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Decade 2020 - Humanity is our greatest strength

It has been a whirlwind of a year so far.  Fear of the amount of death has led to the lockdown of most of the world.  I was reading the article about the Virus that devastated the Roman empire through the Roman Army ( https://medium.com/publishous/the-virus-that-crushed-the-roman-army-f6754a062062 ).  In it gives us one of the closes parallel to what is going on right now. It was a contagion that spread fast and kills close to 10% of the population.  It spreads by close contact and usually spread by travellers to various towns and cities.  Difference between then and now is that we actually have the technology, the science and the knowhow to do something about it. Trouble is what we can do about it also requires us to give up on some basic freedoms.  Such as freedom of privacy, freedom of movement, freedom of association.  We have to support those that are not as privileged as us.  Some western countries do not have public health care systems in place.  This means there will be many wh
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Decade 2020 - the begining.

Hi all, It's been a while since I wrote any articles.  Since my last article, the world has changed.  2 of the biggest changes in the world has taken place. We are witnessing one the cusping events of our generation.  Covid-19 from the start of the year has given us a common enemy.  Unfortunately for many, it has proven to be one of the biggest killers in the world since World War 2.  Real question is, is my that statement truly the truth?  Did we tally how many deaths we have had last year.  What were the combined number of that?   I used to read in the history books of the Indian Caste system.  The slave trades of old.  Empires of old.  Real question I have is, is it any different now?  I am not a politician, a historian, a protester, a captain of industry, a health care worker, an elder, a black person, or a white person, so I don't know.  There are people who are far more qualified than I am who can answering many of these questions of today. Here is what I see in this worl
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New Decade: What clients want - the quest for Beauty, Functionality or User Experience

Happy new year everyone, welcome to the new decade. My career now sits at over a decade and a half old.  I have done freelance and quite a bit of work for companies as full time developer.  I have learned from some of the greats and had the privilege of working with some of them too. I am still stumped by one of my greatest mysteries in my career.  It's basically what the customer really want.  I have found that to be the single biggest reasons for failure of a project.  Failure to understand what the customer really want and to get them to agree to a single set of requirement. Let me preface the paragraph above.  It's not really their fault that they don't understand what they want.  Software that does essentially the same thing works very differently in terms of user interface and user experience.  Most common example of this is how gmail worked vs good old fashioned outlook.  Essentially the same idea as far as email sending and receiving goes, but now you didn'
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My very first contribution to open source

Open source has defined my career so profoundly that I cannot even begin to be thankful for it.  I have learned so much from so many great people in open source.  I have supported and grown my family thanks to my income from working with open source technologies. Over the years I've gone from a php developer to becoming python, aws cloud infrastructure architect and everything in between.  I have learned what it takes to handle thousands of requests per second to 100's of thousands of requests per second.  I have learned how to architect, rebuild rework legacy code to work in cloud native environments. I have been through my fare share of challenges too.  I have been through properties that were hacked.  I have been through legacy systems that we had to scaffold to support because that's where majority of our customers were.  I have had to change the architecture of current system in order to be able to to continue to support our long term customers. I have also been
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Long time no post

Hello, howdy and salutations. I've not blogged in a very long time.  I wanted to get back into the habit.  I have grown tremendously in the past few years.  My daughter is now 3.  The last post I had was her birth.  Now she is one of the smartest kids I know.  She asks questions that most adults are afraid to ask, which makes me both afraid and proud of her. I've also gone through a great journey at Nextopia Software Corporation.  I've been through the creation of biggest platforms in the company's history (we called it the Watson Engine).  I have worked tremendously from old day of Monolith physical boxes to virtual boxes, to containers and even serverless. I have been part of building out the team at Nextopia over the 4 year journey and have met some amazing devs whom I have been proud to work with. Like every family though sometimes the careers of people lead them down different path.  This is what ultimately happened at Nextopia as well.  Senior devel
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Birth of a new member of the family

Over the last year my blog has lacked the love I wanted to give it. I became too busy with various parts of my life and family, and less I wrote. None of my series are any good anymore. I've not done much experimentation as I used to. I have fallen behind what I wanted to achieve with this website. I have switched jobs to join this exciting company Nextopia Software Corporations . It is a company that is at the forefront of helping e-commerce clients achieve greater and greater success. I loved working at Keek Inc. It has been a wonderful experience working at Keek, but reality of the matter is, Keek wasn't profitable. As much as I enjoyed my time there, I had a family to take care of. So with a heavy heart, I had to say goodbye to some of the best people I have ever worked with. Thanks a lot to the Keek team for welcoming me into your world, and teaching me some amazing things. I also went for a visit to my wife's home in Bangladesh. Despite all the bad ne
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Phalcon: The journey begins

I've been a php developer for about a Decade now, and it was a fun decade. I've learned php through php 4, release of 5, and seen it evolve from the beginning. Modern day apps I've worked on have benefited greatly from the simplicity and well documented function base that php provides. I've met some of the greats of php and other web technologies in the great city of Toronto. I've been through personally created frameworks and frameworks designed to provide a great deal of rapid start to any project. However, as the years went, PHP stopped being just an easy language to get a web project going. It evolved, with the frameworks out there. It evolved with the goal of producing lots of code very very quickly to get more and more websites live and online as fast as possible. Trouble is those companies who got their great start with php, is now feeling the pinch of legacy php code, and framework's true limitations. If you think about how most of these frameworks handl
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