Technical Ramblings

The book Software Architecture with Python is by Anand B Pillai. The book explains various aspects of software architecture like testability, performance, scaling, concurrency and design patterns. The book has ten chapters. The first chapter speaks about different architect roles like solution architect, enterprise architect, technical architect what is the role of an architect and difference between design and architecture. The book covers two lesser spoken topics debugging and code security which I liked. [Read More]

One Sunny Sunday morning one can get up and question their self-existence, or one can ask every few days or few months what am I doing at the current job? The answer will push you to a place you have never been. One can meticulously plan for extravagant programming tour or programmer’s pilgrimage for three months. Yes, that what my outlook of RC is! RC is a different place from a usual workplace, meetups, college or any educational institute. [Read More]

Postgres supports JSON and JSONB for a couple of years now. The support for JSON-functions landed in version 9.2. These functions let Postgres server to return JSON serialized data. This is a handy feature. Consider a case; Python client fetches 20 records from Postgres. The client converts the data returned by the server to tuple/dict/proxy. The application or web server converts tuple again back to JSON and sends to the client. [Read More]

A simple question can open a door for new exploration. While I was at RC, I tweeted “Is there any meetup group similar to papers we love for discussing RFCS?”. In an interval of nine minutes, Jaseem replied: “Let’s start one :)” Is there any meetup group similar to @papers_we_love for discussing RFCs? — kracekumar (@kracetheking) November 30, 2016 Above discussion on Twitter, lead to a new focus group RFCS We Love in Bangalore by Nemo, Jaseem, Avinash and Kracekumar. [Read More]

What is the Jupyter notebook? The Jupyter Notebook is a web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualisations and explanatory text. The definition is from the official site. I use IPython/Jupyter shell all time. If you haven’t tried, spend 30 minutes and witness the power! At times, I want to share some code snippet with folks in the same building during work, workshop or training. [Read More]

The Recurse Center is a free, three-month self-directed program for people who want to get better at programming. I attended fall batch 2 in 2016 from September to December. If you aren’t aware of Recurse Centre, take a couple of minutes to go through recurse.com and read the rest of the piece. Every day we open a significant amount of doors to get to desired places. Some doors are unique but look dull and plain, but the incredible universe behind the door hides excitement, adventures, gems, friends, and insights. [Read More]

Grokking algorithm - An illustrated guide for programmers and other curious people is the book by Aditya Y. Bhargava about understanding algorithms. The book is different from other algorithm books. The book explains the chosen concepts with illustrated guide like cartoons, xkcd and doesn’t let the followers lost in the sea of mathematical formulas or procedure. The book discusses a handful of foundational topics on algorithms like Big O notation, Binary Search, Sorting, Recursion, Hash Tables, graphs, greedy algorithm, dynamic programming. [Read More]

I was watching one of my favorite Tamil writer S Ramakrishnan’s video about books. Somewhere in the middle of the talk, he suggests the audience to write down the list of books they read this year and share with others. Irrespective of how short or tall the list is, undoubtedly people will pick up from the list someday. I bought the idea and documenting the book list. English Read The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking - The book is about introverts, what constittues who they are and their world - My Review The Fire Next Time Jonathan Livingston Seagull Animal Farm - Satire on Russian Revolution - My Review The Metamorphosis Outliers: The Story of Success - the factors that contribute to high levels of success Man’s Search for Meaning - Hope during adversity - My Review How to Stay Sane Currently reading The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life Grokking Algorithms An illustrated guide for programmers and other curious people Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone - World historic events in few sentences The Trial Flowers for Algernon Dropped the ball Surely You’re Joking, Mr. [Read More]

EDHT I continued to work on the project and added the few features. Data replication - One of the main features of DHT is replicate the data across a subset of nodes in the cluster. Remember not all nodes! Depending on the number of copies to store, say N, the data is stored in N - 1 nodes starting from the primary node in the anti-clockwise direction. Routing - Every node in the cluster has equal responsibility, and there is no master. [Read More]

This week has mostly been calm and cold in New York. EDHT Distributed Hash Table implementation in Erlang is slowly coming along. The project now supports multi-node communication. The project uses bitcask which riak uses. Erlang’s Key/Value store data is local to the single process. Building Key/Value store from the ground up requires reinventing wheel and time consuming. The leveraging existing library made sense. Bitcask takes care of persisting the data to the disk and can access data without race conditions so far. [Read More]