Facade

AI!! The buzzword is too hot in the market nowadays. Do you have a technical product or an idea? If it doesn't have AI in it, then chances are it's not going to be sold like hot cakes. That is how things have changed lately. It is no wonder why me and my colleagues at Gelato want to see what AI can do in a niche department like customer support and service. And that is exactly what we did. For a company like Gelato, which is in the market for production-on-demand, there are a lot of customer questions you need to answer. It can be related to products, queries about shipping and pricing, and so on and so forth. Thus, our customer support team is always happy to help with these recurring questions. Let's take one example. A customer asked us, "Do you ship to Norway?" Now that is an easy question to answer if you have the knowledge written somewhere where you could refer to it and say, "Yes! As a matter of fact, we do." Following the same thread, the next q...

 There is this meme on the technical world, which I am not sure you have heard, but if you are into technical memes, or programming memes, you would know that there are a bunch of programming languages that are laughing stock. Languages that's not "shiny" enough to be on the radar of the top notch programmers out there. Like JavaScript, PHP, HTML (even including this is in itself is a joke!) etc. Well I don't know if I could agree with it or not, but people who started learning web development from the ground up (just like me) might have started on these 3 probably. And PHP was the first and foremost language that you might have linked with a framework of sort.  What are frameworks by the way?  Well according to Wikipedia, framework is a generic term commonly referring to an essential supporting structure which other things are built on top of. And software framework is an abstraction in which software, providing generic functionality, can be selectively changed by a...

In June 2022, I embarked on a quest for a new job opportunity. Fortunately, this endeavor began just before the global job market experienced a significant downturn. I must admit, I faced my fair share of rejections during this period, but I also had an epiphany. It became evident that there was so much more to learn and understand in the world of technology. Coming from a small service-based company, I had encountered limitations in terms of how much I could learn on the job. However, during interviews and conversations with senior developers, I gained valuable insights into the architectural and technical decisions made by teams in various companies. One such company that left a lasting impression on me was Delivery Hero. Their technical blog posts provided a wealth of information, especially for someone like me, transitioning from a smaller company where projects had minimal daily active users compared to the scale of Delivery Hero. One particular blog post that caught my attention ...

One of the projects I am working on is using MongoDB as the database solution. And the project makes use of the nifty ORM mongoose to do the heavy lifting of data orchestration. It was high time I implemented transactions to the equation but because of a time crunch I was not able to start with one and the situation merely demands it at times. But come with an architectural change and the way the project was heading it was high time I implemented transactions by using MongoDB. According to MongoDB documentation, transactions are used when the situation requires, “atomicity of reads and writes to multiple documents (in single or multiple collections)”. MongoDB supports multi-document transactions. With distributed transactions, transactions can be used across multiple operations, collections, databases, documents, and shards. Now the piece of code to implement the same was pretty straightforward. // For a replica set, include the replica set name and a seedlist of the members in the URI...

 So I was tinkering around the internet as usual, when I came to know about open source alternatives to some of the common tools that we use day in day out. That's when I came to know about firebase alternatives. A service that I used more often to come with a small POC of anything that I want to try out. A couple of the alternatives were  Appwrite  and  Supabase .   I started with appwrite initially, their self-host policy was really awesome and how easy to set it up and get started.    I created a small application on top of appwrite, that I am currently using for my company internal documentation storage. Since it's on top of docker image and resource-heavy I could not deploy it to my AWS free tier server. So sorry about not showing you guys a demo.   After working on top of it, these are my main findings;   Positive   Easy to use, no doubt on that Pretty straightforward documentation on about implementing the features support for a v...

 So recently there was this requirement from the operations team at my current company to keep up an excel sheet for the tasks that we do every day. Now my company's work culture is pretty good actually. They never sneak up on you to check whether you are doing your tasks or not. They are cool and most importantly they trust you with your tasks.  This was more like a record for safekeeping, for both parties. All was good except we should maintain this at least weekly. So at the end of the week if the operations team need to cross-check your task time with your leaves all the sheet should be updated.  Now see there are many tools out there that can do this pretty easy for you but trust me you don't want to spend a monthly/yearly fee for such a tool that does so little as keeping up the tasks hour and the project associated with that task. So many times a problem arises for me since I forget things pretty easily. At the end of the week, I need to fill up the entire task rec...