Uttam Kini's Blog

Software Development

  • Hybrid Mobile App Development : Learning from experience

    Building mobile apps is not a side dish anymore, it has become a part of the main course for businesses. Hybrid mobile apps (Javascript + Native) tick more proverbial checkboxes than pure native apps as far as a sales pitch is concerned for non graphics/game apps. The hybrid supporters will tell you to go read Read more

  • Dilemma : What is the best way to create an object in JavaScript ?

    JavaScript is a powerful but weird programming language. Syntactically it carries a lot of baggage from class based Java and ultimately C++,  even though it is not a class based language. It is an object based language. Everything is an object (like Ruby). The most commonly used syntax for defining and creating objects goes like Read more

  • Build Automation on Windows

    I have heard  people complain that it is hard to automate almost anything on Windows/.Net. It is one of the few things that even I agreed with, until I tried to do it a couple of days ago. To do it you may have to  not do everything that Microsoft tells you to and not Read more

  • Configuration belongs to the environment and not to the application

    Sometime ago I helped a client create an internal .net web application. One of the decisions that we had to make was on having a different web.config file for different environments. On a previous project, I had used xml poke nant tasks to do it. It had worked for us then, so I solved the Read more

  • The pain of using a BPM tool

    If you lookup the term BPM online, you will either find Business Process Management or Business Process Modelling. As concepts they make sense; In business process modelling, you represent your business process graphically, so that you understand them better, implement them correctly and continuously improve them. Business process management is a more high level ‘holistic management approach’, Read more

  • Jenkins plugins that every team must use

    If you are setting up a continuous integration environment for anything serious and Jenkins is your choice of a continuous integration tool, then there can be a learning curve. By default Jenkins comes bundled with very little features. For anything more, you need to install plugins. Here is a list of plugins, that can make Read more

  • Sharing code and why git submodules is a bad idea.

    Recently at a client, we had to build restful services that talk to each other. We had a choreographed set of services, which meant that any service could talk to another service. The problem we had was, we were constantly refactoring the messages that were used by the services to talk to one another. We Read more

  • Organizational Agility is the next bottleneck

    Before the ‘agile revolution’, the biggest bottleneck for organizations was building, deploying and maintaining reliable software (It still is for a lot of organizations). Then came the agile way of building teams and software. Suddenly, software was delivered faster, more reliably and more quickly. Practices like test driven development, continuous integration automated regression tests helped Read more

  • There can be no innovation without slack

    Recently I worked at a client where the developers did not have laptops and the internet was restricted. You could not look at social networking websites and blogs even. The reasons most companies give is that it is for information security and to prevent people slacking. If you have worked in technology for long enough, Read more

  • Test driving node.js

    After getting my bearings around JavaScript as a first class language, I wanted to try using it on a non-browser environment. Enter Node.js. The install was pretty simple on Ubuntu. Googling for a tutorial gives you this awesome ebook. It starts off with by an example of creating your own Http server. However my new Read more