I write about math, tech and computer science related topics. https://www.ahsan.io ahsan.io The fall of the wall gave Berlin a rebirth. It's a young, hip city with fascinating history and vibrant culture. I absolutely loved my stay here. Here are some amateur pictures that I clicked randomly over the course of a year and half. © ahsan.io Wed, 28 Oct 2020 00:00:00 -0700 https://www.ahsan.io/2020-10-28-berlin/ https://www.ahsan.io/2020-10-28-berlin/ Databases are one of the more challenging aspects of scaling a service. A monolithic database could meet the requirements in the start, but as the application scales, a single database tends to become the bottleneck. Apart from scaling, there might also be other situations where a single database architecture is... Fri, 15 May 2020 00:00:00 -0700 https://www.ahsan.io/2020-05-15-distributed-databases/ https://www.ahsan.io/2020-05-15-distributed-databases/ Copying dictionaries in Python is easy, but with a few gotchas in special cases. Dictionaries with immutable values can be copied simply by passing as arguments to the dict() constructor method. Immutable types in Python are int, float, decimal, bool, str, tuple, and range. Example: original_dict = dict({'foo': 'bar', 'fizz':... Sat, 04 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0700 https://www.ahsan.io/2020-04-04-python-dicts/ https://www.ahsan.io/2020-04-04-python-dicts/ I was watching a video on YouTube about the Internet’s networking infrastructure, and it got me thinking: “What is the modulation method used by modern electronic devices to communicate with networking hardware?”. The pursuit of an answer took me deep into the rabbit-hole that is communication theory. TL;DR: WLAN 802.11... Thu, 02 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0700 https://www.ahsan.io/2020-04-02-qpsk/ https://www.ahsan.io/2020-04-02-qpsk/ Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps are two ideas that have different origins but the same underlying objectives. DevOps advocates for certain practices that increase success and productivity in a team building and running software. These include: Reduce organization silos Accept failure as normal Implement gradual change Leverage automation and... Sun, 26 May 2019 00:00:00 -0700 https://www.ahsan.io/2019-05-26-sre-implements-devops/ https://www.ahsan.io/2019-05-26-sre-implements-devops/ Oranges are orange, water is wet, and observability is a best SRE practice. Applications today comprise of multiple independent sub-systems in the form of distributed microservices, that are in the case of containerization, more ephemeral. Having visibility of these individual components, their performance and behaviors is key in designing and... Tue, 19 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0800 https://www.ahsan.io/2019-02-19-observability/ https://www.ahsan.io/2019-02-19-observability/ As is the case with majority of my blog posts, this one is also an answer to a question that spontaneously popped up in my head one day: “Are there any functions that have the same inverse function as their first derivative?” Spoiler alert: there are atleast two and, they’re... Fri, 01 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0800 https://www.ahsan.io/2019-02-01-inverse-derivative/ https://www.ahsan.io/2019-02-01-inverse-derivative/ What will the Internet look like when humanity has reached interplanetary status? With companies like SpaceX aspiring to land the first humans on Mars by 2024, we don’t have a lot of time to figure it out. Thankfully there has already been some development in this space. In one of... Wed, 16 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0800 https://www.ahsan.io/2019-01-16-interplanetary-internet/ https://www.ahsan.io/2019-01-16-interplanetary-internet/ Contrary to popular belief, failure is always an option. Totally reasonable in certain circumstances, as well. There exists no such thing as a perfect service. Every service will experience downtimes at different points in its life; under peak traffic, due to hardware failure or even caused by network partition. It... Wed, 09 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0800 https://www.ahsan.io/2019-01-09-istio-circuit-breaking/ https://www.ahsan.io/2019-01-09-istio-circuit-breaking/ The World runs on technology. Modern society functions on the assumption that technology just works. Tech keeps our airplanes in the sky and our people across the globe in touch. When it works, we can have a pair of socks delivered at the doorstep and when it fails, a rocket... Sat, 29 Dec 2018 00:00:00 -0800 https://www.ahsan.io/2018-12-29-world-runs-tech/ https://www.ahsan.io/2018-12-29-world-runs-tech/ In my previous blog-post about Istio, I described briefly what Istio service mesh is and what problems it solves. In this one, I’ll try to take a deeper look under the hood and identify some limitations of Istio service mesh. In the olden days, application tracing and telemetry required instrumentation... Tue, 11 Dec 2018 00:00:00 -0800 https://www.ahsan.io/2018-12-11-tracing/ https://www.ahsan.io/2018-12-11-tracing/ Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment built on Chrome’s V8 engine and libuv’s asynchronous IO. It is primarily used for building backend services and APIs. Due to its very active community it has become one of the most popular server side frameworks. With the backing of npm, almost any kind... Fri, 07 Dec 2018 00:00:00 -0800 https://www.ahsan.io/2018-12-07-performant-nodejs/ https://www.ahsan.io/2018-12-07-performant-nodejs/ In my previous blog post, I described briefly what Kubernetes is, why it is gaining such a wide adoption and how it solves a multitude of problems and makes deployments of fault-tolerant, scalable and maintainable systems very easy. Seems like Kubernetes can solve all of the problems right? Almost, but... Mon, 26 Nov 2018 00:00:00 -0800 https://www.ahsan.io/2018-11-26-istio/ https://www.ahsan.io/2018-11-26-istio/ Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration platform. It deploys, configures and automatically scales containerized applications for dynamic workloads on distributed systems clusters. Kubernetes has its origins in Google. Google runs virtually everything in a container. Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Drive, everything runs in a container. Lots of them, too.... Thu, 15 Nov 2018 00:00:00 -0800 https://www.ahsan.io/2018-11-15-why-kubernetes/ https://www.ahsan.io/2018-11-15-why-kubernetes/ Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployments are the philosphies that dictate that changes in a software project should be made more often. Commits should be tested automatically, merged in a branch and should result in some form of a running application environment without any manual intervention. Gone are the days of... Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:00:00 -0800 https://www.ahsan.io/2018-11-06-automated-lambda/ https://www.ahsan.io/2018-11-06-automated-lambda/ At first there was the monolith running on bare-metal. Code revisions for this monstrosity were few and far between. Apart from being resource in-efficient, updating such an application required manual intervention and more often than not, downtime. Scaling these application was also not a trivial task. Generally, scaling required that... Thu, 01 Nov 2018 00:00:00 -0700 https://www.ahsan.io/2018-11-01-serverless-servers/ https://www.ahsan.io/2018-11-01-serverless-servers/ GitHub Pages is a very convinient way of making personal or project webpages. There are a lot of templates available as well that allow for quick development of simple webpages. This website is built on top of the Beautiful Jekyll theme. I wanted to make a simple personal blog and... Fri, 19 Oct 2018 00:00:00 -0700 https://www.ahsan.io/2018-10-19-github-pages-custom-domain/ https://www.ahsan.io/2018-10-19-github-pages-custom-domain/ Having a seamless integration of the project management tool with your VCS just improves the overall productivity of your team. Apart from the obvious uses and benefits, it also increases visibility and promotes ownership. I recently setup JIRA and wanted to integrate Gerrit with it. I’ve listed down the steps... Fri, 12 Oct 2018 00:00:00 -0700 https://www.ahsan.io/2018-10-12-gerrit-jira/ https://www.ahsan.io/2018-10-12-gerrit-jira/ Recently, I explored more on the full-stack side of things. After getting some hands-on experience with Angular, I decided to learn application state management. The official solution from Angular is the @ngrx/store. We make use of this store very heavily in our most recent project. The project has a very... Mon, 11 Jun 2018 00:00:00 -0700 https://www.ahsan.io/2018-06-11-state-management/ https://www.ahsan.io/2018-06-11-state-management/