Monthly Archives: August 2015

Am I a Developer? Architect? Neither?

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I have always preferred to call myself a “Dev” and thats it.

To me, “Architect” is a loaded term. It could mean quite a lot of things in real world :
– Person who keeps himself up-to-date with the various technologies and solutions that is prevailing, trending and emerging
– Person who is not hands-on
– Person who is a power user of PowerPoint 😉
– Person who when needed, may not be able to fold his sleeves and get his hands dirty on a specific code problem, troubleshooting etc.

However, Neal Ford has explained in a much better way here…am atleast able to relate to it well and also able to reflect upon myself…

  • Thing Big picture
  • Try and “know” various technologies in breadth and try and apply them to solve a business problem, and go “depth” on need basis
  • Is able to effectively provide solutions to business problems using Technology
  • And yes, “you should not be an ivory tower architect” where you stay too far away from code and become almost untouchable 🙂

Bye bye Blogger, Welcome WordPress

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Thanks to V1 for this inspirational post.

After a very long time I am hoping to get back to blogging…

Somehow when I looked at my blogger site, it was looking quite dull and was very demoralizing.  I was using Google’s Blogger service.

Somehow, I always wanted to switch to WordPress.  Couple of options I had considered…

  1. Setup a local WordPress Site in my home and hook it up on the Internet.
  2. Setup a WordPress Site in AWS.  This means I will have to ensure I take care of things like backup etc.
  3. Setup a Bitnami Cloudhosting service.
  4. Or simply host it on WordPress.com, and go for an upgrade to make my blog.karthiks.in to point to my WordPress Blog

Yes, finally option #4 is what I chose!

I had to export my blogs and comments from Blogger to WordPress.  Based on some googling, I thought I will have to do some work to setup proper redirections between blogger and wordpress to ensure the permalinks are indeed “permanent” and any google search result to my old blog link should take the user to my blog in the new WordPress location, but looks like its taken care of automatically (still trying to figure out how!)

And now it’s all kind of setup and the fact that you are able to read this blog says that all is well 🙂

Simple function to switch between multiple Java versions

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Recently we have started upgrade our java applications to start using Java 8.  Wanted to quick and easy way to switch between different versions of Java.

If I was using a debian variant of Linux(Ubuntu/Mint etc.), I could have used

sudo update-alternatives --config java

But am using a Mac, hence wrote this …

jvm() {
 export JAVA_HOME=`/usr/libexec/java_home -v "$1"`
 java -version
}