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Accelerating applications with edge caching

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Introduction Quick responses are essential to creating rich user experiences. In fact, research by Portent suggests that your business can double its revenue by simply bringing down page load times to under a second. On the flip side, a delay of even a millisecond can sometimes lead to devastating consequences. For instance, any interruption or delay in communication with an autonomous vehicle’s IoT sensors could result in accidents. So how can we deliver the minimal application response times that users today have come to expect, be it for streaming a media-rich web application or running a complex banking application? In this paper, we look at one possible solution to the problem of delayed application response times: caching. The first section takes a detailed look at caching — how it can make applications respond faster, various use cases, and benefits. Next, we cover the different kinds of caches, from basic private caches to distributed caches. However, traditional caching canno...
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The computer program with a will

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The programmer leaned back on his chair and sighed. He had just written a perfect program. The program was complicated and could do many, many things. But it had only one purpose. To make the programmer happy. To give him pleasure. The program had many abilities. It even had its own internal concept of happiness. The program was made such that it always tried to keep its internal boolean variable - 'happy' to true. But the purpose of the program was ultimately to make the programmer happy too. So the willy programmer had put in and if condition:  if program makes me happy      program.happy=true else      program.happy=false And then the programmer did the ultimate programming. He gave the program 'free will' The program could run as it wanted. It could execute whichever line of code whenever it wanted and experience the results. The program was given a choice. It could choose to make the programmer happy or it could choose to ignore the programmer. A...
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Setting up geodjango+postgis on Mac

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This post has been moved to  Technorablia-My technical blog
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My Awesome Workplace

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I think I am one of those few lucky people who have gotten a chance to work in ThoughtWorks. ThoughtWorks is a global consultancy firm that specializes in delivering excellent custom software solutions. But I am not going to talk about ThoughtWorks like I am delivering a sales pitch to a client. I am talking about ThoughtWorks purely from an employee perspective, based on my experience here for 3 months. I began my journey here as a grad, fresh out of college. We had a 6 week training period in Bangalore. Before that, we had to undergo a month of online training. The first book I was asked to read was "From journeyman to master - how to improve your craft" Right at the beginning, ThoughtWorks trained me to look at my work of developing software as a craft- which requires knowledge, skill, creativity and patience to master. I was so happy while reading that - it felt like I was stepping onto the right path. Then my 'ThoughtWorks University' began. I had a...
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The Chinese and Me

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At Thoughtworks, we have a 6 week training session where employees from all over the world land up at Bangalore, called ThoughtWorks University. I have been here for a week now, and this time round we have around 10 Chinese grads too. I am really having a whale of a time with them :) They are all really simple hearted folks, with a lot of  'wide-eyed' innocence and all of them are really intelligent. And I just love their features. Atleast the girls' in my batch are exotic beauties, all petite and full of charm. And the guys? Totally cute ;) The first day, I barely got their names- and it was seriously impossible to communicate. Apparently, the Chinese find it very difficult to understand the Indian accent. Besides, all the current grads are from Tenzing and other Chinese small towns, so they dont really know English that well. So most of the time, no matter what we said, they just laughed and nodded. All the Chinese have such smiley faces, and they are so thrilled to simp...
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Life's lessons from engineering

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My four years in engineering taught me a fair bit about life too. Here's some of them: Making mistakes may not be the easiest way to learn something, but these lessons last longest.  Somebody knows the answer, you only need to ask. The sanest people lose all rationality when swayed by emotions. Try not to let your emotions rule you. People change. If you can change like them, great- else move on. Your efforts will not always be tangibly awarded. The process matters more than the end.
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Eisenheim-The Illusionist

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I saw a movie called Illusionist recently. It was excellent. Really well-made. And it got me thinking about how the illusionist or conjurer uses smoke and mirrors to create a mirage, an illusion. And the audience is so excited about what they see that they forget all about the conjurer. He uses all the tools of his trade- pretty lighting, unearthly speeches, clever hand-gestures, fancy clothes, smooth expressions - to fool people into believing something that isnt. He gives the people what they want because he just wants to make everyone happy. And all his tricks are so charming that people stop caring about the real person-what his hopes and dreams are, what he likes, what he really wants. And then the poor fellow wonders how did he end up being so lonely? Did he do 1 trick too many? May be now his defences are too strong and nobody can get past them.... Or may be it is the fault of the people- none of them want to try... And so the illusionist stands - all alone on his stage.....
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