tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-273844602024-03-10T12:13:11.529-07:00Being brainless!Hello! I am Sumit, a nomad, trying entrepreneur and software engineer. I blog about mental issues, personal journey, software and product development.<br>
This is my personal space and my views might seem contradictory to yours. That is OK, my views are not set in stone. This is a place where I share my learning as a human.<br>
Try not to take anything I share as advice. They are just my logs as a I grow, if they help you, great! Share yours too and I will be happy to read. Cheers!brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.comBlogger79125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-83375210120799865122020-08-10T19:41:00.002-07:002020-08-10T19:47:42.032-07:00During the 2020 Pandemic: starting a new product from LaosI have been traveling all across SE Asia since November 2019. This was part of my long term digital nomad lifestyle which would have otherwise taken me to live for about 6 months each in Japan, Canada, Denmark (or another Scandinavian nation) and New Zealand. That, mixed with bakpacking through South America, Africa and Eastern Europe was my dream for the next 3-5 years. Then 2020 happened. brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-11453347019655764212020-08-10T19:15:00.000-07:002020-08-10T19:15:02.694-07:00The different worlds of Personal and Professional relationsI have somehow always mixed the worlds of Personal and Professional relations and paid huge price for that mix up. It is an aspect that I am still learning, but as I feel a little more confident in my handling of this aspect, I felt like writing out my thoughts. A lot of people including myself have raging debates about the definition or meaning of these two sides of our adult life and how they brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-67096948881066988762020-06-16T06:43:00.001-07:002020-06-16T06:43:31.224-07:00Mental health, Routines, Anchors and BlahI started talking freely about mental health a couple years back. Initially I used to have enough lack of confidence that I was not even able to share that I have issues. Gradually, after seeing people around me and finding others who share, I started sharing. It has been quite a few years since I went through multiple sessions of counseling, which have helped immensely.Mental health is a brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com0Vientiane, Laos17.9757058 102.6331035-13.843240519304505 67.4768535 49.7946521193045 137.7893535tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-41423653300615076532020-06-14T03:26:00.002-07:002020-06-14T03:26:52.804-07:00It is OK2020 will be a year to remember. But I am not going to write about the perils of 2020. Rather I want to talk about what is important - to accept that is it OK. I have anxiety issues. I go into bursts of panic and until recently I was not even aware of them. I would wake up in the middle of the night because of anxiety almost at a predictable interval after going to bed. My ex was the first personbrainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-29402039340323044812020-06-14T02:54:00.002-07:002020-06-14T03:01:11.486-07:00Lost touch with writing, yet again!This happens a lot it seems. I am 36 years old now and it has been about 13 years from my first blog post in 2006. Also, in between I already blogged once about losing touch with writing. But hey, at least I am consistent. So a lot has happened, as they always do. The world moves around.When I moved back from Germany to India in 2017, I thought I would be engaging in a great startup experience brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com0Vientiane, Laos17.9757058 102.6331035-10.334528036178845 67.4768535 46.285939636178846 137.7893535tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-4191791016473824052018-01-22T21:14:00.001-08:002018-01-22T21:14:32.652-08:00Machine Learning, AI, Data Science in simple termsHey folks, it has been a while since I posted. I was in a peer group discussing some of these terms recently and then a friend, who was writing a post to demystify these terms, asked me to explain these in plain English.
I thought I would share my views with everyone who is struggling to get these terms. I will use an analogy that perhaps will help. These opinions are as simplified as I could brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-68792767160825353472017-02-17T11:09:00.000-08:002017-02-17T11:10:13.600-08:00Frontend Driven DevelopmentI have primarily been a backend web developer, started out with PHP around 2005 and then moving to Python in 2011. I have worked with a lot of JavaScript, mostly using jQuery and friends till 2013. One of the major JavaScript based projects I worked on in this time was an iOS (iPad in particular) based magazine product with native features like swipe, and columnar display of content. That was in brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-31164069545831204622016-08-14T06:02:00.000-07:002016-08-14T06:03:25.353-07:00The reality of failuresLook around your office desk for a moment (you can imagine an office if you are not at office). What do you see? People focusing on the daily tasks, glued to their screens or notepads, crunching numbers, making phone calls, typing text, doing whatever they have to in order to achieve some daily target that is either self established or was handed down by a manager. If you are in your brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-63413125403722442142015-05-26T13:58:00.000-07:002015-05-26T13:58:33.935-07:00Hackathon HH - 24 hours of awesomenessIt has been three and a half months since I relocated to Hamburg, DE. Working at a medium sized company is a very different experience from the entrepreneurial life I had for many years. The work is fun and it comes with consistent salary at the end of every month so that I can enjoy personal life. But once a while I have the urge to keep on working through the weekend and hack something. The brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-78738554325956266952014-11-17T05:53:00.000-08:002014-11-17T05:53:33.291-08:00It's been a whileYes it has really been a while since I had blogged last. 2 years, according to the date on the previous post. I have been feeling to write for sometime now, but I guess the feeling was not strong enough to overcome the mental state of not blogging.
I honestly do not know why I stopped blogging in the first place though. Anyway, no use thinking about that. I guess I will try and blog about what Ibrainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-56911308898359702612012-02-28T08:33:00.000-08:002012-02-28T08:33:29.533-08:00PHP libxml issue while compilingToday I had some trouble getting libxml to work in PHP. I was compiling PHP 5.3.10 for a client's Joomla site and it needs libxml. The issue seemed to be commonly happening to many people and I came across a number of forum threads on the topic.
The suggestions mostly hover around installing libxml2 development package. This can be done in Debian or Ubuntu by:
apt-get install libxml2 libxml2-devbrainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-26322821612391203372012-02-17T07:46:00.000-08:002012-02-28T08:44:39.990-08:00Building a Yii app: The Data ModelA friend of mine needs a web application to be revamped. I had originally created it about 2 years back using a custom PHP mini-framework that I had built for many projects at that time. The development had stopped for different reasons and parts of his web application were incomplete. For example images were not upload to Amazon S3, which was originally planned. Some Model edits were not workingbrainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com2Koramangala, Bangalore, Karnataka, India12.9316556 77.622695912.9161796 77.6029549 12.947131599999999 77.642436899999993tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-51033446926917238602012-02-04T00:18:00.000-08:002012-02-04T00:18:44.164-08:00Trying out non AWS optionsI have been using Amazon Web Services for all of my (or companies' I work with) compute or storage needs for the last 4 years. That include AWS S3, EC2, SimpleDB and even RDS (at MobStac). For the last few weeks I have been planning the platform choices for Mag. It does include AWS DynamoDB, S3 and EC2, but the picture is a bit different.
Amazon DynamoDB guarantees a lot of performance and I brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-16613721491870674982012-01-23T10:45:00.000-08:002012-01-23T10:46:33.707-08:00Trying out GeoDNSFor the last 3 weeks that we have started working on Mag, we have been talking to a few prospective clients or other knowledgeable folks out there. We want to understand how individuals, SMBs or larger organizations use Social Media or the Internet in general. Of course all of these initial meets are local to Bangalore and a few in other cities in India (over the phone).
We have been getting a brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-5430949329012615102012-01-20T05:00:00.000-08:002012-01-20T05:05:57.204-08:00Schema Example on Amazon DynamoDBFirst an apology to anyone who read my previous blog post. I had used wrong rates for throughput capacity. I noticed this since my calculations seemed a little costly :)
Throughput Capacity price as on AWS website, as of today:
* Write Throughput: $0.01 per hour for every 10 units of Write Capacity
* Read Throughput: $0.01 per hour for every 50 units of Read Capacity
Thus as per my brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-79215527264555409622012-01-19T20:39:00.000-08:002012-01-19T21:04:45.099-08:00Day One of Amazon DynamoDBIts been just about a day that I have been going through the documentation of the newly released Amazon DynamoDB. Using the PHP SDK and getting a basic Table up was simple. Right now I am planning the data organization. DynamoDB is a schema less data store. There is a primary key per table which is your main query column, so as to say. I am trying to use existing MongoDB based data mappers and brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-90910161891947430252012-01-19T04:52:00.000-08:002012-01-19T04:52:47.902-08:00Mag will use Amazon DynamoDBAmazon's latest announcement (and offering) could not have come at a better time for Mag. I am talking about Amazon DynamoDB here and I feel it is a good fit for Mag.
For the last few weeks I have been looking at many available options for the data storage for Mag. Notice I mentioned data store and not RDBMS. The reason is that Mag's data is really a large collection of configurations for brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-66595648393411128172012-01-16T04:30:00.000-08:002012-01-16T04:32:03.306-08:00Price comparison of dedicated or VPS hostsFor the impatient: link to spreadsheet.
For the last few weeks I have been looking around a lot on the web, checking for details and prices of VPS or dedicated servers. I am looking for places to host Mag when it starts growing. Not that I am leaving AWS in any way. But for Mag we will need servers at a lower bandwidth cost that on AWS.
I am looking for self managed (or unmanaged) dedicated/VPSbrainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-16383192147575709802012-01-13T09:29:00.000-08:002012-01-13T09:29:43.476-08:00Height of Facebook custom Page TabsThis is a quick tip: I am currently working on a Facebook app. I have a demo for a custom Page Tab. But somehow the height was not setting properly. The canvas height setting in the Developer setting was to Fluid. I have no clue where was the setting for Page Tab. Anyway after a little search I found that the following code works:
<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script type="text/brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-26291691690777567582012-01-13T09:21:00.000-08:002012-01-19T21:15:17.036-08:00Serve static files from nginx for POST requestThis is a quick tip, I haven't had the time to dig deep into this. I am working on a Facebook app, and was doing a demo with static HTML. Everything was set, including SSL (I will write quick tip on that too). I could browse to the page separately. But it failed from within Facebook, giving a 405 error.
From previous experience I remembered Facebook does POST requests, but I had forgotten the brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-61961703639131532532012-01-05T20:18:00.000-08:002012-01-13T09:22:03.956-08:00Oh! So we have started upToday is Friday, January 6, 2012 (Indian Time). Last week I was at MobStac at this time. That was my last day at MobStac. 2012 started with fun, food, a short drive to a nearby spot, drinks and everything in-between. But the fun is gradually getting over and the feeling has started to change. I have done this a couple times earlier. I have heard the rules of the game repeated so many times by brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-67597139737344809002011-09-27T21:48:00.000-07:002011-09-27T21:48:27.648-07:00Shift from mod_wsgi to uwsgiThe last couple weeks we have been thinking to shift from our current web serving platform which was powered by nginx + Apache + mod_wsgi to nginx + uwsgi. The reasons were that Apache was part of the plan for about a year and a half, but its main reason to be there was that Apache + mod_wsgi was stable. We of course wanted to keep nginx, but right now we had no reason to run the Apache + uwsgi.Ibrainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-52377907352891147582011-08-27T09:59:00.000-07:002011-08-27T10:10:18.813-07:00The 9 to 5 work at MobStacWe are preparing for our new product's launch at TechCrunch Disrupt SF2011 (Startup Alley) and to be honest we are fighting with all our might. The last 3 weeks have been really tough. Our product is a full HTML5 app, for a particular platform. What we are working on is honestly a bit of a challenge. The way we are doing stuff is not absolutely new, but at the same time its not easy.
Thusbrainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-9614439218702211792011-08-08T06:14:00.000-07:002011-08-08T06:15:00.100-07:00Basic security setup on AWSRecently at MobStac we restructured our layout of EC2 on Amazon Web Services so that we are more secure than earlier. We wanted a scheme that would not be painful for our current deployment scheme but would still be as strict when it comes to inward access as possible.
Here is what we settled down for:
Application servers (Django) are all internal security group accessible only. So they can not brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27384460.post-73801025582182360942011-08-08T06:00:00.000-07:002011-08-08T06:01:15.399-07:00S3 storage for DjangoHi there!
Am blogging after a few months now. I have settled in the MobStac team as an all hands engineer. I have shifted to Bangalore with 2 friends from Kolkata.
Anyway, at MobStac we needed an S3 storage backend for our Django app (Django runs our publisher platform, and mobile site serving platform). I figured out there is nice way to write a custom storage backend. But then a bit searching brainlesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17030873095558521647noreply@blogger.com0