I took up a resolution in 2015 to pick up my lost interest in photography and get better at it. With a lot of up and downs over the last 14 months I managed to keep up with my resolution. Over this year I switched to Sony mirrorless completely and...

I have been writing and deploying applications for the past 7 years. I wish I had some friends to set up and run the servers for me but I was nt lucky enough. So I had to always do it myself. It took about an year for me to really...

One of my resolutions this year was to shoot photos with camera, develop them, print them and make a real physical album. So I spent about 15 days researching which camera to buy. This research consumed about 2-3 hours everyday reading many many blog posts along with watching many youtube...

When I saw that 53 was launching a stylus, I thought it will be just a basic functioning stylus. But when I saw the intro video it was really good. Not that it blew my mind but the design was simple and intuitive. I pre-ordered one immediately. I received mine...

29 Aug 2013 I set off on my journey to “Land of Holy Cross” Brasil. Took a good 16hr flight via Houston, TX to reach São Paulo. The journey took around good 16 hrs. Procuring a visa was easy but required 2 visits to the Brasil consulate. United airways has...

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...

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...

PyMysql is a pure python mysql client, which is trying to be a drop in replacement for python-mysqldb. There is a install_as_MySQLdb function which when called makes PyMysql to be a drop in replacement for MySQLdb. I am excited about this project because its so easy to install and get...

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...

Statsd is a nodejs daemon for easy stats aggregation from folks at etsy. If you have n’t come across statsd I suggest you read blog post from etsy devops team here. I like the fact that they chose UDP to aggregate stats since its blazing fast. Graphite is chosen as...

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....

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...

Tornado has been an excellent webserver with a minimal framework feature set. I love the way how signed cookies have been implemented. So clean and easy to use. When I started to use tornado for a project there are a few hurdles you might come across. Lack of ORM No...

Update: There are quite some interesting projects to create thumbnails and provide storage access. django-imagekit, django-thumbs, sorl-thumbnail, django-storages etc. Check them out!! It’s been a while since I blogged and just wanted to share a quick snippet I wrote to create avatar/profile image for user’s. There are quite some reusable...

A man who needs no introduction!! Has given the world a gift, his talent, and, in return, took crucification. Redefined the term professional entertainer. A pop phenomenon who never stopped pushing the envelope of creativity Has his own touch of technology lean boot The meaning of life is contained in...

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...

Well after reading the tweet from Chris Amico I felt that I should write a post on my 2008 memories. Well 2008 is quite a big year to me. First I found django. Well putting a framework name as first point is kind of funny but its the fact. But...

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...

After being an active member in django-syncr I have gained some experience with API calls and parsing data from XML/JSON. It is a lot of fun working in such a project. Recently I have written Readernaut and Brightkite syncr apps which pulls user’s data and writes into a django model....

Recently when I started to redesign my blog I re-wrote a lot of the code to be more optimized. During this process of re-writing I just found a more better way to write templates. Its not very new and innovative but I found it to be a huge time saver....

Generally its the other way around. But adidas redefined the meaning. This is the story of a french guy who left his country and family to fulfill his American dream. Ok what’s his American dream? To be a director. No plz dont laugh. He’s serious. I met frank about an...

Here is the quick post on how I setup my django development and production server. I know everybody has their own type of server setup but I just wanted to share mine. So basically I created two apache instances which run production and development servers respectively. If you are with...

I have been using django signals for quite sometime and I absolutely love it the way it works. Its an extremely useful tool when used can create beautiful algo-flow. I will explain use of django signals with a practical scenario. Definition: In telephony, signaling is the exchange of information between...

Transformation complete. Output: A fresh repository with all my code base migrated from SVN to GIT. Yes, I agree that I am late in using a version control. First of all i am a student and not a programmer. Frankly I started writing a bit code once i started using...

I sync various data from twitter, brightkite and flickr into my blog. I use cronjob to achieve this. It is important for me to know if my cron’s are running fine. In my case, I had to tough time getting a cron running. The first problem I encountered was to...

I started off my new django project with user registration module. I wanted to customize the django-registration to my needs. With the help of b-list, I started off to write my own registration form to handle registration. I seeked for help in django IRC channel. After a while I found...

Since, March 2007 I started working on my blog where I learned a lot of things about Django. I could get the blog app running in few days. After that I started writing my templates, I realized the importance of design for a webpage. I have never designed a page...

That’s how all the programming books state their first program as. Well I wonder who set that standard. Most experts say that it is a simple program to show how to print a string. Sounds convincing enough. Ok anyway I just want to say Hello World as a start for...