Web Summit 2015 with Upgrade Digital

In November this year I was lucky enough to be able to attend Web Summit to promote Upgrade Digital 

The web summit venue is truly vast. Our stand, which we only had for one of the three days was near the main stage so we had fantastic footfall but very little engagement sadly.

Web summit has become famous due to Uber raising so much funding during a chat in the pub but it has perhaps gotten too large.

The first night summit was very popular and there were a lot of great conversations but what became apparent was that there were a very large number of startup companies attending.

If you go to Dublin I strongly recommend going for a whisky tasting session at the temple bar. The bar staff are very knowledgeable and extremely friendly.

Oh, and there are some great places for live music too, whether you are looking for traditional folk or more rock covers.

SSL Test Certificate Bleed

Many of the people I have worked with will know of my distaste for self signed SSL certificates in test environments. Once you have built a tool to generate and distribute these 'cruft' flakes they invariably spread. The worst case scenario is if these certs end up in your production environment. The real question to ask is will developers take the path of least resistance and skip SSL validation.

I have always advocated using genuine certificates for all build environments. This approach is usually resisted with the vigor of a grad dev defending his favourite language. I don't know why. With a little planning it is easy to use a subdomain, with implementation costs typically in the double digits per year. Usually the argument has more to do with resistance to fixing something that 'works'.

The recent news of symantec accidentally releasing test certificate is a really good counter case. This is one test environment that really should use a self signed cert. The Web needs security and the certificate issuance companies could be the weakest link.