-
The future for Software Engineers by 2040
How latest trends will impact software engineering by 2040 and how developers can thrive. For the next three days, Azure Community Conference is happening online. With over 200+ talks across ten tracks, speakers from around the world, this is one of the largest technology conferences organized by Microsoft community enthusiasts. I was invited to deliver a talk on the future trends that are under way in the software industry. Titled “The future for Software Developers by 2040” I presented on four topics: First, the current job market, immediate changes expected post pandemic and long-term trends. Second, the changes that have in the last eighteen months around the practice “Work from…
-
Broken images in new WordPress blog posts in Windows
Been years since I fiddled a lot with IIS & Windows Server. But when you had to do it, you do get a thrill by dirtying your hands when debugging a problem in production and solving it. Today, it started for me when I upgraded the server I run #Wordpress from PHP7.4 to 8.0, new posts were not showing uploaded images. I was getting a 500.50 HTTP error. After hours of debugging which involved: Disabling and enabling every single plugin in WordPress, Enabling Debugging in PHP & IIS, Eliminate any file format issues with the ImageMagick CLI utilities that I use to resize the images and add my blog logo;…
-
The software programming course in 1989 that changed my life for good
Today, I found an old certificate from 1989, and that set up a train of thoughts & recalling of old memories. It was the first computer programming certification given to me thirty-two years ago for completing a course on BASIC, Word-Processing & Database management. Below is a summary of my early years with IBM PC & MS-DOS. My first contact with a computing device was probably in 1986 when my uncle gifted me an Atari 2600 gaming console. I used to spend every waking hour on the device, playing games and creating quiz presentations (a question popped up on screen and an inbuilt delay before the answer was shown) and…
-
Engineers and Documentation – Random thought
Today I had this thought and I am penning it down immediately here. Later, I will try and expand on this. Thanks. Fact: #Engineers don’t like to write #documentation. Probable reasons: No one reads them or gives a ‘like’ for a good one. Only the code matters (it runs) & brings $$$. Today, source #code have become self-explanatory (?). Possible Solution: #ArtificalIntelligence to analyse & generate tutorial videos :-)
-
Windows Subsystem for Linux and Visual Studio Code
It feels like magic when it all works out of the box on the first try. The free open-source IDE “Visual Studio Code” is one of the finest out there for coding. Combine that with a convenient platform like Windows Subsystem for Linux which allows running your favourite Linux distro with the frameworks and tools you need, and you have a perfect system to do development especially on Python. Today, after a fresh install of Windows 10 on my AMD Ryzen 7 desktop, I went with enabling support for WSL through the following commands (or through Add/Remove Programs) and then setting the default version to WSL2: You can then install…
-
The Top Programming Languages in 2020 by IEEE Spectrum
In the list published by IEEE Spectrum on the top programming languages for 2020, it is interesting to see the change in trends. My observations: Python (as expected) retains the top slot for the last four years. JavaScript is slowly raising in popularity, it would’ve been in the top 2, had it not been for AI, ML & Python. C# suddenly has vanished from the top 10 this year, feels odd as the comments in the article page point out. Similarly, PHP going out from the top 10 for last two years, I am surprised with this – as WordPress which is powered by PHP, still runs over 30% of…
-
A trip down memory lane to assembly and hex
Glancing through the FREE book “Reverse Engineering for Beginners“, brought a lot of fun memories that I had with assembly language and doing Hex dump of executables. Sharing two examples below: 1. My first freeware (downloaded by thousands) around 1996-97 was EasyPass. It removed (!) the password from a #Microsoft #Access Jet 95 MDB database files. It helped those who had forgotten password, or, that’s what I naively believed then. Believe it or not – it was just a matter of flipping (XOR encryption) a few bytes of hex values, you needed to know which bytes, that’s all. A whole chapter in the book explains this technique. 2. When .NET…
-
Python code to list movie details
This post and code has been updated as on 21th November 2019. The other day, I wanted to retrieve posts from my own blog corresponding to a list of movies from IMDB. If not found in my blog, it should retrieve the information from Wikipedia. I thought I can cook-up a Python script for it in an hour or so. It turned out to be nearly more than a full days work. Reasons for the long time taken were my level of Python skills, the unavailability of public APIs for IMDB, learning on how to call IMDB package, Wikipedia package, the WordPress APIs (initially I went with using RSS from…
