Recently, we had a production outage for a few minutes due a database migration on one of our Ruby on Rails apps. The deployment went fine through a few stages, but the problem only showed up at the last and the largest stage. This is exactly what happened during the deploy process. New code was deployed. Restart was pending, so the server was still running old code. Migrations ran. One migration removed a column that was used in the old code, but no longer used in the new code.

Src: Claudia Dea Most problems are solved inefficiently. Innovation follows when a problem is researched first. I spent a fair amount of time in grad school. First, sixteen months on my MSc, and then another forty eight months on my PhD program. Also, I worked as a pro software engineer for 20 hours/week during my MSc days and then full-time during the PhD days. It was quite an undertaking, but I survived and now claiming my bragging rights :-)

Past few months at work we’re trying to revamp our CI infra. This has been a migration from a Jenkins cluster to GoCD. This post is a result of my frustrations with the state of CI in the age of Git/GitHub. With Pull Requests, or a form of pre-merge review process, it’s common to leverage a few automated checks alongside our human peers to remove potentially breaking changes from being merged into the repo.

Finally, I defended my PhD thesis yesterday. Family, friends, and colleagues are all sending their wishes, and it feels great to have crossed this milestone. To be honest, deep inside, I carry a sad and guilty feeling, which at times overshadows the feeling of acomplishment. This phenomenon is hard to write about, but I wanted to give it a try anyway. So, it was 2012. Life was good. I got promoted to Senior Consultant at ThoughtWorks and Shahana got a job almost immediately following the completion of her grad school.

Most people eventually come across a time when they’d need to provide names of colleagues as references while applying for a new job. The referees are often involved in the last stage of the hiring process, when the employer is generally satisfied that the candidate is a potential hire. At this stage, the employer expects to find a few things: Verification of facts. The employer wants to confirm the validity of the information such as the role, responsibilities, and achievements provided by the candidate about their past experience.

You didn’t go to college to study computer science and you have no background on computer programming. You’re not quite happy with your current job area, and looking forward to something more rewarding and exciting. You’ve heard software development is generally a good area and often times people without any prior software background can actually get a job. But where do you start? First, you’re thinking in the right direction, and I can assure you that if you like making things and have a nack for problem-solving, you can learn the skills to become a programmer.

No matter which side of the table you’ve sat during interviews, you’ve probably heard this question: ‘Why do you want this new job?’ In the recent past, I’ve interviewed a few candidates and heard the following answers so far: I’m not learning much on the current job after it’s been 2-4 years. I’m looking for something that offers better work-life balance. I’m not really looking for a job. The recruiters got in touch and I thought I’d discuss.

2017 will be the year to get closer to my PhD defense, and spending my time with family and dear ones. It means a stricter control on the daily use of social media. That’s pretty much it. I’ll sharpen my focus on events and matters that I can influence with the aim to get better at achieving the most within my limited circle of influence. This is a fairly small circle; myself, family, team at work, and a handful of friends.

2016 Highs and lows Baby #2, it’s a girl Shera, our little daughter, was born this year. She has been happy, healthy, and an absolute source of joy. Almost hard to believe that we somehow sustained the pregnancy period of my wife, while also running after our active toddler son, Shopoth. Such a pleasure to see the two already reaching for one another, cuddling, giggling, and occasionally fighting. Canadian Citizenship, eh!

I have finally been able to attend a RailsConf, the 2015 edition was my first ever. And I got to say hi to people like @dhh, @wycats, and many more. Thanks Cisco for sponsoring this trip. The attendance on the conference was totally amazing, heaven knows how many, but it looked like a couple thousands of rails developers attended the @dhh keynote. And @dhh delivered a good one. Unlike the last year’s talk, this year it didn’t cause a huge noise because it was mostly about announcing new features of rails to be released with Rails 5.