I have been working on a experiment framework recently which allows us to change experiment values on the fly. This has been one of the things we needed for a while. We would push a feature to 1% of our users and something goes wrong and we want to turn...

I went to Boston MIT to recruit for software engineering internship positions. It was 2 days full of interviews. Meeting people getting to know them and gauge them its a super tiring job. Regardless I enjoyed doing it. I wanted to do it so that I get to know what’s...

Couple of weeks back I started to rewrite one of our core service layer where I refactored a bunch of code and abstracted in a more reusable fashion. This involved touching some mysql cursor code and I accidentally introduced a memory leak during this. Unfortunately we found this bug right...

There are some scenarios where you have a huge JSON / binary data you wanted to save. You can totally write it to a BLOB column using mysql / postgres. That works well till you have a finite dataset. When you have an expanding dataset I bet you will see...

Its often common to see some python process like a webserver process or a python script running for a long time and you have no idea what its doing currently. Although you have logging and print statements it does not help much to get a sense of what the latency...

Memcache is one key component that cannot be neglected from a web stack. Its almost certain that when you have some sort of caching before your database layer it is certainly gonna improve your performance. But setting up memcache in a production environment is slightly trickly espcially when you have...

More than 6% of the web is powered by nginx today. Nginx out of the box is very fast and extremely good at serving static content. But then you have a growing traffic you need to monitor all of your infrastructure and make sure no body is gating your speed.

Once in a while we install nginx on a box, but there are times where we want to install from sources to benefit from the newer stable features. Usually apt-get or a similar package manager is a good friend here but compiling from sources gives you much more flexibility. Say...

I attended the MongoSV conference on Dec 3rd and learned a bunch of cool things on using / deploying and monitoring MongoDB. First I was impressed by the various usecases of where mongoDB was used. EventBrite was using Mongo to recommend events to its users. They perform background processing on...

Its pretty common to backup mysql with mysqldump utility but this backup acquires a global lock on all tables. Especially when your database is huge it takes few minutes to take a backup. When you only one database / shard in production running a dump will result in downtime. Another...

Autocomplete is one feature that has become an integral part of every application. Building a fast, scalable autocomplete is pretty big project of its own especially if you have a ever growing data set. One of the best autocomplete I have seen is Quora’s search autocomplete. I know google and...

NOTE: The data we set in a session is always in our session store not in user’s cookie. I just missed just a simple point. Apologies. Thanks Kaihola for clarification.

A man who needs no introduction!!

Has given the world a gift, his talent, and, in return, took crucification.

Redefined the term professional entertainer.

Well I finally motivated my self to switch the hosting to a VPS.

Well its about over an year since I started this blog. I was hosting it on webfaction shared hosting. I really loved their hosting services which were very promising and reliable. I only remember one...

Well my 6 months old job hunt finally ended. There is a lot I learned throughout this journey. Quite a lot of experiences varying from pleasant to frustrating. In the end it’s all fair.

A few lessons I learned in this period of time.

Never confine yourself to a technology...

It’s a fact that linux rocks at any kind of development. And I firmly believe it.

Last week I decided to create a mobile interface for my blog. I just wanted to create one just to prove my self that I can do it. And it was quite an easy task. A site optimized for mobile should be light-weight and fast to load.

Some of the...

Well there are bunch of posts on setting up a slice with django. I just wanted to write one for myself so that I can setup a slice in future without wasting much time searching. When you get a brand new slice you need to setup SSH access into your...