Benjamin Fleischer, SK Intertainment

Benjamin Fleischer works in Chicago for SK Intertainment, a company whose portfolio includes Mr. Skin (mrskin.com), a website that makes available NSFW media clips on a subscription basis. You may recognize Mr. Skin as a plot element in the film Knocked Up. Yes, we're real.

As the first employee hired as a Rubyist, Benjamin introduced testing (including TDD), CI, design patterns, and some agile practices. The team's development stack includes PHP, Ruby / JRuby, and YUI (not jQuery!). Mr. Skin is a small company and a really great place to work.

Benjamin's open-source software contributions include maintaining the metric_fu library. Benjamin lives in Chicago with his wife and daughter.http://benjaminfleischer.com

Presentations by Benjamin Fleischer:

YAML, what is it good for?

Rails Israel 2013 Conference, Wednesday, October 9, 2013, 15:10

YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language) has been a structured data format frequently used in of Ruby development for some time. It has many useful features that often go unnoticed.

Its ability to store serialized objects has recently made much news in the form of very serious vulnerabilities in the Rails framework.

In this talk, we will explore ways of using YAML beyond a simple store of arrays and hashes of data, as well as the risks and benefits of doing so. We will discuss YAML databases, configuration files, conversion into and from Ruby objects, incompatibilities between parsers (Syck and Psych) and the reasons for them, and some gotchas. Some reference will be made to YAML libraries in Ruby and other languages. http://www.yaml.org/