Posts in category "posts"
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Application Developer View: PostgreSQL vs. MySQL
I reluctantly started to write this post some 6 months ago. As a application developer my knowledge of the internals of DBMS design was (and still is) very limited. It is one thing to work with a DBMS at development and quite another to keep it running as part of …
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Functional Conference: Random Notes...
The first 'Functional Conference' happened in Bangalore between Oct 9-11. I had been keenly looking forward to it. This is a quick post on the sessions I attended and the conference itself. As the lineup of speakers and topics shaped up in the buildup to the conference on their website …
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Experiments with XML XPath libraries on JVM
These days I mostly program in Scala. Few weeks ago I ran into a problem to search for data within fairly large XMLs. XPath and XQuery are the standard technologies to query XML's. JVM programmers have a choice of multiple libraries to choose from when it comes to XPath. One …
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Running Machine-Learning Assignments on my Laptop's Spark Cluster
The latest offering of Coursera's popular course on Machine Learning by Andrew Ng started in the first week of March. The course requires Matlab's Octave to be used to solve the assignments. Apart from trying to solve the problems in Octave, I decided to solve the assignments in the programming …
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Code Retreat
Last Saturday I happened to go to my first code retreat. Hosted by Multunus and conducted by the master programmer Venkat Subramaniam, it was a very learnful experience. Here's a sneak-peek of the event from my eyes. The Format Code retreats are day long coding fests. Programmers take a crack …
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Play2 Application on Wildfly: Why and How
JavaEE (v5 and v6) has a commanding presence in both marketshare and (developer) mindshare in the enterprise software world. The specifications are well thought-out, battle-tested and highly relied upon. I started using JavaEE (v5) way back in 2007 with JBoss 4.x. The latest release, JavaEE-7, which was released close …
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My Scala Application: Real-time Twitter Volume Grapher For Indian Elections 2014
The Indian general elections are around the corner. For software engineers, this time around, there is data to play with and try to predict the outcome. Among all, the data from the social media giants - Twitter and Facebook - is easily accessible for analysis. Though social media may not be the …
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Computing Laws, Theorems and Aphorisms
There are plenty of laws, theorems and aphorisms out there, apart from Moore's and Murphy's, that computer people could use. They sometimes come handy in meetings and emails! Just using them could, at times, mean standing on the shoulders of giants. I plan to keep this as an ongoing post …
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Streaming Twitter On Play + Spray Scala App
Working on Scalog I decided to write a quick program couple of days ago to see the super trending twitter hashtag - #ArnabVsRahul. I initially tried to follow the hashtag on TweetDeck but found that the arrival rate of new tweets simply did not allow me to read. Wanted a way …
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My Scala Projects In The Making
Over the last year I often heard my friends say the era of MOOC was truly upon us. It was only on taking up couple of Coursera courses did I realise it fully. They have been eye-opening many times over (and extremely rigorous). Would particularly recommend these two to anyone …
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Why Learn Scala?
It was a long time ago that I read this masterpiece by the software engineering guru, Peter Norvig - Teach Yourself Programming In Ten Years. Peter advises wannabe programmers to learn at least half a dozen programming languages. Taking stock of myself earlier this year I realised having terribly missed out …
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Programming Is Hard To Manage
Couple of recent incidents triggered me to write this one. Few weeks ago, I met an old friend. A fellow software industry man. But unlike me, a people manager. As we shared our experiences in software development, my friend picked on my recently acquired MBA. Give me something to read …
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Concurrency on the JVM
Over the last few months I amused myself with an interesting pursuit. I spoke to a large number of people on the aspect of concurrency. I spoke to ex-colleagues. I spoke to engineers, architects at hackathons/meetups. And I interviewed a large number of senior engineers for a job at …
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Folding it the right way
I have been dabbling with Scala for a few months now. And one of the things that strikes me about functional programming is the beauty of the finished code. It sometimes gives me a feeling of being just the right mix of art and science! Gone are the dirty null …
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Algorithms Course-1 With Prof Sidgewick on Coursera
I did my engineering in electronics and communication systems. But my very first job was in software development. Having not studied theory of computing, databases, compilers and even algorithms/data-strutures as part of my graduation I went on to self-study these. However, deep down, have felt the need for more …
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Weekend well spent with JSFoo & NodeJS
Had been to the wonderful JavaScript conference JSFoo last week. The tremendous enthusiasm in the web development community for server side JavaScript was all at display. Personally, I have spent a lot of time coding visualizations with JavaScript. However only recently did I write some tidbits of code with NodeJS …
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The Bleeding Edge Of A Web Application...
Most web applications have the well-known 3-tiered structure - WebTier > ApplicationTier > DataTier. Both WebTier and ApplicationTier have the web-layer to parse the incoming HTTP requests. Its in the WebTier that one deploy's load-balancing L4-routers like Apache/Nginx or Netscaler like appliances. HTTP requests are forwarded by the WebTier to the ApplicationTier …
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Application Topology Graphs - Usecase, Different Product Offerings, Prototype Using D3 and jsPlumb
Graph depictions are common for problems like computer networks, social networks etc. Sometime ago, I came across the use-case of graphs for software application topologies. This post covers the few things I discovered on the topic of application topologies and their graphical representation. Table of Contents Usecase Prototype About these …
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Effective Java
I read this beautifully written article a few days ago - "I will not do your tech interview". I can't agree more with the author. Every single time I have had to give/take a technical interview, more than the sense of being inadequately prepared I feel like carrying an inexplicable …
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System and Application health - Is there a data collection challenge at the DC?
My champion-hacker friend Sumanth and I spent a little time few weeks ago digging to know if there was a data collection challenge for system and application health metrics at a typical small data center. Here is the little that we discovered... Table of Contents Usecase IT Resources Quantum of …
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Real Time Dashboard with Camel, ActiveMQ & Dojo... On JBoss7 and using JMS & WebSocket
I have built real-time 'stock-ticker' like dashboards. There are many ways to build them. Few months ago I had the opportunity to design one freshly again for an enterprise product. I did a quick sweep at the different technology stacks that can be used to build a highly scalable (design …
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Java and JVM 7: Slides from a quick talk
Doing Java early in the morning makes for a good day. Got up early today to put together few slides for a talk to developer folk. Not comprehensive. May not be very accurate even. And too much opinionated. If you dont mind my ego you may click here.
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Build Dojo 1.7/1.8/1.9 with Maven
I have been a Dojo user for many years now. Also use many JavaScript libraries (jQuery, backbone, bootstrap, D3, highsoft) all the while but Dojo is what I really love. I would not embark on any "professional" development work without being armed with Dojo. But I rest my opinions and …
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Few days with Apache Cassandra
Few years ago I was a product developer at a big software (but non-database) company. We were writing the v2 of a new product after a fairly successful development round of v1. For everything OLTP, we used the wonderful open-source database - Postgres. But by v2, we had new, hight-volume data …
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The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
For the last couple of years I have been in search of theories in Data Visualization. Educate myself on the fundamentals. My search has taken me to many books and blogs. But none as remarkable as Edward Tufte book seminal work on the subject. This is a short refresher of …