Mute Mic With Keyboard Shortcut On Ubuntu Or Linux Mint

Mute Mic With Keyboard Shortcut On Ubuntu Or Linux Mint

Here is a quick tip for all the automation buffs like me. Turn your mic on and off with just a keyboard combo. I do all my work remotely. Which is also to say I have a lot of conference calls. And like you, I hate it when people do not mute their phones / mic on laptops when not speaking! (cue in the obligatory meme about not putting your phone on mute during a call!) I always wished for…

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CIDR Explained in Layman Terms and Decimal Numbers

CIDR Explained in Layman Terms and Decimal Numbers

If you work on cloud it is likely that you have used those numbers and slash that follow the IP addresses. The documentation points to something called CIDR. It is said to be super helpful, and awesome standard adopted by internet that extended life of IP4 . But have you tried searching ‘what is CIDR’? It is all jargon, all of it. There is hardly any lay-man friendly explanation of the term. Even Wikipedia has managed to find a complex…

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[TechNggets] Episode 2: Intro to Git Flow

[TechNggets] Episode 2: Intro to Git Flow

This is the second episode of podcast “Tech Nuggets and Thoughts”.   Some docs on git flow: The blog that brought it to us: http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/ git flow scripts project discussed in podcast: https://github.com/petervanderdoes/gitflow-avh A superb cheat sheet for git flow: https://danielkummer.github.io/git-flow-cheatsheet/   To get updates, you can subscribe to the podcast on: Apple iTunes, player.fm, RSS feed. If you have any suggestions, thoughts or recommendations, please feel free to comment below. You can also reach me on podcast’s twitter handle @TechNggets or my personal account @nikhilwanpal. (If the fancy player…

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Hello world, again! (Broken links)

Hello world, again! (Broken links)

I have moved by blog over from blogger to WordPress! As these two platforms are not exactly compatible,  old links are broken, please give me some time to fix them. I am working on it. How do I access the old blog pages? Meanwhile, you can: Try replacing the year and date between the domain and the actual blog you are looking for with link with ‘/blog/’. If you are logged in to WordPress, the blog may show you a…

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[TechNggets] Episode 1: Intro to Containers and Self

[TechNggets] Episode 1: Intro to Containers and Self

Here is the first episode of “Tech Nuggets and Thoughts” In this episode we talk about containers, what they are, how they work, what docker is and when / when not to use docker.   To get updates, you can subscribe to the podcast on: Apple iTunes, player.fm, RSS feed. If you have any suggestions, thoughts or recommendations, please feel free to comment below. You can also reach me on podcast’s twitter handle @TechNggets or my personal account @nikhilwanpal. (If the fancy player above does not work, try…

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We need to talk, says one microservice to another

We need to talk, says one microservice to another

‘But how?’ asks the other service! Ever wondered how we communicate? One would not believe how complex and multi-step process it is. It involves some very complex terms like perception, encoding, medium and decoding. Let us take a look at a diagram explaining this: So what is the relation with microservices? Communication between two services is not much different. It follows through a process very similar to this, in fact it can be explained with the exact same steps! Consider…

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Google Tag Manager: Tag Priorities Vs Tag Sequencing

Google Tag Manager: Tag Priorities Vs Tag Sequencing

  As most GTM (Google Tag Manager) users will agree, this is a much discussed yet confusing topic! The documentation on these topics is very concise and to be honest precise in describing what these two options do and what to expect, yet some of the side effects of these two options, combined with asynchronous nature of JavaScript are left out to be inferred by the users. And this is where much of the confusion seems to come from. Even…

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Software development hygiene: Why do we brush our teeth?

Software development hygiene: Why do we brush our teeth?

Yes, why do ‘you’ brush your teeth?Is it guaranteed that if we brush our teeth twice a day, floss once a day, gargle with an antiseptic, we will never have toothache or bad breath? And if we did not brush teeth say, for a week, would we be guaranteed to have toothache? For a few months, may be yes, we might, might just have to get some treatment done for a few teeth. So the question, why do we brush…

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Experience: Introducing JMockit To The Team

Experience: Introducing JMockit To The Team

Like many codebases out there, our codebase at work had a backlog on unit & integration tests and it was high time we covered it up. So one fine day, it was decided that we shall no longer accept code without tests. Then the question of ‘how do we write tests’ came up. As one of the architects on the team I introduced the methodology of unit/integration testing and a mocking library (JMockit) to aid in cases where testing could…

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Please Give It A REST!

Please Give It A REST!

A regular stressful day in the life of a software developer. I was communicating a module we needed to quickly put together. The team was not exactly new. We had a backend guy, and a front-end guy. Interface was designed and agreed upon, we needed to make it quick, we just defined the resources and said that we need the ‘standard CRUD operations done via REST’ on them. And we got down to work. When everyone reverted that they were…

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