Honk if you love hacking! I know I do, and boy is it ever satisfying to turn a tough problem into a clever solution. But as you tumble down the slippery hacking slopes, picking up loose bits of code, you may find the itch to start writing code for other hackers. Good thought, but realize that implementation is just the tip of the iceberg.

Today marks Ryan Tomayko’s first day as a GitHubber. He’ll be helping make GitHub more stable, reliable, and awesome.

Ryan has consistently impressed all of us with his work on Sinatra and Rack, the awesomeness of shotgun and git-sh, his prolific writing and linking, and his various other projects.

Authentication is what you do when you let a user identify itself. This is needed when you want to offer a login access to your application.

Authorization is what you do when you check the credentials of a user before letting him/her interact with specific sections of your system. This is needed when you have restricted areas/actions.