Facade

 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...

 One of the most controversial questions you could ask a Linux enthusiast is what is his/her favourite Linux OS is? This is just like that question you know, you know the one. What came first the chicken or the egg? Everyone has their reasons and proof to show why their Linux OS is better than yours. But the truth is there is no such thing as the best Linux OS out there. You see I am not a person to settle this issue once and for all. But in my experience, it solely depends on what you want to achieve with the OS in hand. I have used OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and its many variants, Linux Mint, Manjaro, Fedora, Pop OS, Elementary OS, Zorin etc. Till now I have never met my "Soul OS". Now I know if you are a Linux user, you are going to use you never used Arch btw. I know, I tried that's as well, but when compared to other distro's Arch won't be the same for me for you, that's the beauty of Arch. And that may bring a new set of controversies to the table as well. In my d...

Recently I was the backend dev for a client-side project, which was quite challenging based on the use case it has. Now I cannot go and ramble it over here, due to obvious reasons. But what I can tell you is how I fixed a particular problem that I faced while working on the project. See every new project will come with a new set of challenges, in my case it was the case of third-party integrations. Now integrating a third party application is not a challenge, but in my case, it turns out to be challenging one because of the way it needs to be integrated. The issue with my case was that I have multiple third-party integrations I want to use based on the user's choice. This choice is stored in the database when a user gets registered in the application. So for example, if User A wants to use ONE and User B for the same use case wants to use TWO. Now we have a single dashboard for both User A and User B, and the same set of functionalities even if one use ONE or the other TWO. So how ...

 Recently I read a Reddit post that was posted on the subreddit r/cscareerquestions. It was posted by a junior developer from the U.S, who travelled across the country for his very first job. In the first week, he was given access to the production DB (But why?). With some false judgement from his side, everything went into mayhem. Long story short, the production data was gone...poof, just like that. A hefty price for a mistake from a junior dev. The guy was fired, and the company said they will take legal actions against the fellow. I am not supporting the junior dev here on his mistake, but in a world, where we celebrate every single minute of success, why don't we ever hear about failure stories much? Failure is the best teacher in many ways, isn't it? I like to share my failure story from my very first company, and how I made a database error that cost my company around $1000. I was working on my very first project back in my first company. Let's say for privacy sake t...

   So recently I heard the news of a startup "Announce" getting a bill of $72k and almost bankrupting them in the process. Story can be found here. When I heard the news I was thinking about the same mistake that was made by me. if you are a programmer, chances are that you heard about good old recursion. Recursion is a powerful strategy for solving problems, but with great power comes of course great responsibilities. Missing an edge case in a recursion can cause a huge conundrum and your resources getting exploited pretty quickly, all thanks to the infinite recursion that's been happening on the background. Now in the cloud, recursion is little bit of the same line but brings forth another set of problems as well. In my case, I wrote a cloud function in firebase, that will update the date of a set of documents inside a particular collection when data is being **modified** in the same collection. Yes I know, dumb! I thought of making the cloud function such tha...

 I travel almost one and a half hours a day. It was such a waste of time for me, going through the same roads, travelling the same distance all day. There was no time left for me after my office hours for anything new. Then I got the idea of podcasts. I started listening to name a few and fell in love with the idea of it. I started searching for the best podcasts on the internet and found out one gem, which was released back in April 2018. "The Caliphate", by Rukmini Kallimachi. Rukmini Callimachi is a Romanian born American journalist who is working for The New York Times. Back in 2014, she started her reporting on Islamic extremism and then focused on Al Queda and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). after years of research and study and battling through tough times of reporting, she published a podcast series named "The Caliphate" back in April 2018 with proofs of her findings and the way she got them. "The Caliphate" was a series focused mainly on a...

 Covid hit us like anything we have seen in our entire life...(I am talking about people of my age..). The entire daily routine of an average programmer who writes code for a living just shifted itself from one dimension to an entire another one. They were thrown from their ever so normal routine of going to an office block, and then back home once the work is done. And by home I mean a rented one. But Covid just played its game, and we are all back home, where we wished to spend our time most of the time. Now we had two things most individuals are too cared about. A monthly income and a safe place to sleep. There is no spending on rent or extra junk food that we may have bought if we were alone in our other "home". We all loved this idea of remote work.  But is it all good? Well... I mean, it's all good and all that we spend most of our time with our beloved. But is that all for a human being who is at his precious youth? Aren't we allowed to take risks now? Aren...