even the strongest advocates of using “print” statements eventually need to use a debugger. In this talk, Matt Boehm demonstrates why and when you want to use a debugger — and the variety of debuggers that exist within the Python world.
Continuing the discussion of Web security from yesterday’s lecture, today’s talk describes many of the vulnerabilities in modern Web applications — and then goes on to discuss how you can defend against them, as well as test your applications for such holes. Michael Coates, an expert in Web security, looks at some of the most common problems that Web applications experience.
Gary Bernhardt gave this talk at RubyConf 2012. He discusses testing, APIs, and the different levels/aspects of programs we write. As usual, he is funny, interesting, and thought-provoking.
Kenneth, the author of the Requests library for Python, describes where Python’s APIs could be improved — and more importantly, how to write an API that is useful for programmers, and not just for programs.