Why so much craze about Microservices ? 🤔

If you have just started hearing about microservices, this is a good place to come.

I heard it for the first time when I was preparing for system design questions that are asked in interviews. And OMG all I could find here and there was “MICROSERVICESSSS”

Since then I have been exploring this “stuff” more and here I am writing a blog post to share what I have read and my learnings from them ⛄️

Hope it makes this domain familiar for beginners and ignites an interest for the same💯

CLICK TO SEE THE PRESENTATION here

Monolithic Applications :

Let’s talk about this thing first, the applications you would have developed till now are monolithic, all the work handled by one application.

Every functionality is handled by one process and hence with change in just a single feature the whole application has to be built and deployed again. Sometimes all the modules do not require scalabilty.

• https://ewanvalentine.io/microservices-in-golang-part-1/
• https://www.nginx.com/blog/introduction-to-microservices/

Microservices Applications :

• functionalities divided into services.
• services are independently deployable and scalable.
• allow modularity, each service can be coded in any language.
• can also be managed by different teams.
• services communicate via RPC or other web service requests.
• loosely-coupled components
• enables the continuous delivery/deployment of large, complex applications

Deeper Knowledge

• https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html
• https://dzone.com/guides/microservices-breaking-down-the-monolith
• Server setup with ubuntu

 

What I learnt during making my website 🔬🎨

So making your website is an easy task or difficult depending upon what extent you go to make it awesome 💁🏼‍(doesn’t it happen with every thing you do :P)

To start with, I choose Ghost as my blogging platform as it is super easy :xD to customize it and make it as per your needs.Though the following points apply to any kind of websites you make.

• SO MANY SCREENS, MY GOD 😶

  • Mobile screens, desktop, i-pads and god knows what else.
  • I got to know that it’s called Responsive Web Design(RWD).
  • So I did some research about it and their was an angel 👼🏼 called as Media query
  • You can add breakpoints i.e specify specific parameters for different elements as per the screen size they are viewed upon.
  • Do try http://quirktools.com/screenfly/ in order to check your website on all possible screens.
  • You can make changes as per the needs of the screen size and yes it’s a boon 🙂

• WHAT’S UP WITH THIS CHROME CACHING 🤔

  • So another problem I faced was that of cached webpages by browser like Google chrome.
  • Result – Whenever I updated my website and deployed, the changes were not evident when opened in chrome.
  • I went through some google group threads and read that it’s actually not the issue with chrome but the server storing my data, I read this informative comment :

    "There are two possibilities.
    
    1) The servers cache needs to be cleared
    2) The servers loads needs to be balanced
    
    A senior IT associate had explained to me that the servers load wasn't balanced between load 1 and 2. Servers tend to have array drives so your files are duplicated on multiple drives. Sometimes the servers load balancing software needs to perform maintenance or an update.
    
    Ask your server to check the load balancing, given that a load balancing is being provided.
    
    The problem you are having is not specific to Chrome. It has happened to me in Internet explorer, and in firefox for my boss. If your problem is inconsistent through out browsers, always follow-up with your server."

  • After going through open issues in Ghost repos and doing some more googling, I got to know that it’s actually something with the HTTP request and the problem could be solved by including the following two lines :

  • <meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">
    
    <meta http-equiv="Cache-control" content="no-cache">

• ADDING DISQUS DOESN’T LOAD COMMENTS 😓

  • I intially had some trouble figuring out what did I do wrong.
  • Then I landed upon this tutorial https://www.fastcomet.com/tutorials/ghost/disqus-comments-integration which worked out smoothly.

• NEXT UP, I WANTED TO ADD LINKEDIN AS SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS

  • So the thing is, by default Ghost doesn’t provide LinkedIn as a social medium to be added via it’s admin settings.
  • Yes I needed to customize it, for which I took the help of some sample websites using ghost and look around how they are incorporating this.
  • So on inspecting a bit, I saw that they all used https://fontawesome.com/?from=io to import whatever icons they wanted to use.
  • Each icon has a value something similar to what we learn as ASCII for characters, I used the values from here and incorporated in CSS using “content” property.

• I HAD NO CLUE, HOW THE FLOW WORKS IN GHOST

  • So incase you are wondering the same, I will make it easy for you.
  • PS: Remember to add {{ !<default }} as the first line beacuse without it, ghost will be unable to search your template file.

    

  • Now your customized post will lie in /../YourTheme/post-about-me.hbs for this particular instance.

• NEXT UP, AS I WANTED TO CUSTOMIZE AS PER MY NEEDS, I EXPLORED THE “get” HELPER

  • So basically what “GET” does is it fetches a block of data(posts, authors or tags)
  • So I was in short categorizing a lot of stuff and “get” allows you to fetch additional data, separate from what is provided by default in each context(in my case, it was my post).
  • Within a particular kind of post I needed several others posts that belonged to this parent category.

    {{#get "posts" include="tags" filter="tags:opensource"}}

  • The about was used for instance to get all the posts with tag as “opensource” and hence I could display the *specific* type of content.

• SOME COOL CSS TRICKS

  

• IMAGES UNABLE TO LOAD FASTER ON MY WEBPAGES 😥

  • So came across PageSpeed which gives an analysis of how many roundtrips are happening in your webpage in getting the resources and what should be the ideal count.
  • This is how many website’s result looked like 😦
  • But yayyyy, it gave optimization suggestions as well like :
    • Optimize Images
    • Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript
    • Leverage browser caching
  • There was a detailed description for all the suggestions and tada, the optimization worked like a charm 😍

And yes, my new website will be up very soon 🎉

Shell Scripting 💻

So this thing is something I wanted to learn from soooooooo long, and yes finally I could learn it and would like to share the resources too you all as well 😀

Before starting, you should be aware of the following most used commands in Linux.

Why shell scripts? 🤔

• Many of the commands that need to be executed to complete a task can be grouped together in a script to help avoid repetition when typing the commands.
• It is better than having to remember, and type the commands every time the task is needed.
• It’s a series of commands written as a text file and ends with a .sh extension or none.
• You can execute your scripts in multiple manners :
  1. Executed by using bash command, for instance(assuming the script file is in your current directory while executing the command in cmd)

      bash myscript.sh

  2. Having the file mode set as executable, make sure to make the file executable by changing the file permissions using chmod, in this case chmod a+x myscript.sh and adding the following line at the top of the file.

     #!/bin/bash 

     and then executing by typing ./myscript.sh Incase you are wondering how adding this line did the magic, the story begins with something called as “sha-bang” which indicates the path where the interpreter to the shell exists (in our case the path was bin/bash) :

     #!/fullpath/to/the/interpreter/executable

  3. Running your script as a command just like standard Linux commands, so this one was really exciting and interesting as it cleared my concepts on $PATH variable🔥

Writing a shell script 🤓

• Setting Values

  var="Welcome everyone"    #No spaces
  
  echo var       # Output: var
  echo $var     # Output: Welcome everyone
  var=filename_$(/bin/date+%Y-%m-%d).txt      #Substitution
  echo $var   #Output: filename_2018-06-08
  

  Remember that there should be no spaces in between variable and operator “=”, else it will throw an error ⚠️

• Basic Operations

  Simple expressions can be evaluated like : $((expression))

  chocolates=10
  ice_cream=20
  total_eatery=$((0.25 * $chocolates + 0.75 * $ice_cream))
  echo $total_eatery

  STRING="everyone loves shell scripting"
  echo $(#STRING)                  #Output: 30(length of string)
  start=5
  length=3
  echo $(STRING:$start:$length)    #Output: one

• Conditional Statements

  var=0
  if [ $var == 0 ]; then     #start
    echo "Zero"
  else                               #execute else part
    echo "Not Zero"
  fi                                   #finish
  # Output: Zero

  Remember to leave space between the condition and square brackets in if-clause.

• Loop structure

  COUNT=4
  while [ $COUNT -gt 0 ]; do
    echo "Value of count is: $COUNT"
    COUNT=$(($COUNT - 1))
  done 

• Functions

  brownie_shake() {
    echo yummy
  }
  brownie_shake # Output: yummy

  The arguments passed by console or to the function are passed via the dollar sign along with the position of the argument

  brownie_shake() {
    echo brownie shake costs $1
  }
  brownie_shake 100 # Output: brownie shake costs 100

• Special Variables
  

  $0 : Displays name of the script
   $* :All arguments passed to a function or through cmd
  $$ : Process ID of the current shell
  $# : Number of arguments passed to func or through cmd
  $n : Nth argument passed 

  Learnt all the basics, let’s figure out few other things that will save our lives 🤗

  

  Shell scripts + Cron Jobs 😍

• Cron jobs – jobs that run at specific times on periodic basis.
• Combining these two superpowers can be awesome most of the time for instance your system needs some system checks at the end of every month, scripts along with cron jobs can automate the process and you can relax and chill 😎

Let’s put our learning to usage and code 🚨

Sample code 1 :

This one’s pretty easy, just clear the screen and print “I am learning shell scripting”

clear
echo "I am learning shell scripting"

Save and run the script file.

• https://blog.eduonix.com/shell-scripting/writing-your-first-script-in-linux-shell-scripting/
• http://www.learnshell.org/en/

WomenTechMakers – Delhi

I have been associated with WTM for 3 years now. I started way back as a volunteer and always wished to meet all those amazing people who used to come in such events. Today, I represent WTM-Delhi as it’s lead and have a huge responsibility to use this position for the best of everyone.

Here’s the global directory which stores my info here

I will be leaving Delhi in few months and will be transfering my position as well. Before I leave WTM as a lead I wanted to document my journey.

So ready to be a part of my ride, let’s begin.

I have always been this competitive passionate girl who doesn’t want to die average. I study in Delhi Technological University and and am an outside Delhi hailing from Lucknow. I always felt that Delhities had better connections, better networking skills and I was an introvert at heart. I had that fire in me but knew no one to show it to. It was difficult for me to come out of my comfort zone and start interacting with people.

I remember it was my first year end, I heard about communities like WTM and GDG from a bunch of seniors but again my introvert nature and not being known didn’t help me get in touch with the right people at the right time.

I really wished to be a part of communities like these as I wanted to know more people, help more people and learn from everyone. I started filling the forms and going to events. Those were the days that made me realize that getting out of the bed can be so helpful “sometimes” 🤓

Volunteering for WTM ❤️

In my opinion awareness is “the most” important thing even more than your knowledge. Knowing the right people at the right time is what I have learnt in these four years of college. Many a times people simply don’t know about stuff which they might be the best candidate for. And I guess I understood by then that WTM was supporting the exact same vision. It was connecting the people to the right ones.

Subconsiously I started taking this seriously and by my third year I was really passionate about the events in terms of making the events better and helping my seniors organize them. It was WTM events only that exposed me to opportunities like GHCI, Google Summer of Code and offcourse the push to believe in myself. I got the opportunity to meet people who achieved something or the other and talking or listening to them made me beleive that “if they can so can I”. I still owe WTM in instilling those ideas/thoughts in me.

In my fourth year, I became the WTM-Delhi lead and got the responsibility to take it the way I wanted. I always wished for many things but again you get to do something only at the right time with the right powers. I started off late as a lead and am thankful to the national team headed by Lakshya Sivaramakrishnan who is making this initiative so strong by being more regular and supportive.

I attended the WTM Lead Summit in November, 2017 where I got the opportunity to meet other awesome leads from different corners of the country. I learnt a lot from them in terms of how they lead their community, what makes them different and how we can improve and evolve this community.

WTM Lead Summit

After coming back I was even more motivated and was determined to use my position for the benefit of all. I started forming my team along with the support of the GDG leads, special thanks to Arpan Garg for being my constant support. We started planning the event and we finally organized one on 11.02.2018

WTM’s first event of 2018

This event was really close to my heart as I had put in a lot of efforts in this and wanted as many people to benefit from it. The event was a success, thanks to my wonderful team and support of GDG. We got really good feedbacks and I was personally happy as well as relived that both my talk and the event went great. I wanted to make our efforts count and accessible to the community and hence me along with my team started maintaing a github repo which contains the gist of all that we do.

WTM-Delhi Github Repo

We have started collaborations with many communities like LinuxIndia, WomenWhoGo and several others.

The next big thing was International Women’s Day(IWD) which is celebrated throughout the world and WTM-Delhi also was a part of it. This time I wanted things to be a little different and hence we wanted to have speakers who haven’t spoken earlier and wish to convey their passion in short the less popular beings. We called out for proposals and we got an overwhelming response, people did wish for something like this and WTM was happy to see the community happy.

We are planning on many new and exciting things in the future including the expansion of WTM-Delhi. I want to make this community better and have awesome people in my team before I leave 😊

Journey with Kubernetes- 001

KUBERNETES BASIC MODULES

 

Detailed illustrations in next blog, follow along ❤ I will be more regular on my blogs from now :xD

 

 

 

GCI Trip

Google Code-in (GCI) is an annual programming competition hosted by Google that allows pre-university students to complete tasks specified by various, partnering open source organizations.**Wikipedia says so** but it’s way more than that, what I am going to share today is probably a different aspect of this competition.

I started off as me being completely unaware of what this thing is and trying hard to make a position in my organization to crack the coming GSOC to ultimately ending up being in the Google’s Mountain View office.Okay, let me slow down a bit 😛 It happened in November-16 when forms for applying to Google Code-In as a mentor came out in my organization-Systers.Out of curiosity I wanted to know more and hence pinged my senior who suggested me to go ahead with this opportunity which would nevertheless help in increasing my community involvement.The different aspect I mentioned before is that of being a mentor.

Many people don’t know about these opportunities where they can learn and give so much.The competition was yet to start but each assigned mentor for different projects was working really hard to prepare the tasks for the students.Finally the competition began and the queries/submissions started rolling in.The enthusiasm was absolutely a treat for everyone.Solving one’s query and making them comfortable with the tasks was my favourite part.The tricky part was to make these kids fall in love with what they were doing, constant encouragement and slight tricks here and there did wonders.

The whole phase was filled with stream of submissions with each kid trying to make as many submissions as possible.The competition finally came to an end with an embarking success.The only part left was deciding the winners.Every mentor who guided the tasks was asked for feedback and we finally came to the conclusion .Yeahhhh we got the winners and we all were super proud of everyone.

As a retreat, the grand prize winners along with one mentor from each organization got the opportunity to visit San Francisco.I hope this blog justifies to convey the efforts which Google infuses to encourage talent.

The day finally arrived when I was boarding my first international flight and was soon on-board.The feeling of being at Google headquarters in the next few hours was something very similar to conquering a dream you always dreamt of.

I was soon in the clouds of Bay area and managed to survive those 17 hours of travel.As I pen down, all those memories just bring a smile to my face.The very first day I managed to get away with my jet lag by sleeping for almost half a day and re-energizing myself for the official retreat starting the following day.The other part of day went in visiting all the nearby places in the Bay area along with a friend from another organization.

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The idea of sunset at around 9 gave me more time to explore nearby places and the place looked no less than a heaven.

The following day I was going to meet all the other mentors and the awesome kids.The event was scheduled in the later part of the day which gave me some time to sneak around.Ed Cable from Mifos came to our rescue and took the responsibility of being a good host. He took us to the Fb and LinkedIn office where we met his friend Connie Yang and saw the awesome rooftop that Fb had. These offices and their culture was a treat to the eyes. More than the location I was glad to meet the people who were full of enthusiasm and passion for the work they do.

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THE FIRST MEET

We wrapped up quickly and rushed straight to the Google San Francisco office which was the place of the event. I finally got to meet so many people including many whom I admired as well. The parents were super proud of their children and the enthusiasm in the air was commendable.It was the first time I was meeting so many people I knew virtually, in person. The rest of the day went in connecting dots on meeting people who knew another mutual friend and went like that. We got many goodies and an insight to Google advancements in various fields by several Googlers. We got a pool of stickers and were glad to have made to this point to be able to meet so awesome people.

Systers – Grand Prize Winners

MOUNTAIN VIEW HERE I COME

The next day was the most special day of my life as today I was living my dream, yeah I know it may sound cliche but who doesn’t want to end up at Google headquarters 😛 Their campus is undefined, for visitors like me visiting all of it in a day is next to impossible. The very first thing that caught my attention were the Google bicycles and the Noogler caps :xD

The rest of the day was filled with Google insights by the engineers along with their pretty cool internship experiences. They unravelled their stories of how they got into Google, for some it was quick but for others it did take some time. The idea that was conveyed after hearing so many inspiring folks was just this that focus on your work, try to find the area of your interest and you will end up in these tech giants one day or the other. We had experts from various fields who managed to create interest in almost every field they talked about. We had the prize distribution ceremony as well headed by Chris DiBona, Director of Open Source & Science Outreach.

The winners along with all the mentors

FUN DAY IN SAN FRANCISCO

The trip had lots to add by each passing day. Each day turned out to be a memorable one.The next day was planned for our outing in San Francisco, we were heads up for roaming around the city. The group was given a choice of two fun activities, one was the Segway tour and the rest to Alcatraz Island, I picked up the island tour but heard that the segway was awesome too. It was difficult to keep track of time as both the activities were so engaging. The other part of the day was kept for the famous Golden gate bridge. This day bonded all of us more and we got to know pretty amazing facts about this place as well.

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CLOSING RECEPTION

The trip finally came to an end with all of us taking so many experiences and making some awesome friends. The closing reception was another treat in terms of the Google insights along with the food as well (though nothing new, they were serving us so much food already). I managed to win an awesome book “Team Geek” along with several Google T-Shirts. The final session was kept for all the students and mentors to share their experiences,I too had so much to thank Google for, which I hope I managed with my short speech. I gained so much from this, watching closely the talented folks, realizing that everyone has the potential to make the best out of themselves and life is ultimately a journey, enjoy it while travelling.

Ooh these smiles ❤

 

GHCI-2016

Okay so another blog,this time it will be a bit longer than usual but I guess it deserves to be a long one.

Great,so let’s dive into this wonderful journey which actually started way back in September when I received the congratulatory e-mail on receiving the Grace Hopper Scholarship.I was highly elated as I always wanted to attend conferences,meet established people and breathe the air my idols do(haha… psycho touch :P)

Grace Hopper is a social gathering of all the wonderful women out in the IT industry.This celebration is now a 7 year old successful venture.It is produced by the Anita Borg Institute and presented in partnership with ACM India.

It was a three day celebration where each and every moment counted,bringing together several known and unknown faces.The first day was the most exciting one since I didn’t know what lied ahead of me.Further while travelling on the  South Indian streets exposed me to the diversities of our country.We finally reached the first-day venue which happened to be White Orchid.As soon as we stepped down off our buses we were amazed to find so many women gathered for this event.Multiple registration booths were lined up with women from different regions.This was just a sneak peek of what I was going to discover.

I would tell you one thing which would lure you to attend a conference in near future,we actually get a lot of free stuff 😛 The Grace Hopper Conference literally flooded us with so many goodies,here’s a quick look at what we got (just so that these things encourages you to apply next year and grab them) :xD

Moving on,the inauguration was a huge hit as it was planned with a high dose of panel discussions,one to one interactions,introductory speeches by the most eminent people of our industry and how can I forget,the performances by the local dance groups.The speeches were so inspiring that literally everyone was glued to their seats in spite of the mouth-watering dishes being served outside 😛 . I personally loved the keynote speaker ,Mrs.Vanitha Narayanan who is such an inspiring women(PS:She is a great dose of inspiration in case you guys need some,do google about her).

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By this time I was feeling so lucky to be a part of this celebration and I had so many reasons to be happy.From meeting my old friends who fortunately were present there to getting clicked alongside my idols.Meeting them in person is a whole next level experience,you feel more encouraged and motivated.

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Coming next were the career fair booths,all lined up together only to leave you wondering which one to go first.I don’t even remember the exact count of the booths but they all had games/quizzes/hackathons and survey sessions.I grabbed a few goodies from there as well.

The air around us was full of positivity and it was good to see people connecting with each other.The ambience of the whole place was thrilling and gave major career goals.From keynotes to street plays the place had it all.

Coming next to the food,just recalling those mouth-watering cuisines makes you want to go back even more.The food pumped all of us from time to time.Not to forget ,the red-velvet cupcake became the first love of many 😛 The days passed by in a prick of time with each day bringing new opportunities,new people and of course more experiences.Back at the hotel also we had a small meet-up where all the scholars , as well as, their mentors came along to know each other.Who knew we would just end up dancing 😛

This is how I would sum up my three days of memorable journey,though I couldn’t express everything but I guess all the fine details are on this blog platter 😛 for your service.These were my best days.Adieu Bangalore,see you soon ❤

The exciting Hacktoberfest

The journey through the month of October has been the most exciting.From getting to know more about Open Source contributions to the happiness one derives by getting their PR’s merged is something which is priceless.Yes,October was the month which exposed me to a lot many things.From getting invited as a scholar to GHCI(Grace Hopper Conference India)-2016 to getting my article published at ReignIT the journey has been amazing.

Hacktoberfest added to all the thrill.Hacktoberfest is basically an open source event which welcomes all the developers to come out and contribute to any open source project with the tag “hacktoberfest” and make a minimum of 4 pull requests in order to win the exclusive T-shirts.

I grabbed the opportunity and was able to make more than 4 successful pull requests.Cheers!! 🙂

How to deal with local server using wamp

Wamp server is the most easiest way to get your local database on board.It comes with the inbuilt inclusion of apache,php and sql.

Set up a local database with a password as well.Sometimes it does flag an error when it can’t get the required resource.PHP acts as a link between your website and the server.

Cookies are small files embedded by your server onto the computer which monitors user’s activity on the internet.Each time the user uses the internet it will send the cookies as well. Php helps in creation as well as accessing the cookies.

Currently I am trying to learn how to fetch data from a database.It is very simple though,it can be easily done with the help of php and two methods either of which can be used as per the requirements as the type of data and it’s security.those two methods are Get and Post methods both of which use different classes to fetch the data,the former usses HttpClient and HttpResponse whereas the latter one uses URLEncoder and URLConnection.

 

My First Blog

Hi everyone, this is Anubha Kushwaha,COE second year student at Delhi Technological University and I was quite keen on writing a blog since very long and that now I have one I can pour in my thoughts and views in here.