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…
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…
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…
Just returned from a 24 hour hackathon, sleepy, red-eyed, tired, exhausted and yet writing this post. You know why? Because I skipped it the last time, and the time before, thinking I will do it the next day and that sleep was more important, but never did it. Not going to make the same mistake again. So here I am. For those who are unaware of what a hackathon is, it is an event where dreamy eyed people enter and…
Docker As Application Registry Docker is great and solves a lot of problems with deployments. It taught VMs to share the resources, like how VMs taught hardware to share resources! Along with production, I have found that docker can work great as an application registry in a local development environment.By applications I mean software that you install on your OS and launch them with shortcuts and they continue to live and retain state till you uninstall them; not exactly what…
Jetbrains messed up our license: Jetbrains still rocks! It is story time today. We are a small startup, by small I mean like 4 people on the team and we established barely a couple months ago. It was time to start development and like all good Java developers depend on their IDE for their life, we did too. Too soon to go off-topic, but I wonder sometimes how large a program can I write without an IDE. There is no…
Creating a Coding Interview Problem At work, I have been responsible for conducting the coding tests during the interview process, and have been doing that for over a few years now. Over the time I have made some mistakes, learnt some things and this post is a summary of what one should consider when creating a coding test. Coding tests are generally the first round of interview; it is either online or on campus, depends, but a coding round is…
Yet another packager for node There are so many packaging systems for node already, or maybe not as many, so here I am presenting another way to package your applications into an self extracting executable that has no dependencies. Ah well, a few dependencies, like the processor architecture, and Linux operating system may be, but that is all. What is it? It is a modified shell script originally used to create self-extracting and installing applications for Linux platforms. What it…
Recently I had to delve into the play framework for a particular microservice at work. Now it is not exactly new, nor is Guice, nor DI, but coming from Spring world it was still a big shift in approach. There is a lot of documentation comparing Spring with Guice, stating which is better, why and how. In general these articles discuss specific points where these two frameworks differ in their approaches and which approach seems better to the author. I…
Wasn’t that a very specific title? Docker has a very good documentation and reading that alone is enough for most of the straightforward tasks we might want to do. But as always some practical tasks are not straightforward, hence this blog. What we are going to see here today is how to setup docker toolbox on a Windows machine, make it work even when VPN is connected, make it talk to a private, insecure docker registry (that is why VPN)…