Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

Waste of time sub-sites that should instead be merged into Stack Overflow as different tags.

Nowhere is this waste more visible than at: cs50.stackexchange.com/. A website just for some specific course that is completely covered by other sites of the network? What a humongous waste!!!

Added this basic but fundamental protection layer to the website.

The email setup will of course be reused when notifications are eventually implemented.

Currently using SendGrid as the email provider. Very easy to setup, and has a free plan.

Adding reCAPTCHA immediately after email is a must otherwise an attacker could send infinitely many emails to random addresses, which would lead to the domain being marked as spam. I was pleasantly surprised about how easy the integration ended up being.

Made the website navbar and article lists more mobile friendly. Main motivation: improvised demos to people I meet IRL!

After breaking production and sweating for a bit hotfixing (not that anyone uses the website yet), I decided to be smart and created a staging server: ourbigbook-staging.herokuapp.com. Now I can blow that server up as I wish without afecting users. Documented at: cirosantilli.com/ourbigbook/staging-deployment

E.g.:

README.cironot-readme.cirothe table of contents for index.html also contains the headers for not-readme.ciro producing:

This feature means that you can split large input files if rendering starts to slow you down, and things will still render exactly the same, with the larger table of contents.

This will be especially important for the website because initially I want users to be able to edit one header at a time, and join all headers with \Include. But I still want the ToC to show those children.

This was a bit hard because it required doing RECURSIVE SQL queries, something I hadn't done before: stackoverflow.com/questions/192220/what-is-the-most-efficient-elegant-way-to-parse-a-flat-table-into-a-tree/192462#192462 + of course the usual refactor a bunch of stuff and fix tests until you go mad.

As mentioned at Section "Computer security researcher", Ciro Santilli really tends to like people from this area.

Also, the type of programming Ciro used to do, systems programming, is particularly useful to security researchers, e.g. Linux Kernel Module Cheat.

The reason he does not go into this is that Ciro would rather fight against the more eternal laws of physics rather than with some typo some dude at Apple did last week and which will be patched in a month.

Related:

One of the key thesis of Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane (2006).

Also mentioned at: