Recent content on cat /dev/random
It’s that time of year when people are writing about what they accomplished in the year, sites are publishing countless the-best-of lists and the only thing I’m left wondering seeing YouTube Rewind is - “How come I’ve never heard any of this?” Since last year , I too have started this ritual of writing down key highlights of my year so that I can look back a few years…
In the previous post, we introduced remote procedure calls and their use within a distributed system. In this post, we are going to dive deep into the concept of semantics - first in the context of distributed systems in general and then discuss various RPC semantics. Semantics We’re now going to briefly talk about one of the most important aspects in a distributed systems - semantics. What…
Having looked at a distributed system i.e the domain name system in the previous post, lets turn our attention to something more fundamental. In this blog post, we are going to start diving deeper into one of the basic blocks of Distributed Systems - Remote Procedure Calls or RPCs. The paper that we’re going to be looking at today is authored by the duo of Nelson and Birell who were the…
One of the classes that I’ve taken this semester is Advanced Distributed Systems . The course is primarily a research seminar wherein the students are required to read a couple of research topics for each class and participate in a two hour discussion which is guided by the professor. My goal in these series of blog posts is to summarize the papers in an approchable manner primarily to test…
A couple of days ago I finally finished the last assignment of the Scalable Machine Learning course. The last few days in Kuwait were a bit tough as I had tons of stuff to do before leaving the country. It turns out leaving Kuwait is even harder than getting there in the first place. Additionally I had set a personal deadline of finishing the course a week before the actual deadline so that I when…
After a fun and productive two weeks at home, I have now rejoined office back in Kuwait. As all good things in life, the vacation has come to an end and it’s now time to head back to the usual humdrum of 9 to 5. What also didn’t help was the fact that since most of easy (low hanging fruits, if you will) features had already been built, I had no option but to start work on the feature…
Last night I finished the final assignment for the new course that I had been working on in the past week called Intro to Big Data with Apache Spark or CS100.1 x . With the course over, I decided to write down a quick review in the hope that it will help others get an idea of what they can expect by enrolling in this popular MOOC by UC Berkeley. I heard about the course after stumbling upon a…
This is my last week at home (India) and the fact that I had a pretty productive week shows that I’m ensconced within the comforts of my home. After the hectic last week which involved traveling, meeting relatives and getting documentation ready for the Visa interview this week was just me sitting at home working on this project without any distractions. So there were three key features that…
If you’ve read the previous blog post, you would be aware that I’m right now back to my home country on a vacation . This week has been quite hectic and filled with anxiety owing to the visa interview that I had scheduled during the start of the week. Since this was my first time appearing for a US Visa interview, I was quite in awe of how the smooth and planned the entire process was,…
Guess what, I’m writing this blog post from my home in Delhi! I’ll be in India for full 2 weeks where apart from visiting my family, cousins and friends I’ll also be giving my visa interview - which is the main reason why I’ve taken a vacation. As I had been traveling the progress this week has been rather minimal. Keeping the travel schedule in mind, I had kept the goal to…
So I started this week with the primary goal of re-writing my stores and migrating them to use Immutable collections. In the last week’s post, I laid out the motivation on why this is a good idea and how it will speed up the React application. While the benefits were clear, I was still not sure on how I could implement and exploit the collections provided by Immutable to my advantage. After…
I signed off the last post mentioning that I’ll be integrating the React tags component into Surveyman which did not turn out to be difficult. As the API of the component was simple, it just meant adding the component and providing the necessary event handlers. The suggestions are loaded as soon as a Question component is dropped, which after careful thought, sounds like a practical…
I closed last week’s update giving an indication that I started work on a standalone React component . After working on the component this week, I was finally able to finish it and publish it on NPM . So before I go into what React-tag-input does, I’ll try and explain the motivation for building it. If you’ve been following closely, the primary way of building the survey in…
This update is coming in a bit late, especially after the week 1 and week 2 updates posted earlier. After progressing a bit on the initial setup and features I decided to take a week off Surveyman and instead wait for the GSOC results to arrive so that I could get feedback from Emma , my mentor for this project and see if I were on the right track. Much to my delight I got selected in GSOC to work…
After the drop targets and drag sources were configured last week, this week my primary motive was to develop a better UI for adding Question types. After mulling over the UI a bit, I decided to replace the existing Javascript prompt with a modal which would allow text entry and multiple radio buttons / checkboxes to configure various parts of a Question type. Adding a Bootstrap Modal UI The key…