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What’s been up?

By Prabhu Sunderaraman on September 30, 2016 in

It’s been some time since I cut myself off from the rest of the world. So here’s a summary of things I have been working/doing/reading/ in the last few months.

  • My colleague and I developed an idea, to build a product that deals with search. The crux of the product is a set of search algorithms for a specific domain. So I have been churning out thousands of lines of code everyday to develop a demo version that can be showcased to the concerned.
  • The work is still in progress, and yet we decided to take it to the investors in the Silicon Valley. Theirs is a different world and it was my first hands-on(!!!) experience. The investor world works very differently completely contrary to what I have read in the media, as an outsider so far.
  • My experience in the non-technical front with the investors has all masala stuff to make a blockbuster Indian movie.
  • Coming to my favourite part. What are the tools and technologies I have been working with?To begin with Ruby on Rails with CoffeeScript in the front end. Lots of micro services built in NodeJS and Spring Boot running in Docker. Couchbase and AWS DynamoDB for in-memory and NoSQL. ElasticSearch for the query-based search. Machine Learning Algorithms based on the Random Forests, Bagging and Naive Bayes methods. FitNesse for Acceptance testing. TDD.
  • I decided to take off from my consulting and training assignments. I also had a pretty bad experience and probably the only one in my several years of training. I had to train a group of developers on Groovy/Grails in MindTree Bangalore. Most people in the class were very reluctant to code throughout the course. And when I pushed them to code they began to crack open. They either didn’t have the pre-requisites or interest in coding. They had probably come expecting a power-point presentation. And the worst is a particular co-ordinator lady who in my opinion needs a crash course in basic etiquette and conduct. I say this because throughout my career I have worked very hard to stay away from people like this woman who are impediment to growth in a productive environment. If I were to deal with this client again, I am going to be doubly careful. This experience made to pull the plug of training for sometime and expend my energy on product instead of putting it in dealing with clients like this.
  • I cut myself off from Social Media and deactivated(now deleted) my Facebook account. I have not been too much of an active user of Facebook. But this time I needed full concentration, so decided to quit. In fact, I feel a lot more rejuvenated and focussed and feel very happy that I had taken that decision. And thanks to this decision, my reading frequency has increased. I have already completed 5 books in the last 2 months. MS Life in Music, Creative Schools, Serverless Single Page Apps, The Golden Tap, Zero to One.

I still have a long way to go in terms of the product that I am building. It succeeds or bites the dust, the journey is one hell of an experience both technically and emotionally. And yes, I promise to myself that I will write more frequent posts from now. One post/week. :)

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10 Dos and Don’ts for getting started with Microservices

By Prabhu Sunderaraman on June 20, 2016 in ,

Too much noise about Microservices but still scratching your head where and how you can start? In the current application I am working on, we have been developing a number of smaller services. I thought I would give you a very simple no-nonsense list of things that you may want to consider to develop microservices.

  • Choose a simple/non-critical feature in your application, that you can afford to burn your fingers several times. You know what I chose? Change Password functionality. I developed the complete change password behaviour that involves validating the old password, accepting the new password, encrypting using BCrypt and Salt and storing them in the Database.
  • Don’t bother too much about the presentation layer. Concentrate on the core functionality and talk to the service using HTTP and exchange simple JSON data. We’ll worry about WebComponents, Virtual DOM and the like later on.
  • Don’t develop it using the mothership technology of your project. If your project is implemented using RoR or .NET or Java implement the service using a technology other than these. In my case, our main application is built on Rails, so we have chosen Spring Boot to implement the services. You can also use NodeJS.
  • Do not write more than 100 hundred lines of code to begin with. Remember it’s a microservice. Don’t make it a macro service and grow to be a giant. And that’s why we have chosen a small feature in first place.
  • Use a simple IDE like TextMate or Sublime Text or just Notepad++. Why do you need a mammoth editor that takes 5 minutes to open? In that 5 minutes you could easily complete half the service.
  • Don’t worry about the Message Queues like RabbitMQ, Kafka etc., Do not complicate your service in the beginning itself. Keep it Simple, Stupid.
  • Learn Docker. Period.
  • Learn the basics of setting up an instance in the cloud. 10 minutes is more than enough to learn how to set up a LINUX instance in AWS. You can watch my voiceless video on this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGPzedozlwI
  • Throw away your Windows machine. Now, that’s very harsh!!! I understand. But if you want to jumpstart developing a service and quickly deploying to the cloud, please move away from the comfortable territory of Windows. Pick up a Mac(that’s what I have been using for more than half a decade now) or buy an Ubuntu or any Linux machine and start working.
  • Stop reading too many articles in this topic after some point. Just go ahead and implement it.
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Technology Radar 2016

By Prabhu Sunderaraman on May 12, 2016 in

One of the sites I frequent to keep a tab on the arrival/progress of new tools and technologies is ThoughtWorks Technology Radar, published every six months. Here’re some interesting things about the one released in April.

ES6, ReactJS, Spring Boot and Swift have all moved to the ‘adopt‘ category. I have been working with Spring Boot and Swift for quite sometime now. React JS is easily the library for modern web apps. A number of my clients seem to be slowly adopting it. ES6, the new kid on the block is yet to see support from modern browsers.
Screen Shot 2016-05-12 at 7.17.08 pm

Another platform that’s moved to the adopt category is Docker, which has gained widespread popularity thanks to Micro Services. Thanks to my stint with HealthyCode Magazine, it’s not surprising to find TOTP move up the stack.
Screen Shot 2016-05-12 at 7.17.52 pm

You can view the complete report here.

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Angular JS 2.x and the fear

By Prabhu Sunderaraman on February 22, 2016 in

Whenever I meet developers working with Angular JS 1.x the first question they anxiously ask me is ‘Is Angular JS 2 completely different from 1.x?‘. Let me explain the reason for the fear or enhance(or confirm) it. :)

ECMAScript is the standard for scripting languages. Our JavaScript, ActionScript etc., are implementations of ECMAScript(ES). Writing modularized JavaScript is a pain and we use libraries like Angular JS, Ext JS, Backbone to modularize our JavaScript code.
I have started using CoffeeScript a lot, of late. CoffeeScript gives you OO features and it gets transpiled(or generates) to JavaScript code. MicroSoft has TypeScript, which is similar to CoffeeScript.

So if you want to write moduarized JavaScript code, without having to depend on frameworks like Angular or Backbone, you can use CoffeeScript or TypeScript or the similar ones.

Now, the latest version of ES, ES6(or Harmony) introduces features like classes, symbols, inheritance etc., You can read more about it from http://es6-features.org. And that means JavaScript language will have to support ES6 syntax that has classes, objects, symbols, iterators etc., With this change, the JS interpreters in browsers will definitely start supporting the new syntax as well.

Angular JS, not just for this reason alone, has decided to come up with a better syntax that eases the job of the developers. It announced that it’s developing a new language called ‘AtScript‘ that is based on Microsoft’s TypeScript. The AtScript code will get transpiled to JavaScript.

And this is the major source of fear for the developers of Angular 1.x. You may have to code in a new language, AtScript, in Angular JS 2.x. There’s been a big hue and cry in the Angular JS community ever since the announcement was made. There are lot of articles and videos out there, debating this vehemently.

For me, apart from the new language(it’s still work in progress), which has never been an issue, its other features like focus on performance, mobile devices and support for standards like web components, makes Angular 2.x a compelling wait.

Let’s continue to keep our ears and eyes open :)

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First book for 2016

By Prabhu Sunderaraman on January 17, 2016 in

My first Kindle purchase for this year is Ruby Performance Optimization: Why Ruby is Slow, and How to Fix It by Alexander Dymo. It’s a Pragmatic BookShelf release.
I will write my comments about this book once I am through.

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