Of This and That

I got a chance to attend a CIO Klub organized daylong conference called " CIO Tech 2015 - Leveraging Technology for Business Transformation " this last Friday. It was a good event with all topics of discussions very relevant to the very current issues that CIOs/CTOs face.  As I reached the venue, I immediately felt out of place as I seemed to be the only one not in a business suit. I had thought about wearing one, but the May heat discouraged me. My mistake that I missed the point that the venue would be well air conditioned.  The conference stared 10 min, but that's very reasonable given how such conferences are. By the time the initial key note was over, we were running 20 min behind schedule. But I must mention that during the course of the day, things got back on track and the last the session of the day finished right on target at 4.00 pm. I had to skip the final Mind Matters session as had some personal work to attend to.  In the keynote address Mr. Manoj Bar...

19th May 2014 was a milestone date in my career and I had written all about it here . Today, a year later, I think it is but expected that I look back and think about this year gone by.  I could not have imagined a life outside of Infosys for all the years I had been working there. A friend even had joked when he heard about my resignation, "How can you leave Infosys? I have been saving to come to your retirement party!". Afterwards, over the months I did think if I did miss Infosys and had shared my feelings here .  A year later now, it is time to do my personal annual appraisal and share the results. The catch is that this is a self appraisal and hence the results may be biased :). It has been an exciting 1 year outside the campus that's a dream come true for so many youngsters. While I am yet to complete 1 year at my new organization, Curologic , but I could not have asked for something better. Working in a start-up has its own challenges and you ...

Node.js has gained lot of traction in the last few years and many high performance sites are today using it. When we started with it, I wanted to understand what’s it that makes node.js so high performant, over and above the regular web servers, which were created with the purpose of being able to handle loads of incoming requests. The answer lies in the core of node.js that uses a single thread for its main execution and passes on the work to asynchronous functions. In the world of multitasking and multi-core CPU machines, this come as a surprise, but then when you look at the cost of creating all these parallel threads vs handling all incoming requests in a single thread, you suddenly realize the benefits, and is very clearly visible also in the performance it delivers. As I thought about this, I realized that this concept isn’t new but is something that is at the heart of windows programming, something I had learnt back in 1995. We had started programming on Windows for Wo...

"Change is the only constant" is something that we in IT world strongly believe in and the technological evolution around us have been a constant reminder of the same. However the recent declaration by Microsoft that Windows 10 will be last in the series of Operating Systems (OS) seems to go against this well accepted norm. It is a significant milestone of sorts, this announcement.  Microsoft so far had relied heavily on sales of OS, Microsoft Office and more recently SharePoint Server as their backbone. Newer versions every few years was the way things had been all these years. If I look back, I started my career with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in the year 1995, which was a significant improvement towards graphical user interface based working experience. Then I worked on Windows 95, which added preemptive multitasking and then on Windows NT that introduced the UNICODE character set. Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Millennium edition (that actually disappeare...

Come Summer and it used to be the time to get packing and make the month long trip to grand parents place. A tradition that kept on for many many years and then took a break in between as I graduated from school to engineering and then onto my job. These trips became far and wide. However for the last few years they are back on track, though the destination has changed, for now it is the grand parents for my daughter.  Though climatically this isn't the ideal time to visit Delhi, but can't help it. Fortunately due to the changes in weather pattern, the summer heat has also got pushed along and the initial few days of the month of May aren't as hot as it used to be. Eventually the heat does catches on, but we do get some days of good weather. Interestingly this time, the electricity board was also a bit favorable and the power cuts were less and also not long lasting.  After my typical week long break (that's all I manage these days), I boarded the Duronto Expres...