February 08, 2010
I Think I Have Writer's Block
Um... Yeah. I do.
January 31, 2010
Being Honest
Honesty is formed by a desire to connect with somebody or something at a deeper level.
What makes your relationship to your significant other different from your relationships with everyone else? Honesty. It's what forms the foundation of trust that couldn't exist without it.
January 24, 2010
Do You Really Need All That Session Data?
When I started web development in 2003 I was using PHP4 as my language of choice. In PHP4, sessions were a built-in feature where the mechanics were somewhat hidden from you. You could initialize a session by calling a function (session_start) and then you would have access to the aptly named $_SESSION variable, which was simply - for all intents and purposes - an associative array.
When I moved on to the world of Python and Django, I carried over the mindset that a session needed to be a hash that I could use to store all kinds of important data. As it turns out, though, all I was really storing was the user's name or their email or something of that nature; nothing that required the use of a database.
So the overhead that I was incurring to store a user's session data in a database and retrieve it every time they made a request was absurd. Now I'm not saying you should never do that, I'm simply saying that if it's not a necessity to store more than the user's name, why not just use a signed cookie? For simple authentication or tracking, using a signed cookie can save you unnecessary hits to your database.
Just my two cents.