I have always taken the time to analyze my thoughts and reflect on the past year. Since last year, I started writing about my reflections on the past year.
Taking time to assess my yearly objectives, measure my progress, and analyze my time management has become a valuable practice. This exercise consistently brings a fresh perspective for the upcoming year. There’s an inherent thrill in both maintaining ongoing projects and embarking on new ventures - it creates anticipation for what’s ahead. The process of documenting these thoughts reveals areas needing adjustment and helps identify necessary changes in direction. Moreover, it provides an opportunity to celebrate successes, pinpoint areas for growth, and acknowledge the many blessings for which I’m appreciative.
I failed my reading challenge in 2024. I read 32 of 48 books. I read 56 books in 2023 and challenged myself, and 25 books in 2022. I think I have found my sweet spot: 36 books a year, which is three books a month. I like a challenge, so I always have a stretch goal. I hope to surprise myself!
But, I feel it is not about the number of books you read. It’s about the discipline and the routine to find time, to read, everyday. Even if it is 10 mins a day.
If you are thinking of forming a good habit in 2025, start reading. I wrote about my mindset, strategies, challenges, apps, and tools on How to Read 24 or More Books in a Year. Create a reading list, set a reading challenge, read every day, and track your progress. You will thank yourself later.
Be friends with me on Goodreads; we can share our reading lists and be each others’ accountability partners.
AI-powered development tools are revolutionizing how developers write and maintain code. In this hands-on tutorial, we’ll explore how to use Cursor AI Assistant to enhance a simple Todo list application with new features and improvements. Whether you’re new to AI coding assistants or looking to level up your development workflow, this guide will show you practical examples of using Cursor AI for iterative development, debugging, and feature implementation.
We’ll take an existing Todo list application and walk through adding new functionality like filtering, improving the UI layout, implementing a color theme, and fixing runtime errors - all with the help of Cursor AI. You’ll learn how to effectively prompt Cursor AI, review suggested changes, and validate the results. By the end, you’ll have a good understanding of how AI assistants like Cursor AI can accelerate your development process while maintaining code quality.
AI has been the hype since Chat-GPT commoditized the use of its AI chatbot. Soon after, many AI chatbots followed suit, including Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, etc. Many new applications and startups using these AI APIs sprung up as well.
There are a lot of terminologies in play, and it gets confusing very fast. My goal has always been to make complex things easy to understand and break them into small digestible chunks that can be then delved into individually.
The article’s core focus is on making AI accessible and practical for everyone, breaking down complex concepts, and emphasizing that AI is not just another tech hype but a revolutionary technology that everyone should understand. I also list some of the AI tools that I have been playing with that will give you an idea of the leverage you can get with using these tools.
AI is a huge revolution, and it should not be limited to the technical folks but should be understood and leveraged by everyone.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of software development, AI-powered coding assistants are emerging as powerful tools for accelerating application development. This article explores the capabilities of Bolt.new, an AI coding assistant by StackBlitz, through the practical exercise of building a dynamic Todo List application using Next.js and nothing else but prompts.
The demonstration showcases how Bolt.new can not only generate a basic application from scratch but also iteratively add complex features through simple prompts. We’ll examine the assistant’s ability to handle various development tasks, from implementing UI components to managing data structures, while also highlighting both its strengths and limitations.
Throughout this hands-on exploration, we’ll see how Bolt.new handles different challenges, including error resolution and code refactoring, providing valuable insights into the current state of AI-assisted development and its practical applications in real-world scenarios.
It is overwhelming to start anything, but getting started in a large and diverse space like AI has been challenging for many. The AI technology space is advancing at an accelerated speed, so the time to get started is now. This article is a set of recommendations, suggestions, and ideas for an AI learning plan for beginners. I hope you find this article useful if you have been wondering when and how to start.
The article’s core focus is on providing a structured learning path for AI beginners, covering everything from programming fundamentals to advanced AI technologies.
With the advent of AI chatbots, many have been using it to write code and develop apps. But, in reality (at least in my experience), it has been a huge disappointment. The technology is great but works well in the hands of people who know how to use it. A lot has been talked about ‘prompt engineering’ which is at the core of making these AI chatbots respond in a more productive way.
I have tried creating apps using these AI chatbots but it is a pain. It is a nerve wreaking back and forth prompt writing in chat, and copy/paste in the code base. And, the code never works as expected. It is tough to progressively build on your app using the chatbots because the chatbots are unaware of your full code base.
As I dove into AI head first, I learned a lot. In discussions around AI with several people, I realized that an article rounding up and comparing the major AI chat bots in the ecosystem will help a lot of people, not only understand AI chat bots but encourage them to use these, based on their use cases.
Starting with an introduction, I cover an overview of the AI chat bots, discuss the comparison criteria & their impacts, do a detailed comparison, touch upon their image generation capabilities, illustrate some use cases & best-case scenarios and finally finish off with a section on future developments of the AI chat bots.
I have been reflecting on my past year for a few years now, but I did not publish them. This year I wanted to start the trend. Reflecting on my goals for the year, evaluating how I did, and rethinking how I spent my time. It has always provided me with clarity for the next year. Continuing what I started and starting something new has always been exciting for me, something to look forward to. Writing down the reflections, helps me see the gaps and the course corrections I need to make. It also helps me reflect on what went well, and what to improve on, and for all the things I am thankful & grateful for.
One of my goals every year has been to read at least two books a month, but in 2023 I challenged myself to read 3 books a month. I surprised myself, and I surpassed my expectations by reading 56 books in 2023 with an average of 4.5 books per month.
In 2022, I wrote about how to read 24 or more books in a year. I touched upon tools, apps, and ideas to keep me motivated and read more books. I talked about reading consistently throughout the year, and I found that most of us want to read, but we lack the motivation, discipline, structure, and cadence to keep reading.
What would it take you to go from reading zero to one book per month? Or read one more book per month?
In this article, I add to my process for overcoming some hurdles to keep reading throughout the year. I hope this helps you achieve your reading goals for the upcoming year.
In this Part 2 article, we will build upon the Strapi app we built in the Part 1 article How to create a Strapi CMS app to manage content. But, instead of using the Strapi Dashboard Admin UI to manage content, we will take a deep dive into exploring how we can programmatically create content types, manage content, and consume the content via the Strapi CLI and APIs. We will also look at the anatomy of the Strapi app that is created and explore some of the functionalities that it provides out-of-the-box.
In this article, we will create a Strapi-powered app, to manage content using the Strapi CMS. To manage the content, we will use the Strapi Dashboard Admin UI to create the content types, create content data, set roles and permissions, and then expose the content via automatically generated APIs. Finally, we will access the APIs to retrieve the content data.
One of my goals every year has been to read at least two books a month. I have accomplished the goal by reading 25 books in 2022, and in the past years. While talking to several of my friends about reading consistently throughout the year, I found out that most of us want to read, but we lack the motivation, discipline, structure, and cadence to keep reading.
In this article, I describe my process for overcoming some of the hurdles to keep reading throughout the year. I touch upon tools, apps, and ideas to keep us motivated and read more books. Hope this helps you achieve your reading goals for the upcoming year. Happy reading!
We are in a terrible crisis, and it has been very stressful for everyone. Some of us are on the front lines, some of us losing our jobs, some of us are in small businesses affected by the shutdown, and some of us are forced to work from home. Kids are missing school and adapting to online learning, missing out on proms and graduations, are missing going out and playing with their friends. Some of us are juggling work from home while taking care of our children. And to top it all, fear of catching the virus and being in a precarious health situation. Chaos - to simply put it. But we as humans have survived adversities in the past and we will get over this as well. There is light at the end of the tunnel.
So what can we do with the situation we are in? How can we turn this adversity in our favor and make it a positive thing? How can we utilize the time we got and turn it into something productive and prepare for the future?
I had the opportunity to present and host the Opensource Summit Serverless session along with panelists Burton Rheutan & Pav Jimanov representing OpenFaaS and Yaron Haviv representing Nuclio, at DockerCon 2019. Humbled to be part of the show.
Due to a personal loss in my life, I took a few months of sabbatical to get through it. I got through the holidays with support from my family and friends. It was hard but as the year turned around, I had to move on with my life.
I had a very interesting tenure at Serverless.com and I was looking for a more close interaction with customers at large enterprises. I wanted to remain hands-on technically, but not become a code monkey. I wanted to work on a variety of enterprise use cases yet did not want to become an “on-the-road-Mon-to-Fri” consultant. I wanted to ideally work remotely and travel occasionally.
A curated list of serverless resources, applications, workshops, tutorials, newsletters, blogs, and enterprise case studies. I started this list for my own use but I thought it might be useful for others as well. This is a live document ad I will be updating the page often, so bookmark it and come back to check it for newer content. Enjoy!
As usual, AWS announced a slew of new services and updates to it’s existing services at reInvent 2018. Here are the most significant ones that I am maintaining a list of. I will be updating the list as more services get announced. Werner Vogels is on stage right now announcing new Serverless services and updates.
This is a multi-part blog series that explores building serverless applications with Stackery. In the first part, we discussed why Stackery is a great platform for visually building and deploying serverless applications on AWS.
The application we will build is a video processing application that will take a video file dropped into a S3 bucket, along with some user-defined parameters and extract a thumbnail of the specified frame, and store it into another S3 bucket. Since the video processing bit is a long-running process, we will use AWS Fargate to process the video.
We have been building APIs for ages, with varying standards and design styles - SOAP web services, gRPC, REST, and until recently GraphQL. Instead of declaring a winning design style, I believe that each one of these design styles stands its ground, and it depends on the use case when to use which style.
While researching for full, end-to-end, lifecycle API management tools, I discovered many that fit the bill. In this post, I compare some popular API platforms and specification formats.
When I was a kid, I was intrigued by the Starship Enterprise’s onboard computer featured in the science fiction series Star Trek. Although cheeky at times in its portrayal of technologies beyond our imagination, the voice-controlled computer always made me wonder. And, here we are in the same lifetime, realizing similar technologies - inside our homes, on a small device… Amazing, I think! 🖖