Reflections for the Year 2024 Jan 4, 2025

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.

2024 Reading Challenge: Building a Daily Reading Habit One Book at a Time Dec 31, 2024

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.

Practical Guide to AI Assisted Development: Enhancing a Web App With Cursor AI Dec 17, 2024

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.

The Comprehensive Guide to Leveraging AI Tools: From Chatbots to Code Assistants Dec 12, 2024

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.

Exploring AI Assisted Development: Building a Feature Rich Web App With Bolt.new Dec 10, 2024

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.

Master AI: The Ultimate Learning Plan for Beginners (2024 Guide) Dec 5, 2024

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.

Building a web app using AI without the prompt engineering headaches Nov 16, 2024

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.

Comparing Chat GPT, Gemini, Copilot and Claude AI Chatbots Mar 10, 2024

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.

Reflections for the Year 2023 Dec 29, 2023

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.

Challenge Yourself Into a Reading Habit Dec 22, 2023

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.

How to Programmatically Manage Website Content Using Strapi CMS Feb 26, 2023

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.

How to create a Strapi CMS app to manage content Feb 19, 2023

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.

How to Read 24 or More Books in a Year Dec 31, 2022

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!

How to Better Yourself During This Covid-19 Lockdown May 2, 2020

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?

DockerCon 2019: Opensource Summit Serverless May 6, 2019

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.

Excited to Join Docker Mar 5, 2019

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.

Curated list of serverless resources Dec 25, 2018

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!

AWS reInvent 2018 Announcements Nov 29, 2018

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.

How to build long-running serverless apps using Lambda and AWS Fargate with Stackery Oct 16, 2018

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.

Building an API using the Swagger toolchain Oct 3, 2018

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.

Building Serverless Apps Using Stackery Sep 21, 2018 This is a multi-part blog series that will explore building serverless application with Stackery. In this post, the first part in the series, we discuss why Stackery is a great platform for visually building and deploying serverless applications on AWS. We will also look at setting up Stackery, linking an AWS account securely with least privileges, and using a boilerplate template to build and deploy a serverless application to AWS.
Roundup of API Platforms and Specifications Aug 31, 2018

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.

How to build a Serverless Alexa Skill Aug 29, 2018

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! 🖖

Personal Brand May 1, 2018 Over the years, I have built a lot of applications and written about software and its practices. Most of the applications were internally facing and hence could not be shared in public. Many articles I wrote were hosted on internal knowledge bases or those sites have evolved. Many of those applications and writings were never made public. Building a personal brand is crucial. So I have decided to post all my writings here and publish all my applications on Github.
Monitoring Docker Services With Prometheus Jul 21, 2015 With the advent of the ‘micro-services’ architecture and the evolving trend for using Docker, monolithic applications are being broken up into smaller and independent services. The idea is to keep the services small so that small groups of developers can work on them, upgrade or patch them quickly, and build & release them continuously. Although that vision is promising, it introduces complexity as the number of services grow. With that also grows the need to monitor these services around the clock, to maintain the healthy functioning of the application.
CenturyLink Labs Goes to DockerCon 2015 Jul 15, 2015 It was an exciting time for us again to be attending DockerCon 2015 this year. It was the 2nd DockerCon, and was way bigger than the first one. Our whole CenturyLink Labs team was there, excited to hear the new announcements from Docker and the rest of the community. The opening keynote by Ben Golub, CEO of Docker, was followed by Docker’s Founder & CTO, Solomon Hykes. The keynote session was followed by a variety of breakout tracks taking place throughout the day.
Lorry.io: Pathway to Docker Composable Apps May 26, 2015 Recently, Docker released the Compose tool for defining and running complex applications with Docker. The basic component of that tool is the file, docker-compose.yml. We at CenturyLink were big fans of Fig, the basis for Compose and the docker-compose.yml, but always envisioned a utility that could facilitate creating the docker-compose.yml files easily and intuitively. From that idea, we are happy to announce our latest project, Lorry.io, a docker-compose.yml validator, editor and composer.
Managing Application Code in Linux Containers Oct 10, 2014 Many developers have heard of Linux containers and Docker. But how do you deploy your code to an application running in Linux containers? Let’s go over that in this article, using a very simple yet effective workflow. We’ll focus on WordPress, but these principles can be used with Ruby, Python, or even Go applications. I think most of the time, users need to manage Wordpress for adding/updating plugins, themes etc.