Back to Rants

This is a half baked idea and kind of a rant. The idea is very simple and has to do with my personal position position about how to choose technologies. When building a software systems, first do things as natively as possible for your context. As a software developer I would like to construct systems that are easy to get started with, understand, maintain and still can be delivered on time. As you may know that it is impossibly hard to do so many things well in any domain. In my brief career I have seen many examples of technology stacks and systems which try to achieve the previously stated goals by abstracting away complexities of underlying layers but also creating some of their own. If you are a Java server side developer you probably have worked with likes of Hibernate etc (which helps you create database queries). This usually results in poor results and has been discussed in community  (to quote "the resulting cakes  from cake mixes generally taste worse tha...

After learning about bluetooth smart, I have been wanting to write some phonegap/cordova apps for my self. There are few plugins ( 1 , 2 , 3 ) available on github but in my opinion the most promising one is from EvoThings called cordova-ble . I decided to write my self a sample app for scanning on a weekend and ended up modifying one of the examples from EvoThings and mixing in topcoat and zepto as per phonegap expert recommendations . Code is here . The code is dead simple, so I won't bother to explain it, but essentially it is just HTML5/CSS3/JS stitched together with the evothings plugin. Video made with the help of   Reflector ,  Android SCR  and Apple iMovie

I had the pleasure of sharing my recent learnings about Bluetooth Low Energy in a Internet of Things meetup in Stockholm. It was inspired by a similar meetup held in San Fransisco back in October. I would like to share some learning resources for people who attended the meetup and this is what this post is about. I would try to make this list grow over time. Edit: I am dumping more links here from Droidcon Stockholm Videos First the basics. I think the best place to start and get excited is from youtube videos  There are lots of videos from Bluetooth Tech channel, from home automation, security etc.  If you want to go more in depth you can watch Robin Heydon from CSR do a really nice intro to BLE. This intro is similar to other webinars that are available out there. You should watch the whole series to get a basic idea This following video presents BLE from a Linux perspective. I think it introduces too much detail without context, but can be worth watchi...

I am really glad that interest in Neo4j education is picking up and NeoTechnolgoy is taking a fun approaches to help people learn graph databases. These efforts tie in neatly with my suggestions regarding Neo4j community outreach. Back in 2012 we had the Neo4j heroku challenge . At that time Cypher was just coming out and the aim of heroku challenge was to get people comfortable with code/cloud and Neo4j. In the last year or so Cypher has evolved considerably and now it is a great initiative by the Neo4j-community-team to hold a challenge that focused on Cypher and graph modelling. In this post I would like to go through my personal favourite gists from this challenge. I have a " fair " understanding of modelling with graphs; yet I learn some thing new and interesting, almost every time, when I am looking at other people's graph models (and that was my personal motivation when I began reviewing the gists ). I am not sure how the voting for this challenge will be d...

This is like the fifth time in the last 10 years that I have started a new blog. I am still trying to find a balance between what to post/share with the world and what to keep it to my self. My last blog was titled "No more rants" and today I have forcefully retired it.  Why (you may ask?). My initial goal of that blog was to only focus on technical content and not say too much about other stuff (like politics, my travel adventures, life in northern Europe). But now I have changed my mind about it because I missed writing. I think writing helps you become a better person, since one(usually) takes time to reflect on the topic. It is another thing altogether that with blogs you open your self up to the world and that can have some consequences (mostly some thing you wrote a while back can come to bite you back, example in my case was bashing of a company for no reason other than fashion, and of course bad writing that just make you look un-intelligent.  I think I w...

I copied this post from my previous blog. This post is about some ideas for helping the the cause of NoSQL and Neo4j education.    The purpose of this (longish) post is to jot down my ideas about education of  Neo4j  in it's community. This post is in response to an irc/online  meeetup  called on Sep  12th   6th 2012. I have been involved with Neo4j community for almost a year now. It all started with me attending  Goto Aarhus  2010 as a student volunteer/crew. Since then I have been trying to learn more about the subject of Neo4j and NOSQL for my personal and professional use. I am by no means an expert in Neo4j, or in spreading knowledge (pedagogy). But as a loud mouth trouble maker I do have some opinions/ideas of my own.  There are many aspects of Neo4j that I am interested in ( Cypher  being one,  Spring-Data  integration being other). But one topic that I am deeply interest...