What then is the next progression in writing one's own CMS/Blog engine for whatever the joy? That was the question that was running at the back of my head as I sat down watching the oddly timed rains in the evening. Until last week, I had been using couple of modes to create new posts, in terms of decreasing orders of pain - adding markdown files manually committed to the repository and using Github’s web interface to create a new post from the drafts. ...

Long story short, created a virtualenv clone for NodeJS. Provides a flow that borrows from the convenience of both n and virtualenv Rationale At crisp, NodeJS powers our article content extraction services. A cause of concern during development/ deployment has been version maintenance. With containers, smaller team bandwidths meant high maintenance costs. Currently, n powers most of our NodeJS versioning requirements. It has been convenient for the most part since it installs a non-intrusive binary at /usr/local. The missing part with n was with a single version’s use between two packages with different needs. ...

The last few weeks have been taxing with things that wrap up, and preparing for what’s ahead in every sense. Part of the former has been running long with cold storage and consolidating things. A major concern with most of the operations has been wherever we introduced Node into the mix. Or, to be precise, the node modules black holes; the obvious joke of most tech-meme circuits. Where it became particularly problematic was the amount of n-th degree dependencies’ modules. A certain repo that we were working with added up to about 600M. Most of it coming from the nested, never ending chain of node_modules, this is a certain pain in the neck. ...

The beauty of ascertaining issues that are sporadic is their providing sensible defaults. Odd word choice in a sense, but I’ve come to agree that a sensible default take with firefighting is calm. Add to that, a singular focus. The redis cache issue we had got solved over the weekend thanks to switching to a newer hosted Redis infra on AWS. Now, that raises another question - do we know what the RC was? ...

The good thing about early starts is how well paced they can be with bumping productivity. There isn’t a lot of proclivity at the current place (earlier one wasn’t great either, let me be honest) towards it. But, what it makes up for more than enough is the kind of osmosis that I tend to consider a bedrock for a boost. A day starting on odd notes about weird choices by people ends with weird actions by frameworks. The best part is the kind of bouncing back of ideas and TILs that tend to happen quite often. ...

Atticus always used to say - “Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself.”. The kid, hands now trembling o’er the pages wonders, “what then is it to live with myself when other folks wouldn’t?” There is in general a sense of identity innate to a human, and the siblings related and otherwise. But, is that one the kid’s equipped to see, one does ask from time to time. ...

I hate ad-hoc changes. There, I said it loud after long. I’m not sure about you, but I almost hate them with a vengeance. Not in an acerbic tone, but the layers they introduce in maintenance, a sure spoilsport. That’s exactly what one gets to deal with when looking at legacy code bases. All the more so, when it evolves right as it keeps moving and brings in changes. Quite an odd situation to be in, that way. ...

At long last, a whole 10 days after I started, got to committing code again with the new code base today. What’s still something that’s a thorn in the flesh, so to speak, is the complete lack of documentation at code. Not to construe in an acerbic manner, but the lack of structure is something that does slow things down. At times, a little too much, today’s change set for an example. With no clear line of flow for the recent haphazard[sic] additions for a PoC, my coffee drains have increased. ...

Where the point of silver lining comes up, there is a certain thread of discomfort that wishes to be undone. Be it physical, mental, or otherwise, the theme does run undisturbed, in a sense. The last few weekends got drained over a wilful not wanting to get out or do a thing, this one, tad different yet the same. Waking up post 9 has become a frequent pattern of late, more so with timings at the new place. But, when it pushes to beyond noon, that’s awkward for a lot of reasons. ...

Searching for a good news app, ended up discovering what never crossed the radar until now. here. Ended up playing around with a few (downloaded a few more, hope to get a picture soon) but no good leads thus far. What was of particular interest was Newspoint; awkward might be a good choice I guess. Now, take it in any wrong sense what I’m about to say. If you are in the iOS land, this is an alien world to you but the Android folk might be aware. Ever noticed a new browser app and whenever you click on a link every browser wishes for it to be the default? Like a shy a teen (albeit, a little different here, obvious), asking someone out through another? ...