Allen Holub made an interesting quote during the course of a talk that struck a good chord. Scrum is basically a wrapper put around Extreme programming in order to make it more palatable for management. One of the initial discussions I had with our QA lead a few months back was to put in a discipline of all stakeholders discussing pre-sprint. A la a CEO pitching their making-the-world-a-better-place product and VCs taking their time to get back with feasiblilty and PMF questions, product owners pitch and technical stakeholders assess and get back. He said, well, that’s XP there. As a rose by any other name person, as long as it pushes things ahead. ...

One of the concerns about a water body like a dam is how well maintained the sluices are. And one should add to it, how well the pressure safety valves are engineered. Encountered yet another of our current stacks’ concerns today - a singular GraphQL-esque end point with no isolation. Add to the mix, a not so well thought handling of connections and we had a good CPU spike. Second day in a row dealing with database concerns isn’t a welcome Independence day. ...

Inching in some sense towards a freedom; another I’m trying to free is our APIs’ hackiness. Spent a bit on a vlog series that focuses on a new OS/language development. A couple of ideas to provide a slim, robust layer for GraphQL/REST APIs to restrict queries/mutations. Smaller steps from the past looking back.

The spatio-temporal bounds of perception and thereupon and thenceforth of inference make the two invalid modes of cognition and of assertion insofar the dominion of matters such as god are concerned. Whilst one might on the other hand employ the same limits to negate the presence, or of absence of divinity or such ideas mental or otherwise, the quandary in such is one of a non-sequitur if one may, for reasons stated above. ...

For most of my POCs/experimental work, I use my own [HTTP server package] (https://github.com/techiev2/node-http-server) and a scaffold bash script that boostraps a complete API including base tests, package.json, and git init. Comes in super handy so made a change/addition to this a few days back. Since the scaffold gets the base commits, setup done and I create the repo in parallel to continue on, added a default route that does a git pull on the repo. An unseen positive here is the fact that it is deploy-first an approach in a sense, since I need webhook end points. ...

A few days back, I wrote about something I built for personal use - a quasi ORM that depends on the database for typing and validations. While it is at a 0.9.x state right now (I’d like to update the API a bit more intuitive, ergo), found this on Hackernews a while back that takes a similar approach to things. The API update I’ve been working on for the last couple of days looks at using Tagged template literals to provide a flow similar to a GraphQL query. ...

A year on from this, a bit of an update on this; bandwidth is a great concern, without a doubt. Most of the changes came from a switch to MySQL from the MongoDB land. One of the questions I’ve had since January was working with type safety in case of NodeJS. TS/others do provide some solutions. The major concern though is runtime safety, particularly when working with the database. We moved away from Mongoengine in 2015/6 to Pymongo and experimented* with two type check versions; one each from from my colleague and myself. And experimental for the same reason - runtime safety. ...

Today’s dose of life saving refreshes for me comes as always from the SQL land. At crisp, the authentication flows were based on user tokens delivered through authorisation headers. The token itself used to be computed at the application layer. When I started to rewrite an older project from scratch using MySQL for the database [and my data layer], was looking to see if this could be offloaded to the database layer. ...

Something I picked up during grad school, fell in love with since is TeX. So much so, I used it for drafting philosophy rants/rebuttals. Naturally, it was the choice whenever I generated resumes. Imo, for a non-Mac person, best choice. A few months back, I had shared my resume with someone who was impressed by the layout which looked more like it borrowed from a publication than a resume, and the bread crumbs I had for links at the top, they mentioned was interesting. ...

He did everything a cancer patient would have done to prevent a recurrence: He faithfully checked for the earliest signs of the disease returning, and minimized his risk factors. ... Not all cancers can be cured. Nor can all depressions. With the strong foundation of our love and his excellent care, my husband had almost 20 years of remission before succumbing to his disease. From this article, the best of my recent reads. A good chunk of it reverberates a little too close to my shoes; good enough to warrant multiple reads late last night. ...