Articles by Sirko Sittig

Use session variables to optimize your user flow

Sessions provide you a nice little data storage feature where the application does not need to get the information directly from the database. So you do not have to persist data in your database and can easily store info about the user on the fly. This is a nice way to enhance the user experience on your page.

Let’s say that you want to show some users a new fancy sign up form and the rest the old form. If you store the version of the sign up form in a session variable, you don’t need to persist this info in your database.

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Let vs Instance Variables

Maybe in the past you stumbled over the two different approaches to setup your test variables. One way is the more programmatical approach by using instance variables, usually initialized in a before block.

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Protect your sensitive data in Git

If you are working with open source or if you are going to open source a repository, you should ensure that none of your sensitive data (API Keys, Credentials, Passwords) can be accessed by anyone.

One thing that a lot of people forget, is that this information stay forever in your repository history, if you do not rewrite the history of your repository.

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Adding Csrf-Protection to your Rails-Backbone App

When integrating Backbone.js in your Rails App, you might face the problem of the inability to verify the CSRF-Token.

The CSRF Protection secures your app with a token. Rails makes sure that the person who is interacting with your app is someone who started a session in your site, not some random attacker from another site. So you should not turn it off, unless you know what you are doing.

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