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New Year Message

Congrats & Good Luck 2020 Undoubtedly 2020 was a challenging year for most of us, and Congratulations on all those little things you still managed to accomplish last year. 2021 - New Year   Always remember, Today is the tomorrow you were worried about yesterday. So don't give up. Just keep fighting, be bold, do the right thing, and believe great things are bound to happen to you sooner or later. Accept what is, Let go of what was, Trust in what will be.  Happy New Year and this could be YOUR best year. Good luck.
Recent posts

General Hiring Strategy

Even while looking for members with specific technical skills, I generally look for these in any candidate:  1. Lots of people can raise issues and surface problems. But the best people identify the problem, propose a real solution to it, and help do the work to implement it. Those people are incredibly rare and incredibly valuable. Does this candidate look like one among them?   2. Generally, most companies don't need superstars. They need people who are curious and disciplined, and that can come from anywhere. Is this candidate curious enough? 3. Enterprise company: this is a great plan. Let's make sure we get these four other teams on board to get this done.  Startup: great plan! Is it live yet? What are the results?  Does this candidate have a startup mindset while approaching a task?   4. No one person leaving a good company kills it, but sometimes one person staying can. Similarly, the absence of a feature may not kill a good product, but the presence of a bug can.  Does

SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) from Command Prompt

When using SQL Server Management Studio, I feel it's a pain and waste of time to choose the same SQL server instance, authentication details repeatedly. As a workaround, I use to make use of the "ssms" command. If SQL Authentication:  ssms -s MySQLServer2017ENT -d testbed -u demo -p demo here, -s:  Server details -d:  Database to connect -u:  username -p:  password For Windows Authentication: ssms -s MySQLServer2017ENT -d testbed But opening the command prompt and typing this each time doesn't make sense either. So created a batch file and placed it on the desktop that way, double-clicking the batch file is all one has to do. Mainly while working on my laptop, this comes in very handy. Content of the batch file: start ssms -s MySQLServer2017ENT -d testbed -u demo -p demo exit

Lessons learned over a period of time as an IT developer

Have listed down few Lessons learned on the field which I found useful over a period of time. 1: Always execute every line of your code After developing a feature one needs to obviously test it. Make sure every line of your code has been executed at least once. Many times see bugs on a certain line of code which had never been run by the developer. Kind of a condition within your code where the control never reaches during the normal flow. The code might look decent enough while reviewing, but unless you had made sure control comes to that part of your code and test it nothing is guaranteed to work. Sounds obvious, doesn't it? Think how many times you would have faced this scenario by having used some test data which never takes you to an "else" part of the code (or) "case" of a switch statement etc., 2: Logging, Error Handling to be part of the code from the very beginning. While developing a new feature/module/project add logging and error handlin

Stack overflow is built using ASP.NET, C#, SQL Server, Windows, IIS...

Irrespective of what technology we work with how many times have we landed on Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange website on a daily basis? If we ask this to any developer the answer would mostly be MANY times in a day :) Site was launched in 2008 and is built using Windows, SQL Server, IIS, and ASP.NET along with HAProxy, Redis, and ElasticSearch, all served via Fastly CDN. Fun Facts: 1.3 Billion page views per month They transfer ~55 TB data per month 4 SQL Servers (organized as 2 clusters) Stack Overflow serves 528 Million queries per day (Peak 11000 queries per second) Stack Exchange, Careers, meta serves 496 million queries per day (Peak 12800 queries per second) Over 360 databases with the same schema, which changes frequently They made use of Microsoft Bizspark program before getting graduated All their production traffic is served using physical servers &  Cloud services are being used only for storing encrypted offsite backups (Glacier) and for DNS (Route53)

What is common between these apps?

What is common between these desktop applications/tools? Slack Wordpress GitHub Atom Editor GitHub desktop Microsoft Visual Studio Code Microsoft SQL Operations Studio All are built using Electron Framework   (Open Source) Electron framework lets us write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It is based on Node.js and Chromium.  It allows us to (re)use web components - HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the creation of desktop applications.  Then it can be distributed across platforms - Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux.

Ten Quotes From Satya Nadella's Book "Hit Refresh" That Inspired Me

A few years back, Microsoft offered a free upgrade to Windows 10. That was an exciting move as their main competitor Apple was doing it for a long time now. As a consumer felt that Satya Nadella becoming CEO of Microsoft has brought in quite many changes, and started embracing open source, which was initially surprising. So for me, it was a no-brainer to pick his book "Hit Refresh" from the store immediately once it was released. The first half of the book was more interesting where he talked about his life in India, his kids, love for Cricket, and how he got more interested in Computers than Cricket over a period. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's Book One anecdote of how he was first interviewed at Microsoft was exciting. He was asked - "Imagine you see a baby lying in the street, and the baby is crying. What do you do?". - As a young engineer, he has answered the question exactly as I would have: "You call 911". - The interviewer'