ramkalari

I built https://brickwallacademy.com/ to practise sql challenges as part of a sql course I was conducting for some students.

I once had to fix a Rails project where the original developer chose not to use ActiveRecord, ActiveJob or any of the Rails built in features. Not sure why he wanted to go that route unless he wanted to learn Ruby at the customers expense.

How does firestore fare in terms of reliability? I heard it is a cleaner and more scalable version of Firebase.

I think it is really hard to compete with Amazon on cost. That is Amazon's strength and you will most likely lose that battle unless the government has some kind of protective measures in place or you get another titan like Alibaba or Google taking a majority stake. Flipkart still has plenty of mindshare but they need to innovate. They are not going to win based on prices alone.

Amazon is not doing a great job either. They shipped a Macbook Air when I had ordered a Macbook Pro. They didn't release my replacement until their supposedly superior system registered my returns. I had to contact their support to tell them that it was returned a week back. After all the song and dance, they shipped a Macbook Air again as replacement. How is that for a market leading performance!

Play Framework

I would also try to build in as many self-service features that you can so that you are not bugged with routine maintenance requests such as adding master data. Otherwise, all maintenance requests should be done for a fee. Customers also value you even higher if you proactively do maintenance such as security fixes that maybe beyond their capabilities.

Flipkart's customer base is completely different. A large percentage of their customers will probably never own a desktop let alone access their application on one. Front is an app targeted for business where the users still use desktops where it may make sense to have a desktop app.

I have built a couple of apps running Play on Java and I like it. I still prefer Rails if the customer is starting on a clean slate but Play Java has worked out pretty well.

SEEKING WORK - Chennai, India, Remote I'm a full stack web developer with over 14 years of experience. I've been working on Play Framework, Rails, AWS & Ember for the past year.

Currently working on Android.

Experienced in building profitable B2B Saas apps as well as enterprise software.

Anand doesn't like playing long games. Carlsen doesn't give an inch even when he is down. Regardless of rating differences, Anand's game was in bad shape in 2013 and it just continued in the world championship. He is playing much better these days. It is just that his game doesn't match up very well to Carlsen's relentless style. That said, he had his chances this time like how he predicted before the match. He just couldn't take them. I'm always reminded of Federer-Nadal rivalry when I watch these two play.

It isn't true just for a Stanford graduate audience. Extreme poverty and discrimination will shock just about anybody who hasn't seen it. I live in India in a nice city and interact with poor people everyday. Even that didn't prepare me for the suffering that I saw when I traveled to different parts of the country.

I don't know where he got that idea from. Look at the recent candidates chess tournament, there were only two players in their twenties and the winner was 44. Yeah, the world champion is young but Carlsen is a special talent.

Chennai, Remote, Contract|Part Time

Stack: Play Framework, Scala, Java, Spring Integration

Contact: ramkalari at gmail

Looking to work on interesting Scala projects.

Play is simpler compared to Spring but idiomatic Play code also requires you to learn reactive programming, something you probably won't do in Spring MVC.

Having done many ALM integrations in the last year, Atlassian has been the most pleasant to work with in the enterprise space. They are young and modern compared to the other dinosaurs. Github poses a very different kind of challenge to Atlassian with their better developer mindshare. Really interesting battle on the cards.

I was working through the coursera functional programming course on scala which is modeled on SICP. While the content is really good, it suffers from the same problems pointed out by Dr Harvey. Getting used to scala syntax takes time while Scheme was a breeze.

I took the course and I found it very useful even though I had done good amount of work with databases before.

The sections on relational algebra and relational models are really good. The course covers the basics of db - sql, constraints, views, triggers and authorization very well. I particularly liked the coverage on transactions, an area that most web programmers will benefit from.

With respect to xml, I found the level of detail to be quite good again but I don't really use much of xquery or xslt these days.

While the course does cover Olap and nosql, it is quite light compared to the relational and xml units of the course.

I see that they have added a new section on json in the new version of the course. Some of the questions in the homework and exams are slightly tricky but nothing too hard.

I didn't really get to see the office hours videos, so can't comment on that. Overall, I think it is an excellent introductory db course. Just make sure you don't fall back on the schedule as some of the material can be quite heavy.

The best cs book by a mile. One can't help but fall in love with programming after reading SICP. I'm now reading Peter Norvig's Paradigms of AI Programming. It's another classic. I've also listened to video lectures of Brian Harvey. I think his own twists to SICP such as starting the course with functions on words instead of numbers are invaluable too.

I started playing around with Go on GAE just yesterday. I will probably try out a side project on Revel and see how it goes.

I was a big fan of Manmohan Singh and used to be a vocal supporter. I had high hopes too that we finally have someone who understands what India needs but his leadership through these scandals has been poor, to put it mildly. In any case, when it came to liberalization, he had no other option. The previous budgets used expenditure control and increased exports as a strategy to solve the BOP crisis but it failed miserably. He couldn't have ignored the IMF and continued a policy that had failed for the last 4-5 years. In some ways, the previous finance ministers were already taking small steps towards that path by encouraging public sector disinvestment. I'm sure any other Finance Minister would have taken the same decision. On the topic of execution, his team did a great job. However, the Indian government always steps up when it is in a serious crisis. Whether it is Kargil/ Commonwealth/Tsunami/Terror attacks, we manage to unite in a crisis and find a way to get things done. So, should we start calling Shelia Dixit the "architect" of Commonwealth Games. I'm not so sure.

I think Manmohan Singh gets far too much credit for the reforms. Those who have studied Indian Economics will know that liberalization was forced on us. We were close to bankruptcy in 1991 and the IMF forced the reforms on us in exchange for a bailout. Unfortunately, having branded him as an architect of our reforms, we have also set our expectations very high.

Given that nearly 20,000 students completed ai-class, I think the number for this course will be much bigger than 3-4000.

It was a very well designed course and Tim is a fantastic teacher. I scored a 100 but I wouldn't say the course was easy. For the most part, it was obvious. I found some of the questions slightly tricky and I would have got it wrong if I hadn't taken the time to read/think. Overall, I'm extremely happy with the time spent learning from Tim.

That said, if you are looking for really hard challenges, you should take Daphne Koller's Probabilistic Graphical Models.

Actually, I've found many live classes incredibly boring and the lectures uninspiring. Passion is a function of the instructor and not the media. The really good teachers would do well in both live classrooms and online setting.

It boils down to choosing the top 2 courses. It's difficult to do beyond that if you have a day job. One can still score high on the exams but you will have very little time left to reflect on the material.

I actually liked Norvig's teaching style. His ability to get to the essence of a topic quickly is quite remarkable.

This approach may work in a best case scenario when you have great programmers. However, there are very few companies in the world that have the kind of developers that worked for NT. What would you recommend for the average case?

I'm an Indian too and have attended classes under atleast 3 different schools of Yoga. Let's not beat down the schools which focus on asanas. If you do an intense study of Iyengar Yoga, you would understand that it is a fantastic system with the attention to details that is hard to find elsewhere.

I'm not so sure about that given that I'm from one of the countries you've mentioned. My guess is that the profile of people who've taken part in ai class would be very different from what you would see in coding contest sites. Since no rewards were promised, I would think that those groups of people who would game the system to get perfect scores would be a very small number.