Recently, I finished reading the latest "early access" version of the Big Data Book by Nathan Marz. This book has been fascinating because of a strong and simple "first principles" approach and because this general approach allowed just 3 engineers to manage the huge BackType system.
Category: Tech
Wrote an EDN format reader and writer in Python
I was reading about the EDN format over the weekend. EDN (pronounced like in "eden garden") is a data format in the same league as JSON but is supposed to have some nifty features such as sets, keywords, date-time type, custom types, and also being a proper subset of Clojure. Having a date-time type as well as custom … Continue reading Wrote an EDN format reader and writer in Python
Created an app for live preview of Pandoc
When my wife was editing my books, she used Mou.app for live preview of the text so that she knows what the output is going to be like. The caveat was that Mou.app does plain Markdown and not Pandoc format which would mean the preview would be screwed up whenever there was a code block, etc., so, … Continue reading Created an app for live preview of Pandoc
Learning Clojure
I once happened to attend a RubyConfIndia talk by C42's Steven Deobald who said: data > functions > macros > compilers That kind of stuck in my head even though I didn't know what it meant at that time. I understood it only after learning Clojure and "The Clojure / Lisp way". I realized it … Continue reading Learning Clojure
Two nuggets from Coders at Work book
I’ve been reading Coders at Work on and off, and it is a good read for coders who want to learn how coders, who they admire, think and approach programming. Two favorite nuggets of mine so far are from JWZ and Brad Fitzpatrick who are definitely two of my programming heroes: About taking things apart Seibel:Is there a key skill programmers … Continue reading Two nuggets from Coders at Work book
Inspired by companies incubated at RTBI, IIT Madras
Amazed at the kind of socially positive companies that are incubated at the Rural Technology and Business Incubator facility at IIT, Chennai.
Statistics to wow non-techies about digital future
A common question from non-techies is "Is ecommerce for real? Do people really buy online?" So I argue how the future is digital and dug up some statistics.
Passionate Programmer book review
The Passionate Programmer book by Chad Fowler is a must-read career book for every software developer. In this article, I show why.
Everyday reminder about Impact
Everyday I get emails from readers of my books and makes me wonder whether I am continuing to make that kind of impact.
Programming Language Adoption
134 people have asked me about why companies are choosing Perl or Python or Ruby respectively. Here's my take on that.