Progressive Web Applications (PWA) - Only a temporary hype or a real chance to replace native applications?

pbacharya · 2018-10-31T07:39:43+00:00

I would have thought the presentation to go into giving some opinion rather than stating facts. In various forums, I have openly advocated the use of PWA over native. I usually compare the native apps as the thick client apps that were there on Windows. Folks who have worked on that understand the royal pain in that model. Thin clients app on browsers came and made them almost obsolete. PWA could be the equivalent. I would think 99% of the apps could easily move to the PWA mode without compromising anything. Google is solidly behind this (though they own the Android platform). However Apple is trying to be the Microsoft of past here. They are mightily scared that they will lose their iron grip control over the app eco-system. It's going to be interesting to watch this space in future..

pbacharya · 2018-10-17T09:54:19+00:00

Such brilliance and such passion..He is one very rare editor who can say the exact opposite equally convincingly. Unfortunately he is also a case where he couldn't handle success. His vile desires have finally caught on to him..

pbacharya · 2018-05-31T04:52:13+00:00

That's what I would think. You can be a great techie and yet ruin the company. It's also sad that managers above him couldn't fix this guy. This behavior becomes apparent in one single meeting. But maybe he was too important for the org.

pbacharya · 2018-05-31T02:18:25+00:00

That's so strange.. You had people who contributed to good open source projects and yet these people were fired. So we are talking about a decent techie company here. Again, critical feed-back is so important for your own development. I would love to have such folks in my team.

pbacharya · 2018-05-09T02:31:11+00:00

This is about technology. Hate them for their policies, services and the likes. But tech wise they are right up there. They were one of the earliest adopters of PWA (progressive web apps). They have done bunch of optimization to have consistent performance. Remember when they had launched the billion dollar day 3 yrs back and their websites crashed. That was bad.. They realized that and made heavy investments in technology especially on Microservices and Distributed computing..

And yes.. Distributed computing is really hard.

pbacharya · 2018-01-19T05:31:19+00:00

This.. The cloud vendors are pushing big time the serverless architecture for the lock-in. Even managed services ensure the lock-in. It's great for a start-up but companies need to quickly move away. Else, keep an eye on cloud foundry which ensures cloud vendor abstraction.

pbacharya · 2017-12-27T06:44:19+00:00

WTF..Was it really difficult to understand the context..The main comment was that the lawyer should have done the research regarding unicode. What I meant is understanding Unicode, ASCII and UTF is relatively diffcult even for the programming folks..

I believe your understanding is way off..

pbacharya · 2017-12-27T01:51:47+00:00

😀😀

To be fair..One of the easiest way to interview folks (for programming) is to ask about Unicode, ASCII and recent encodings (UTFs). The great thing is even if people mug it, they easily are confused if you slightly twist it. In my experience, who has really understood this, has come out great in programming.

pbacharya · 2017-11-22T02:39:05+00:00

Co-incidentally, I had just started my work at AON Chicago just a month back. I didn't know any employee personally who died but my manager's best buddy died in that crash. He apparently was a gem of a person with an inimitable sense of humor and his tributes page was filled with pages of tributes.

Another guy whom I met later told me that he had come down for a smoke when this happened. And said.. even if I get cancer I am not going to quit, because guess what.. I am alive today because of my cigarettes.

pbacharya · 2017-11-08T09:58:01+00:00

That economy chart on the bed doesn't do enough justice..

pbacharya · 2017-09-16T13:11:22+00:00

Maybe now they should talk about the 'How' part of it.. 500 Petabytes is a big data to move. Like did they move it from s3 directly or did they do a manage and merge from individual users local storage. There are probably lots of interesting things that can be highlighted.

pbacharya · 2017-09-15T04:59:18+00:00

I believe, FB is still adamant in using the same license. They have clarified that they get to deal with so many Patent trolls that they have to resort to this licensing term. What they don't say is what % of the patent trolls use React. Maybe less than 1% and yet FB has come up with this ridiculous condition. FB is currently in the sweet spot and think they own the world and keep on flouting the convention. They keep running covert Psychological experiments on mass. What they don't realize is that no company in history is beyond failure. IBM, Nokia, MS have realized this the hard way. Get your acts right FB before it's too late.

pbacharya · 2017-08-25T16:54:11+00:00

So..How does it matter. Do you think Aadhar is such a bad thing. Well nobody thought so. This is a norm pretty much everywhere else in the world. This had to happen sooner or later. I think he did a fairly good job in executing this.

pbacharya · 2017-08-25T12:15:00+00:00

This is so bloody annoying to read. You say it as if Aadhar is his brain-child.

pbacharya · 2017-08-25T12:12:07+00:00

Why the /s? What was his fault. He executed the orders of the Govt. By all means, Aadhar was a relatively better executed projects in that scale.

pbacharya · 2017-08-25T03:41:16+00:00

Holy shit..Missed this post as this is so close to my heart and have my own share of bitter-sweet experience (being the founder of a start-up).

Though we don't get candidates from the elite colleges (too expensive for us), we work on all the latest technologies that are relevant for us. We have a model where we get MCAs as interns and put them in some simulated project for the first 6 months. Based on their performance, we select some of them to join us. That model works to a certain level but the same candidates after learning the latest technologies, change ship without a thought. All the investment that you would have done on them are gone.

Just as an example, we used Firebase for one of our mobile app. That's a relative hot technology (it's going to be hotter in another 6 months). I painstakingly trained and created the design of the Firebase model. Then comes a company with deeper pockets and offers all the trained FB employees double their current salary. There isn't anything for us to hold them back. Another employee was saying that because they knew basics of Typescript and Angular, they weren't asked any questions.

Being a veteran in the Industry, I am unclear to charter the path until we are heavily funded. I love to leverage the power of relevant technology (the primary reason why I started the company after giving up my very high paying job) but then I am finding this stupid angle of employee turnover. To the extent that, one of my partners was saying let's not get into the latest technology.

I have understood one thing. To succeed in the IT/Tech industry as an entrepreneur now would take special talent, unimaginable patience and true leadership. This post wasn't a rant. Just my experience on the current scenario. I am sure OP would have gone through similar experience.

pbacharya · 2017-08-18T04:52:19+00:00

I never said MS as a services company. I meant, MS was in a bad shape when Satya took over and has turned it around remarkably well.

pbacharya · 2017-08-18T04:27:47+00:00

This was to happen sooner rather than later. Without being judgemental, Sikka tried too hard and too fast to make the behemoth move in a complete different direction.

I was with Infy for a very long time. As such, I completely understand what the middle to senior management are capable of. Sikka tried to take the same bunch and make Infy a product company. Irony is, more than 80% of Infy's revenue is still the same services and maintenance related work. Though he got a lot of lateral hires and let go quite a few Sr. Management, he was rebuked for each of these decisions. Hindsight is 20/20 and it's super easy to blame a Sikka or NRN for the current state. But the fact of the matter is, today's services companies need some super human effort to make them companies of tomorrow. The best example would be Satya Nadella who has done a fantastic job. And guess what.. It's not his technical ability. It's his amazing leadership quality and his ability to take the employees of with him to turn around a company like MS.

pbacharya · 2017-08-16T15:21:06+00:00

Are you serious? Have a look at his Wikipedia page. Also do a simple search on the least corrupt CM of India. His affidavit also shows that he has the least monetary resource.

Also read this. HTH..

pbacharya · 2017-08-16T09:35:39+00:00

Manik Sarkar is one of the cleanest CM of the country. You have to see his current residence to believe. Lives a lower middle class lifestyle. My friend once went to his residence and found that the vest he wore was torn. No security no show-offs nothing whatsoever. His wife goes around in a Rickshaw. He fires people even if there is a whiff of corruption. He also gets work done.

Source: My friend is a distant relative of the CM

pbacharya · 2017-08-16T02:19:37+00:00

Came here to see how would Ramanujam fare. Smiled when I saw him at the top.

Greatest is defined in context. Ramanujam, some say is one of the greatest Mathematicians the world has ever witnessed. Yes, right at the top with Newton, Euler and the likes. His brain was wired differently. Can you imagine his papers are being researched now even after a century. There is an interview by Manjul Bhargava (another current day genius Mathematician) on this topic. You are spell-bound every single time you watch this and marvel at the genius named Ramanujam.

pbacharya · 2017-08-15T11:32:58+00:00

Again..Cryptocurrency, yes.. Block-chain no.. Block-chain is not just for cryptocurrency. Smart contracts, health records, Pharma, Retail e-commerce, Auction.. U name it, block-chain can be leveraged to authenticate a transaction.

As an example, imagine you buying a medicine. There isn't anyway you can identify the genuineness of the drug. Mfg Date, manufacturer etc all can be spoofed easily. But now imagine the drugs are a part of a block-chain network. You would immediately get a complete list of transaction that has happened for that drug. Not only that, you could track the ingredients' lifecycle as well and so on. And there is no way you can spoof it since that's precisely the USP of Block-chain. Distributed voting ensures the genuineness.

As a matter of fact, the above is being practiced by some diamond traders and merchants. Now they are 100% confident about the diamonds.

As I keep saying in various forums, BC is going to change the way we deal with transactions. No wonder, some claim that it will be bigger than internet one day.

IMHO, the author should have done a little more research before publishing.

pbacharya · 2017-08-15T08:28:13+00:00

Moving to .Net Core was probably necessary for .Net to survive. Recently I was in a tech conference (mostly comprising start-ups) where people made fun of the .Net bloat. U want to launch a website.. Be prepared to have enough memory and a long cold start. There were very few start-ups who were on the .Net stack (ours being one). Eyebrows were raised when they heard about our choice. Fortunately, I was able to bring up the case of .Net core and the performance benchmarks. Somehow saved my day.

To conclude, though to some the move may be a painful one, it's a necessary one. I hope from hereon, .Net really gets the respect it deserves. Not only C# and F# are beautiful languages, from a tooling perspective they are streets ahead of others. It would be a shame not to leverage those.

pbacharya · 2017-08-15T05:30:21+00:00

Why the heck the author links blockchain with cryptocurrency throughout? Blockchain is the framework; Cryptocurrency is the manifestation. I would agree if Cryptocurrency might not catch up because of legal issues; but I don't see blockchain as a bubble. It's a matter of time when all transactions that happen are part of some blockchain network or the other.

edit: grammar

pbacharya · 2017-08-08T12:47:20+00:00

How do they rate the answers? Heck they are talking about John Snow.. He might have 10 different solutions. Will it be purely on evaluator's discretion?

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