Posts

Need for Configuration management There are many devs/sysadmins out there who manage their servers by logging in through ssh. Making the changes and then logging out again. Sounds like you? Well hey, you are not alone! But do you feel that this can create snowflake servers? Servers which are impossible to recreate because we missed out on some minute detail which the other dev had known. But Tasdik. This wouldn’t happen if we have a very good documentation process giving a step by step guide on how to do so! ...

Trip itinerary We all have that one trip with friends which gets cancelled no matter what right(goa anybody!)? But hopefully, our decided trip was completed. Wasn’t that smooth. But as the saying goes What is an ocean if it doesn’t challenge the sailors! Thanks to the recent demonetization drive by the Indian govt. We had to delay our plans for the trip by some days. Shimla I started from Dehradun on the night of 28th of November. Left for Delhi in the middle of the night, after much cajoling and giving reassurances to my mum that I wouldn’t be doing bat-sh*t crazy stuff on my trip. Which was not entirely fulfilled as you will see after some time. ...

22nd October, 2016 Clock goes overboard and tries waking me up. Which it has been unsuccessfully trying to do for the last two months. Thanks ma, for the lovely gift. But I woke up to the sweet melody of my roomate’s snoring. Anyway, I was still intoxicated by last nights coffee. Remembered I still had to finish the slides of the talk that I had to give over @ ChennaiPy, October Meetup'16. ...

This year being no different, I attended PyCon India (yet again, this being my 3rd one). The only difference being that this time it was being held at New Delhi instead of Bangalore. Met many of my old friends, made some new ones, interacted with some really interesting people and should I say met some legendary guys/gals too. All in all it was just like the previous year. Felt just like home! ...

As I am sitting here at the Delhi Airport waiting for my flight back to Chennai, I could just not stop myself from thinking about my time as an intern back at Wingify which ended last week. Here’s what I wrote down after getting carried way with several cups of coffee (thanks for luring me with that smell costa coffee) So here it is then! Day 1 It was 5 o’clock in the morning and I was quite drowsy. Reason being the all nighter I pulled the other night for the last exam of our end sems. phew ...

Decorators you say If you are familiar with python, chances are that you might have already seen the decorator syntax. It comes off as a simle concept when being used, but when you try to get your head around the underlying details, you find yourself in a hot fix. And are probably asking yourself How the heck does it work? Python does a very good job in abstracting about the intricacies, so much so that we take it almost for granted. Remember the routes in flask? ...

Bots: Before and Now When was the last time you were having a conversation with a computer before? Most of us will come into the category where we haven’t done so or maybe you did but you didn’t like the experience! The days aren’t far when customer support will be provided by dedicated bots built using cutting edge ML techniques and backed by state of the art NLP research. If you have been following the latest trends in software industry. Bots and VR are the thing as echoed by a lot of big shot companies and tech evangelists. I mean just look at these crazy articles on techcrunch. Bots have been the talk of the town since some time now and developers are taking a fair advantage of this rise in attention for promoting their own bots in the market. ...

Reinventing the wheel is sometimes a good idea One of the stock critiques for any new project is that it’s been done before. You’re working on a new module, format, etc: what about this existing format? Contributing to existing projects is often impossible if your vision is different from those of the maintainers, your changes are too large, or they’re absent. Even if a problem is “solved” by an existing project, it can often be solved better, faster, in fewer lines of code, or with more documentation. ...

This post was long overdue! We have been working on building a food recommendation system for some time and this phase involved getting the menu items from the menu images We poured over at zomato’s site looking for menu’s and all we found was images in the name of menu’s This is not what we wanted! We want the menu items tp be in text format, so that we can easily track which restaurants are serving which dish and analyze the reviews to see which restaurant serves best ...

I woke up and found myself inside the elevator. A rather spooky one I would say. Questions like “Why was I inside an elevator?” would come to your mind. I am coming to that. Prologue I was all alone inside the dimly lit elevator. A sudden jerk and the next thing I know is that the lift is going up. I look around and it seems all normal to me. Next, the lift stops at the 4th floor. The door opens and I look outside the elevator door. I was expecting to see somebody as I didn’t press any of the buttons. Door closes automatically and up we go again. ...