Posts

Featured Image: please let me hold your hand by pippimuckel is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 In the previous post we went through some concepts and terminology in git. Some basic git commands Create a repository Let us take a look at how we can create a local repository. git init What does it do? Initialises a repository for a project Creates a .git folder for your repository Used by Git to track changes that happen in that repository folder Git stores repository specific settings to that folder It tracks the latest change in a branch in that folder Also stores configuration for the repository in there A new repository, needs some configuration. Let us go ahead and configure it. ...

Featured Image “Essentials” by all black long johns is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 In my last post, I introduced you to Git. We talked about its history briefly and how useful it is. In this one, let us explore some key terminology and concepts in Git. That way we have a common language to talk about Git. Remote This is what we generally call the copy of the repository that is maintained somewhere on the server. ...

Background When I joined the small company that I currently work for, I was suprised at how little some of my coworkers knew about Git. The fact is, there was no reason to be suprised. I had taken my exposure with Git for granted due to the fact that I had been using it for a couple of years before I joined the firm. So as a good citizen, I prepared a little workshop to help others learn. ...

“01119 (304) 08-09-2009 Curley Cattle Transport - Mack Prime Mover 02-CCT + 3 trailers for cartage of cattle in a yard in Burke Development Road, Normanton, Queensland, Australia.” by express000 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 When starting this blog, I really hadn’t done enough research onto which platform to start blogging. I previously used to post some of my daily work problems on blogger. It was alright. But I hadn’t really written many interesting posts apart from posting some problems and solutions. Hopefully importing all those posts into this domain, will not only give them some visibility but also give my blog some content. ...

“The Invisible Man.” by Chaotic Good01 is licensed with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ Keeping people informed Early in my career, I thought writing software is all about the outcome. Delivering something that works. I thought it didn’t matter how it was done. At the end of the sprint if you didn’t have a deliverable, it was a problem. This was true in companies which adopt a waterfall model of development. ...

The problem A lot of software engineers get into the industry and often end up starting to write code soon after they read the requirements’ specification. Sounds familiar? You might have done it too. Hard to admit? Can be. We are humans, after all. Jumping right into the coding process might be a great idea for a simple coding challenge, where the objective is to solve a problem in as little time as possible, with potentially very few lines of code. You just have that very specific goal. You don’t have worry about future enhancements for that solution, nor do you have to think about maintainability of that solution. Once solved, the code might have to run through a set of tests and pass the criteria of the question. Fantastic! And you might even get selected for the next round of interviews! Great! So why think about design when you start working on a real solution? ...

LINQ or Language Integrated Query is great for application developers to develop applications that interact with databases. But remember it is a tool and like every tool, you have to use it wisely to achieve the best results. I currently maintain a web based application that is meant to allow job scheduling, and provide users a way to interact with the jobs that are currently running too. Some of the features include, stop the job that is running, skip one among the several jobs, restart the job, resume from a particular section in the job etc. It is a very rich web application. And we have used LINQ almost entirely for all the interactions between the database layer and the application. ...

Hey folks, So I’ve seen a lot of people open putty and then select their host and finally enter a user name and password. I don’t do that. I don’t want to either. Why would I? I’m a computer scientist/programmer/whatever. I should not do repetitive tasks. I should automate it. Password free SSH login is just that: Automation. How do you do it? This isn’t rocket science. Let us start with what SSH is Secure Shell. OMG! That didn’t help. It is a protocol that helps you to connect to remote machines securely over unsecured networks. Over use of secure you might say. You generally need an SSH server and an SSH client for this purpose. Generally most of your enterprise linux hosts would be configured to allow your personal workstation to connect to it using an SSH client like Putty. There are several different versions of this protocol too. But I’m not a networking protocol geek. So enough said. Let us go right into what you have to do to setup your computer to log in. ...

LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query Language. It was a feature introduced along with Visual Studio 2008 that extends the querying capabilities of C# for any sort of data source. Generally LINQ is used to query data sources like SQL Server Databases and XML files. I use it to query databases. I’m not going to explain everything about LINQ here. I’m going to just talk about some very basic details. ...

As you might have noticed from my recent posts, I’ve just recently jumped from one platform to another. And my current project is a bit of a legacy thing. A lot of people worked on it previously and those who did weren’t necessarily experts in the technology that they used when they initially developed it. They did a lot of hacky things, to get things going. But such hacks are good for getting a product moving, but not really good for maintaining them. And now that I’m having to implement changes to them, I realized how hard they have made this for me. ...