Posted by Tejus Parikh on March 24, 2013
Finding the right platform for a technology blog, especially a technology blog that references code, is a challenge. Platforms like Wordpress are very configurable, but require a lot of maintenance. Hosted platforms remove the maintenance burden at the cost of configuration.
My requirements are straightforward. I want a system that:
- requires almost no on going maintenance
- delivers content quickly
- is inexpensive
- makes including well formatted code snippets easy
- customizable
- and easy to back up
Tumblr had a lot of these features, but it failed on customizability and code snippets. Instead I decided to move the whole thing over to Jekyll, hosted on Amazon S3 and distributed by Cloudfront.
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Posted by Tejus Parikh on April 06, 2013
Having a night time monitor for the baby is a must. Being able to keep any eye on the baby when you are away from home is a plus.
Many companies are ready with solutions, but getting WiFi, night vision and two-way audio from an off the shelf solution gets pricy. Spending lots of money on a proprietary base station/monitor could also mean that my investment might be useless in a few years.
Based on a recommendation from my friend amro, I opted to get cameras from Foscam and use my old and current iOS devices as the monitors.
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Posted by Tejus Parikh on May 19, 2013
A common refrain of Developers is just how verbose the language is, especially compared to its more dynamic counterparts like Scala or Ruby. While Java cannot be made as concise as a true dynamic language, it is still possible to make the code more readable and provide clarity to the business logic.
What Makes a Language More Concise
Verbose code is possible in any language. The language’s structure, standard library and the common idioms are the limiting factors in how concise a developer can make the code. Brevity is as important as clarity.
These are some tricks that I’ve learned to help make Java less Java-like.
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Posted by Tejus Parikh on July 29, 2013
Client side list management is to DHTML as logging is to AOP. Updating, filtering, sorting, and searching are frequent use cases for client-side developers building richer interfaces. What is surprising, then, is just how horribly wrong it often goes.
List.js avoids the common pitfalls of some of the more well known plugins, such as DataTables and JQuery autocomplete. It has a clean interface, simple API, and uses the markup you create, instead of injecting its own.
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Posted by Tejus Parikh on September 05, 2013
A security flaw in webcams made by company Trendnet has caused the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to t…
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Posted by Tejus Parikh on September 28, 2013
We’ve spent a lot of time at Outbrain Select improving our search. The technology we use to power our search is Elasticsearch. I recently gave a talk at eHire’s Geek Night about the technology and some of our experiences using it. You can view the slides here.
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Posted by Tejus Parikh on November 17, 2013
I did something today that I haven’t done in a long time: I wrote an automated unit test. I loathe writing unit tests, because despite the rhetoric, I have yet to experience a dramatic increase in either velocity or code quality. Unit testing, like a sub prime mortgage, promises great returns with minimal risk and costs. The reality is very different.
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Posted by Tejus Parikh on December 09, 2013
“For myself I never found need of more than four or five hours’ sleep in the twenty-four. I never dre…
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