Author Archives: cyberaka

About cyberaka

I am an experienced Senior Solution Architect with proven history of designing robust and highly available Java based solutions. I am skilled in architecting designing and developing scalable, highly available, fault tolerant and concurrent systems which can serve high volume traffic. I have hands on experience in designing RESTful MicroServices architecture using Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, MongoDB, Java 8, Redis and Kafka. I like TDD (JUnit), BDD (Cucumber) and DDD based development as required for my projects. I have used AWS primarily for cloud based deployment and I like developing cloud enabled POC as a hobby in my spare time. I have deigned and developed CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins and leveraged Docker, Kubernetes for containerizing and deploying some of my applications. I am highly experienced in creating high performing technical teams from scratch. As an ex-entrepreneur I am very much involved in the business side of the IT industry. I love interacting with clients to understand their requirements and get the job done.

Founding Principles for a Development Shop

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A development shop can be broadly associated with service delivery (consultation and service at cost) or product delivery (product sold at cost).  I think the following principles could be applied to both:
  • Always try to Innovate
  • There are different ways of solving a problem. Try finding the best approach.
  • Have faith in your teams capability to deliver anything.
  • Have faith in yourself and believe that you have potential to change the world.
  • You need to have flexibility and the capability to move fast.
  • Always try to work in the team but also hold your identity.
  • Believe in sharing knowledge and tips.
  • Trust your colleagues.
  • Avoid bureaucracy and politics like plague.
  • Customer is the king. If a customer doesn’t know something be ready with a training session.
  • An absurd idea is not always a stupid idea. Be open and receptive.
The core belief is the willingness to innovate and allow customer to be the final judge.

Traits of a bad programmer

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A bad programmer is somebody who I personally consider a liability to any team. This category of programmers have the potential to bring down a project and even a full team. It is always better to either notify them of their deficiencies so that they improve or to ultimately save the team by removing them. I tend to identify a bad programmer from their following traits:

Lack of curiosity
If a programmer is not curious about the API and considers superficial knowledge as sufficient then it is the first warning bell that this particular person will have a mediocre knowledge and as a result mediocre performance.

Difficult to Understand Code
If the code a programmer writes is bug laden and the code itself is messy and unnecessarily large then you are dealing with a bad programmer.

Lack of Depth in Knowledge
Superficial knowledge about a topic is a dangerous attribute of a bad programmer. This can bring less than optimized behavior in the software. This superficial knowledge can range from programming API, tools of trade and even the problem domain itself.

Unwillingness to do defensive coding
A programmer has to consider lots of scenarios which can be documented as test cases or even unit tests. If a programmer only considers a general scenario and fails to accommodate the not so general scenario then the result is often a bug laden software.

Unwillingness to comment or improve code
A commented source code is an asset and an un-commented source code is a liability.  A programmer rarely works alone and if the source code written by them is not documented then it doubles up the amount of time required to fix their code. If a programmer never has time to comment the code or even simplify the code by writing smaller pieces of a large piece of code then this is a dead give away of a bad programmer.

Aversion to feedback
Any programmer worth his salt should be open to feedback from his peers. If a programmer is unfazed by negative feedback and doesn’t consider his responsibility to fix his code as a result of feedback then he is a bad programmer. A programmer should learn to make decisions based on experience and also the feedback received from peers and customers.

Eclipse RCP – Application … could not be found in the registry.

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While trying to integrate Eclipse Forms into an existing Eclipse RCP application I encountered a launch issue where the launch failed with this error:

java.lang.RuntimeException: Application  could not be found in the registry. The applications available are: org.eclipse.equinox.app.error.

Well the strange thing was I could do the relevant import of Eclipse Forms package in the Java editor while doing development but I got the above error while launching it. I thought it might be launch configuration issue so I went to Project Properties > Run/Debug Settgins > [Select Launch Configuration] > Edit. This opened up the Edit Configuration dialog where we have a Plugins tab. In the plugins tab sure enough the Eclipse Forms plugin was unchecked. I checked this check box for this plugin, saved the configuration and launched the application. This time no error happened.

By default Eclipse RCP didn’t tell me what the problem was. I spent some trying to guess the problem before finding the solution. The lesson from this experience is that we should always use “-debug” argument in the launch configuration as it clearly outputs on log any error which might not be properly reported via error dialog.

Kodak, where are thou?

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Kodak filed for Bankrupcy this month and I believe this is a wake up call to all the small, medium and big tech companies out there who are resting on there laurels based on their performance so far.  The million dollar lesson which we should learn from Kodak’s demise is that a company has to innovate and stay relevant in their business. They have to innovate in order to stay relevant, they have to stay relevant so that they can survive in their current business, they have to survive in their current business so that they can look for expanding into new business. Kodak had everything going a few decades ago and as per records it had the right mix of patents and innovation to actually make a huge mark in digital camera and cell phone industry. Kodak really had a shot at launching a kPhone just like an iPhone and be relevant on todays stock market index, but somehow they didn’t take advantage of all these facts. Its sobering to see a behemoth like Kodak go down under and it serves as a lesson for every company operating in tech-biz to keep innovating and stay relevant or risk obscurity.

Interesting Articles 13 July, 2011

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Here are some interesting articles I found from various sources.

Java Meets Objective-C

Secure Login in AJAX Applications

Sizing Android Visual Elements Correctly

Adobe Woos Mobile Developers With Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5

Secure Login in AJAX Applications

11 Insider Tips You Must Follow If You Want Your App To Succeed

How To Create A Game Like Tiny Wings Part 1 Using Cocos2D

iOS 5 beta 3 released for Apple iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple TV

Cloud based mobile sync

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I have known about Funambol for a while and it seems to be a very promising solution for the purpose of syncing data across diverse mobile platforms. Somehow I never really got down to use it in one of my projects so far. I have decided to check this solution in a test project in my spare time and get a feel of the overall solution myself. It has the correct vision of connecting everything ‘mobile’ via the cloud and I think this product has got a very promising future. I firmly believe that the future is a combination of mobile and cloud. A robust and diverse ecosystem of app driven mobile development market is going to be much larger than the traditional web and enterprise development.

Macro Recording Solution

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In due course of development I came across a project which required me to extract thousands of file attachments from a MS Access 2010 file. This is a new feature of access and relatively less documented feature for which no third party tools are available to facilitate automated extraction of all the attachments. Manually extracting all the attachments was not an option so I started looking for programmatic ways to do it. Although I did find some ways by which I could use the native scripting of MS Access to extract all the files but I was not sure if it would work reliably. So I started looking for automated macro based solutions and I remembered using Jitbit Macro Recorder a couple of years back. This solution promised some hopes of allowing me to do what I wanted to do without throwing a new programming language in my way. So I went ahead and downloaded a new copy from Jitbit website. I was fairly impressed with the enhanced editor and macro recording facility. it took me very little time to record a reliable macro which could repetitively extract files from the MS Access file. Although the process was slow I was able to extract some files from MS Access without any problem. However the speed of extraction was very slow and I started to lose my patience. This is where Jitbit Macro Recorder again shined and I was able to locate the issue down to a number of unwanted delays which had crept into the recoded script due to my slow recording process. Using the inbuilt editor provided by this solution I finally removed almost 80% of the delays and then I was perceptively pleased at the faster rate of file extraction. After the final tweak the Jitbit Macro Recorder was able to extract files way faster than I could ever do manually. Overall at the end of the whole episode I was surprised that there were more than 3700 files extracted by this wonderful tool! It just worked quite reliably and didn’t crash or slowed down while dong this heavy duty operation which means the developers have done a very good job and have designed this solution for production use. There is no doubt in my mind that this tool is a very promising automation tool in my arsenal and I am going to keep using for quite sometime.

Bidirectional sync engine

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RIM’s Blackberry platform has proven the effectiveness of a good sync engine for syncing up user data like emails, contacts and calendars. Given the fact that it has a tremendous user base and fan following in the business culture also proves that it is highly effective for organizations who find it mandatory to at the cutting edge of all information related to the projects, finance and other important aspects of it business. Now it is clear that RIM has poured millions in the research and development of the Blackberry platform to make it stable and robust and hence it is known for its resilience. However what is the option for other developers who need the similar kind of sync engine for their development needs. Do they have to re-invent the wheel at all times to get the job done or there is some pre-built commercial and free libraries which can be used by them. I thing there is a genuine requirement in the market for coming up with a solution which will enable application developers and especially mobile developers to leverage the benefits of these libraries. I can definitely dare to imagine the flood of which will be possible if reliable sync engine is made available to the developers for every known platform. For example if there is a sync engine which lets the user sync data across iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Symbian and the Desktop platform then a developer can develop applications based on this sync engine to develop games, productivity app, media sync etc. A heavy duty multi platform agnostic sync engine is the need for the day for the development community. I personally would like to develop applications on it if such a library is available and does heavy duty platform agnostic sync.

No Direct Charity or Donations via iOS App Store

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Apple’s decision to ban charitable donations via app has taken away a good donation source medium from the various non profit organizations around the world. I have come across websites and posts where people have been blasting Apple for it’s decision to ban charitable donation driven applications from being hosted on it’s app store. I think Apple will continue to receive flak for this decision for some time to come. However if I were to look at it from Apple’s perspective I think that they don’t want to take 30% cut from money which is meant for donations and most importantly they might not want to be involved in verification of the legal validity of the charity funded non profits. These considerations might have prompted this ban. Whatever be the reason and motive behind Apple’s decision to ban donation apps, a lot of non profits around the globe will be very unhappy with this decision.

For developers the approach would be to create an application which tells the user about the non profit organization and their motto in a well designed compelling interface. The iOS application will give the concerned non profit organization a much needed foot hold in the iOS app store. Once the user has come to know about the organization the app should give user an option to easily hop on to the website of the organization and do the relevant donation. Basically the good part is that the website of the non profit would receive a lot of traffic in this way and the website can further give user more updated details about how the  donated money is going to be used. However the bad part is that the user has to manually enter their details like credit card / paypal information into the organization’s website. This approach might turn away some users as they might balk at entering all these information into the organization’s website but users who are convinced about the motto of the non-profit organization, they won’t mind going an extra step to do the donation.

All said and done technology should be the enabler and iOS eco system could definitely be that enabler for donation based apps owing to their ubiquity in the higher income strata of world population. I personally think that Apple could take a special initiative to cater to this category of apps.

iOS Developer Program Renewal

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I had applied for the yearly renewal of my iOS developer program for which my company had registered last year. Since there is no iTunes App Store in India I had to apply in the old fashioned way i.e. take a print out of the purchase PDF form, fill it up and then FAX it to Apple. Last year this approach had taken nearly 1 month of time and I was expecting that at the time of renewal I would have to go through the same loop all over again. After sending the FAX I waited for nearly a week with no response from Apple in any form. Fearing that my FAX’d purchase form might have been misplaced I sent a mail to Apple’s customer support. In the back of my mind I had envisioned that it would take Apple’s customer support another week or so to give me a response back. But I was pleasantly surprised when I received a response within 24 hours from them. They asked me send me a scanned copy of my purchase form and they assured me that they would do the rest. I sent them a scanned copy and within 48 hours my iOS developer program membership stood renewed!

I think this was a very good experience with the Apple’s customer support. With this kind of fast response I think my company will keep developing applications for the iOS platform for quite some time to come. Way to go Apple!