Uttam Kini's Blog

  • 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

  • Going back to first principles

    I have been a developer writing mostly web applications for the last 6 years. Though I can say, I know most common concepts of the 3 tier architecture comprising of  JavaScript, HTML, DOM, CSS, Java/C#, (N)Hibernate and SQL, I still can’t say that I know everything in depth (except Java and C#  to some extent). Read more

  • Switching to Linux from Windows

    Recently I switched to Linux after 3  years on Windows. On windows I wrote code on the  Java and .Net platforms, with some amount of build scripts in Ant, Nant and PowerShell. Now I am doing a DevOps role on Ubuntu Linux. It has been a humbling experience to say the least. The last I Read more

  • The curious case of the permanent contractor

    When I first came to the UK, I found the concept of the IT contractor was very different to the Indian IT contractor. In India, an IT contractor or ‘contract employee’ is like a daily wage labourer. Let me explain why. The wages are much lower compared to a permanent employee. You work for a Read more

  • Stuff that Microsoft must stop doing

    I recently moved off .net after 3 years. Now I am working in the wonderful world of linux (more on it in another post). Looking back and reflecting on .Net and windows, I feel windows is a pretty decent desktop OS (nobody else can beat it’s driver support). I still use it for my personal Read more

  • Fighting my JavaScript demons with domain driven JavaScript

    For quite some time now, I have been a bit uncomfortable with javascript. It is language which most developers think they they know, but in reality they don’t. It is a very forgiving language in many ways (or at least appears to be, until it bites you). It has a syntax similar to C++, Java Read more