The MetaComputer™ (Part "What" of 3)
December 9, 2022
In part “Why” of this series that appeared previously, I talked about the need for a new computing model that simplifies modern cloud-native distributed application development. In this part, I’ll go into some details of what this new computing model should be and what it should provide.
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The MetaComputer™ (Part "Why" of 3)
November 27, 2022
It’s been a quite a while since I truly enjoyed programming at work. Don’t get me wrong. I like wrangling with code to make interesting stuff happen. The problem is that for a long time now, making interesting stuff happen with code hasn’t been the end game. Since the last ten years or so, it’s become incredibly more complex to get finished code to start working in the real world (aka production). Some say it’s because we OD’d on microservices. That probably true but there’s more to it than that alone.
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exiftool Examples
May 6, 2021
Following is a collection of real exiftool commands that I’ve used, along with explanations of what each does. exiftool is a command-line utility that provides very powerful EXIF reading, writing and searching capabilities.
I’m writing this down because I often spend a lot of time reading through exiftool documentation to find out how to get something done, just to forget it within hours. All of these examples work on a Unix shell environment like ZSH on MacOS or the various Linux shells.
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The Best Feature of Go
June 1, 2018
I’ve been programming since the late 90’s and I’ve done quite a bit of coding in C, C++, a lot of it in PHP and some in Python as well. On the front-end I’ve done some JavaScript and I’ve also had the misfortune of programming in Java 😉
I started programming in Go in 2012 and since then I haven’t wanted to program in any other language. I’ve had a handful of large Go implementations across two companies and by now I have my own short list of favourite features.
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Inheritance Semantics in Go
January 22, 2014
Contemporary application design discipline is deeply rooted in Object Oriented Analysis and Design and inheritance is a key concept in OOAD. Go does not support classes and inheritance in their classic OOP sense but since many of us are trained in OOP, the loss of an important design concept sometimes feels restrictive.
Even though I knew about embedding and interfaces, their connection with classic inheritance wasn’t quite obvious. I set out to understand how I could emulate the coarse inheritance semantics in Go, without going into fine nuances.
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The Compiler as a Refactoring Aid
January 23, 2013
Recently, I sat down to refactor a Go application with a high-level design objective in place. The application had two conceptually separate entities implemented in different files but mashed into a single package. I needed to separate them out into their own packages. I wasn’t using an IDE — just Emacs with basic formatting and non-contextual auto-complete aids.
I started out by creating a new directory for the package to be split out and moved the files that contained most of the relevant code into that directory, without thinking of the consequences.
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Go Workshop
January 21, 2013
Last week, I conducted a 2 day Go Workshop at my workplace. It was fun.
I started day 1 with the excellent Go at Google presentation by Rob Pike, followed by my own presentation of Go’s key features. The rest of Day 1 was spent taking the Go Tour.
The coolest thing I did was on day 2. I mirrored my laptop on the projector and went through a fresh install of Go from source on my [newly allocated] dev box.
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Why I Program in Go
January 5, 2013
Go is a fresh new programming language, that has come out of Google and is primarily targeted towards server development. It is developed by some very accomplished computer scientists, like Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. I recently launched a significant new product built with Go at work, and it has proved itself out very well in terms of developer productivity and performance. So much so that many other teams are also giving it a go (oh, how punny this language’s name is).
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Find and Edit File
November 24, 2011
While working on a huge code-base with several thousand source files, it becomes difficult to remember where each file is. If you use conventions like one file per class, you can at least figure out the file name. E.g. the definition of class Foo would be found in Foo.class.xx or something like that.
Thankfully, ack makes it easy to find the location files in a project. Just say, ack -g Foo.
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Simple PHP Timer
August 9, 2010
I was just trying to profile an HTML page for performance bottle-necks. I’m trying to follow a top-down approach, wherein I start from the entry script, and find the block of code that takes the biggest chunk of time before digging deeper into that chunk.
At this stage, it’s not feasible to drop in a full-blown profiling tool like xdebug because of the set-up overhead and amount of data it generates.
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