developerspeak

Announcing Chessific

2010-08-04T15:51:00.004+05:30

I'm very excited to announce the launch of our first product at APP2 Technologies: Chessific

Chessific empowers chess players around the world with "fast", "deep" and "affordable" computer analysis. Think of it as "chess analysis meets cloud computing".

Please visit the site to learn more!

A new beginning

2010-07-03T11:06:00.003+05:30

Something I've dreamed of since childhood is happening... I'm starting my own software company. I always knew this is what I would eventually do. A quote to mark the occasion:

"Its time to trust my instincts, close my eyes and leap" - Stephen Schwartz

Maker's schedule, Manager's schedule

2009-09-27T11:12:00.002+05:30

This article explains very nicely why I've always hated long meetings and in general disliked short meetings too. Now that I'm a manager also doing development/programming, it gets even more tricky.

Switched over to OpenDNS

2008-07-24T21:15:00.003+05:30

DNS lookups from my home network have been getting really slow lately, thanks to my ISP (BSNL). Switched over to the OpenDNS servers this morning and experienced an immediate increase in browsing speeds. Firefox no longer just waits at "Looking up ....".

Using GEdit as a Rails IDE

2008-07-13T22:47:00.001+05:30

The thing I look for the most in an IDE is speed. Over the past few months, been trying out different options for Rails development. Eclipse + RadRails looked promising, but turned out to be quite slow. Then, shifted to using NetBeans 6.1, which turned out to be better than RadRails, but not as fast as I needed it to be. My search finally led me to customizing GEdit (yes, believe me) and so far been quite happy using it. It blazing fast (except the SnapOpen plugin), and the plugins are pretty cool too. The integration with Rails itself is nothing great, but who needs that when you can cook up a bunch of shell scripts.

Linux Tip: Give gedit the Power of TextMate
Pimp my Gedit (Was: Textmate for Linux) | Grigio
Thaumatocracy » Post Topic » Textmate for Linux
Gedit/ToolLauncherPlugin - GNOME Live!

How do they make money?

2008-06-28T09:07:00.003+05:30

Every time I see a new Web 2.0 site, one of the first things that comes to my mind is "how do these guys make money?". Take TinyURL, for example. Or Twitter. Looks like many of these services follow the principle of "get big first, worry about business models later", or rely mostly on advertising revenue. Some related links:

pypeek - peeking at a particular line in a log file

2008-06-18T21:52:00.007+05:30

Announcing pypeek, a pretty straightforward Python script to print out a given line in a log file, with lines of context. While it works fine standalone, it's meant to be used in conjunction with grep. When I search for something interesting in a log file, I usually also want to see lines around the matching line, e.g. when I grep for NullPointerException, I also want to see the nearby lines to understand the problem better.

Usage: peek filename line_number [no. of context lines]

grep MyException -n big-file.log | cut -d":" -f1 | xargs -n1 peek big-file.log

P.S.: Don't try it with very huge log files just yet. It's painfully slow. Planning to work on a memory mapped I/O version later.

My top #3 interviewing tips

2008-06-07T11:46:00.006+05:30

Over the course of my career, I've attended quite a few job interviews, and also conducted a huge number of interviews at my last job while we were building out the team for our unit at Hyderabad. Based on my experiences, here are the top three tips for interviewing candidates:

#1 : Respect the candidate
Just because you are taking an interview doesn't mean you have the "upper hand", and can take liberties with how you interact. An arrogant interviewer creates a very poor and lasting impression about the entire company. Remember that the candidates are going to carry that impression for the rest of their careers. Even if they qualify, the best candidates are unlikely to join if they perceive that the work culture at the company is not good.

#2: Test the candidate in his/her area of expertise, not yours
No matter how much kung-fu you know, chances are that the candidate knows more kung-fu in his or her own area of expertise. Good interviewers try to discover the strengths of the candidate and check if that matches with what the job needs. Insecure interviewers are more likely to keep the questions to their own area of expertise and get into technical arguments about who is right.

To illustrate, here is how the interaction went at one of the interviews I attended about 3 years back with one of the largest IT consulting companies in the world:

Interviewer: How good are you at JSP?
Me: Never worked on it, but I have worked on several other Java technologies
Interviewer: How do you rate yourselves on a scale of 1 to 10 in JSP?
Me: Huh, maybe 0 or 1. I _haven't_ worked on JSP at all, you know.
Interview: So I'm going to ask you a few questions on JSP now
Me: Hello? Why don't you ask me about some of the other technologies that I _have_ worked on?
Interviewer: Well, I don't have any knowledge about those technologies, so we'll stick to JSP

Stupid, isn't it? I was then interviewed by several other folks, and was selected. Needless to say, I didn't join.

#3: Keep the interview/selection process short
Any interview/selection process lasting more than a few hours is suspect. Sure, it can take much longer to actually compare different candidates and decide which ones to make an offer to, but all that can and should be done after the candidate has left. If you can't decide within a couple of technical interviews if the candidate is good enough, chances are that your selection process is faulty or that the interview panel is not good enough.

After telling a candidate your company believes in quick work and fast decision making, having him/her attend 5 technical and 3 HR rounds spread over 2 days is just not on.

Twitter status

2008-06-05T23:35:00.002+05:30

After some very public scalability problems, Twitter finally decides that it's best to keep the customer informed. Wonder how they are serving the status feed/blog, but I bet they're not using the Twitter service itself. The last thing they need is for the status service to go down ;-)

Ah, it's there right on the page - they are using Tumblr.

Microsoft gives .NET a distributed cache

2008-06-05T08:41:00.002+05:30

Think of it as memcached for .NET

Related blog post here: http://simpable.com/code/velocity/

Expanding technical knowledge

2008-06-01T12:59:00.002+05:30

It's important nowadays for software developers to be comfortable with as large a number of technologies as possible. Having knowledge of just one programming knowledge/technology can be very limiting. I'm not talking about job prospects, but about having a big picture understanding of what you are working on.

Very rarely does a software application or product use just one technology these days. To illustrate, take the example of any typical web application. At the very least, it would involve some of the following, based on which technology you are using:

HTML
CSS
Javascript
JSP/Django/RoR/ASP.NET
Tomcat/Apache/IIS/Mongrel
Windows/Linux
Oracle/MySQL/Sqlite

Given the large list above, it's really unimaginable that a "only Java" or "only CSS" developer would have more than a trivial technical understanding of the application he or she is working on.

Joined a startup

2008-04-11T00:20:00.005+05:30

After spending more than 5 1/2 years at BigITCompany, I felt the need to move on and take in the experience of working at a startup. Primary motivations were taking on more ownership of product development, working with a small but smart team and also learning how startups work, since I hope to have my own company some day.

It's just been over two weeks at the new company, and so far things have worked out great. While my experience at my previous company was also very good, I now believe everyone should work in a startup at least once!

My advice to folks considering a switch from a big IT organization to a startup? Just do it!

Announcing twittershell

2008-02-17T18:57:00.002+05:30

Check out twittershell, the shell-like interface I've created for Twitter. Works best on UNIX/Linux.

How enterprises use functional languages, and why they don’t

2008-01-29T15:51:00.001+05:30

Research Paper: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/how-and-why/how-and-why.pdf

Restricting access to AJAX Services

2008-01-29T15:14:00.001+05:30

Restricting Access to AJAX Services

AJAX activity indicators

2007-12-20T17:41:00.000+05:30

Need some nice activity indicators for your AJAX applications? Try here.

Resign Patterns - Ailments of Unsuitable Project-Disoriented Software

2007-11-23T19:22:00.000+05:30

This is a hilarious take on the design patterns book by the Gang of Four. While on the subject, also check out these broken but commonly used development methodologies. Don't miss them!

The Architecture Journal

2007-11-23T19:09:00.000+05:30

Sign up here to receive a free print subscription of The Architecture Journal! Somehow, reading this kind of technical stuff on paper feels much better than reading a PDF.

"The Architecture Journal is an independent platform for free thinkers and practitioners of IT architecture. New editions are issued quarterly with articles designed to offer perspective, share knowledge, and help you learn the discipline and pursue the art of IT architecture. The Architecture Journal reaches over 53,000 subscribers worldwide."

Web application development references

2007-11-23T18:51:00.001+05:30

If you are developing applications for the web, keep these nice links bookmarked for reference:
HTML 4.01 / XHTML 1.0 Reference
CSS2 Reference
JavaScript Reference

Distributing Python applications as Windows executables

2007-11-22T21:36:00.000+05:30

It's possible to convert Python scripts into executable Windows programs using a utility called py2exe. The great thing about the executable produced is that it does not require Python to be installed on the target machine to run.

The REST architectural style

2007-11-22T19:50:00.000+05:30

I've been reading more about the REST architectural style for the last couple of days. Here are are few references which explain the topic pretty well:

Building Web Services the REST Way
RESTWiki
How to create a REST protocol
The power of the URL-line

Functional programming comes to the .NET Framework

2007-11-16T23:30:00.001+05:30

Microsoft research is working on F#, which is a typed functional programming language for the .NET framework. It combines the succinctness, expressivity, and compositionality of typed functional programming with the runtime support, libraries, interoperability, tools and object model of .NET.

Lessons Learned from Five Years of Building More Secure Software

2007-11-14T17:39:00.000+05:30

"Security is an arms race. To stay ahead and anticipate the attackers, we the defenders must learn from our mistakes and create better ways to secure users from being compromised."

Free security software for your PC

2007-11-13T23:12:00.000+05:30

Keep your computer safe from viruses and spyware and strengthen it against attacks using the following free software.

Anti-Virus: AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition
Anti-Spyware: AVG Anti-Spyware Free Edition
Anti-Rootkit: AVG Anti-Rootkit Free Edition
Personal Firewall: Comodo Free Firewall

AJAX toolkits

2007-11-13T23:01:00.000+05:30

AJAX toolkits simplify creating AJAX based web applications. Writing JavaScript by hand is time consuming and error prone. Instead, use these toolkits which provide a rich set of AJAX controls and take care of issues like browser compatibility.

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit
Google Web Toolkit

Welcome!

2007-11-13T22:26:00.000+05:30

Welcome to my blog on computer software and programming.