Here’s how I got F5 to run the Ruby file in Vim… In .vimrc: au FileType ruby source ~/.vim/nitin/ruby.vim # The above needs the "filetype plugin on" included in the .vimrc In .vim/nitin/ruby.vim: map <F5> :w<CR>:!ruby %<CR> PS: Comments in the .vim files begin with the double-quote character PPS: Apparently, we can also do an “au BufRead *.rb ….” instead of using the file type plugin

One of Vim’s superpowers is the ability to record and play macros. It’s quite simple to use - press “q”, then choose any alphabet from a to z as the register name, type your sequence of operations, and then press “q” again when done. Then, type “@” followed by the register name to play. You can view a list of the contents of the registers with the “:reg” command and can display the contents of a specific register by appending a space followed by the register name to “:reg” command.

During CoVID, interviewing applications for software development positions was often through video conferencing tools like Zoom. It worked well when applications could join from their own laptops, but sometimes they would join from their company-issued laptops so they could not always participate in coding exercises in the programming language of their choice. However, JetBrains had introduced the Code-With-Me feature so the IDE becomes a lot like Google Docs - multiple users can collaborate and code can be run on the host; the guest would get a light-weight client to connect to the host (or could also use a full IDE).

Everyone’s talking about OpenAI’s ChatGPT these days. Somebody also posted a screenshot of a conversation with ChatGPT in which it created a code snippet. GitHub Copilot has an animation demonstrating how it is able to generate code based on the comment, name, and parameters of the function. It goes a step further from the one-liner to generate scaffolding in some MVC web development frameworks, and is likely being considered by every solopreneur.

Amazon offers an entire platter of machine learning solutions on the cloud. With Transcribe (speech recognition), Textract (extraction of text from documents) and Rekognition (image recognition), AWS enables developers to extract information unstructured non-textual data. Comprehend and Comprehend Medical can be used to make sense of natural language and to produce information that can be used in workflows or to perform condition-based actions. Forecast can be used on time-series data to use historical information for making informed predictions.

In the tech world, we have intersting job titles that often people out-of-the-know do not understand. The first one I can think of is the title “Resident Engineer”. It is commonly used to refer to a civil engineer. They work on construction projects and do everything from reviewing blueprints to ensuring construction material quality. And then, there’s “Stationary Engineer”, which refers to an electrical engineer for power generation and other industrial equipment.

For anyone not in-the-know, lots of tech folk have started using Mastodon, many even migrating from Twitter to Mastodon. The ability to run your own server and be able to interact with the fediverse makes it so much cooler to run your own server again - in the past, we only did it for saying, “Hey, I have a website/blog.” This could be the next big things since IRC, but not in quite the same way - we had a choice of IRC networks, but we couldn’t actually get someone on one network to talk to another network so Freenode was pretty much the only network you would use.

I got locked out of my work account (ActiveDirectory), and it’s not because I forgot my password or because of a hacking attempt. My workplace is bilingual, and the laptops they provide come with support to run two languages - English and the regional language. HR department also sends announcements in both languages so, when I receive an email, I scroll down to read the English edition. When presented with a password prompt, there is a warning that the Capslock is turned on… but when I typed in an entirely different language, all I saw on-screen were dots.

On a weekend of May 2022, I decided to build a Java library to perform Atlas Search queries through Spring Data for MongoDB. Atlas Search is a cloud hosted service to make Lucene indices available to MongoDB instances - it takes the hassle away from building integration to get data from MongoDB into something like Apache Solr or ElasticSearch (BTW, if you decide to do this, look at Monstache!). It’s hosted on GitHub at nitredd/atlasSearchSpringDataMongoDB

If you are a database administrator in 2023, chances are that you are no longer just limited to thinking about what’s within the database. Identifying queries without indices, queries involved in deadlocks, and long-running queries is just one part of a DBA’s role. DBAs also have to think about (and hopefully never enact) how they are going to handle disasters. Continuous backups, replication, and providing the ability to quickly recover from hacks, server failures, and oopsies.