Technical

Here, you will find all the technical documents that I wrote over the years that I can place in public view.

• Kelvin Redux: What and how to measure “Until you can measure something and express it in numbers, you have only the beginning of understanding.” – Lord Kelvin. There are lot of things we want to measure, even if they can’t be objectively measured. For example, we measure customers satisfacti...
• IT transformation: An architecture perspective Long time ago, I was blissfully unaware of IT technology. I designed programming languages, developed compilers, architected new database technologies, and dabbled in operating systems. Life revolved around all the things I learnt in school and in the lab...
• History is not written by the victors People say that history is written by the victors. Actually, history is written by the scribes. I suppose they can portray themselves as the victors – which makes the sentence true, in a way. What I am leading to is this: if you are the note taker in any...
• HTML5 design knowledge for application developers I am a developer with questionable credentials in aesthetics with one saving grace – I recognize when I see a good one in design. In developing web sites, I have explored a few options for web design and benefited from some of them. A few of my readers ha...
• How to make a billion dollars in a couple of years Ok, I can’t tell you how to do that, but here is how Instagram did it. I am not going to talk about how they understood their customers and how they created something customers loved. That is all marketese – I can’t tell you how to replicate it. What I...
• Tools for Developing and optimizing web: Firefox Last weekend, I was optimizing a site, to demonstrate what we can do, for a customer. I thought I would write about some of the basic tools that I used, since most of the junior developers do not know understand the full potential of these tools. The two...
• Understanding NoSQL from web application development perspective–Part I Consider the simple web program. For the sake of convenience, we will assume it is written in Java. In its simplicity it most likely is as the following: What are the implicit assumptions we are making? The database is supporting the reads and writ...
• Trends in programming and website development I am not the one to say follow the crowds. I am all for listening to a different drummer. But, in our field, we rely on so much publicly available code, knowledge, and support, it makes sense to understand where the world is. Consider programming langua...
• Fallacy of Multi-tenancy I keep reviewing so many documents in several stages. In more than once document, people keep on assuming that Multi-tenancy is not only desired, but also mandatory for applications to move to cloud. People, that is wrong notion. We are not in dark ages a...
• Devops: A cross functional skill set between developer and operations I grew up with Unix (RIP, dmr!) for a long time. Originally, my idea of computing is playing with Unix. In fact, I still say that Linux taught me more about practical aspects of programming than any of my courses. Two years back, I became involved in a l...
• Note taking in exploratory meetings Before I became a pointy haired boss, I was a developer. I still develop, but none of my code goes into projects. Apart from being a PHB, I had experience in being an entrepreneur doing all sorts of jobs. Most of my work happens in meetings. There are t...
• VMWorld 2011: A trip report My trip report from VMworld 2011 held at Las Vegas. I presented there on Cloud Application Platforms.
• What I look for in user interface designers It is obvious to most people that, at heart, I am a programmer. I am not a good artist. My wife wouldn’t trust me to pick colors for our bath room. She wouldn’t even let me pick the tiles! But, obviously, I am qualified to make judgments about UI design ....
• Data warehousing: Basics I am a relatively new comer to data warehousing. I come from OLTP world, where we take lot of transactions and put...
• Setting up VMware hypervisor Setting up VMware hypervisor on a regular box. Specifically how to install using USB flash drive and how to slipstream different drivers in. Also, what is the easiest way to configure for a hobby enthusiast.
• My machine setup … I generally run lot of virtual machines on my desktop. For any development activity, I use VM’s. These days, the cost of machines plummeting, I got my self a new machine recently. My considerations are these: Lot of memory: I need to run VM’s. Lot...
• How long does it take to boil an egg? his seemingly simple question has lot of thought behind it. It is all about metrics, what to measure, how to measure, and how to use the,. Not scientific enough, but written for motivational purposes. How long does it take to boil an egg? (Or Total Time ...
• What does it take to become an architect? how to become a software architect Every large software system needs an architect. Although many people clamor to become architects, there is still a lack of qualified architects in the industry. In this article, I will list what I believe to be the es...
• Resume Synopsis Obtained an Undergraduate degree in CS from IIT Madras and Ph.D. at Rice University; Worked at Bell Labs in Databases; Started a company in developing Enterprise Billing Systems; Now working as the Chief Architect for HCL's SOA division, advi...