Mahboob's Journal

Half the year has gone by and I could not do much of reading till now. Most of the reading has been on the technical front, it being the subject matter of Data Science, Meteor, Ruby on Rails etc. On the fiction side, I managed just a few books like A Bad Character by Deepti Kapoor and The Madras Mangler by Usha Narayanan. Currently I am reading short stories by H.H. Munro and Chekhov. Reading, just like most other activities, is often opportunistic than planned. As time passes, you suddenly realize that you have not read any of the stuff you wanted to read. So I thought it fit to make a to-do reading list for the second half of this year. The list is given below. I may be reading other books based on necessity or recommendation, but these are the ones I am determined to complete just for the pleasure of reading.

I have been dabbling with Meteor during the past few weeks. Yet another webapp development framework!! As if we don’t have enough of those. This also intends to develop your app rapidly. But the bells and whistles it comes with are rather compelling. The first time I got introduced to Meteor and looked at it, my reaction was : This is effing cool. I haven’t seen anything like this before.

Some of my Facebook updates are like blog posts. At what point do you say, hey this does not look like just a FB update, it ought to be on my blog? I don't know, I don't have any objective criteria. Periodically, I review my FB updates, combine a few of them at random without applying any objective criteria and put them here. This is one such post. It is the collection of three updates on the Canon 5D Mark-IV, Arijit Singh and Malupu.

Matrix Factorization is hucking cool. Three times over. Firstly because it is a frequently mentioned requirement in data science jobs. For examples, you can take a look at this LinkedIn job description for Lead Machine Learning Scientist and this Apple job description for Data Scientist .

Once in a while I come across words, words that don't let my eyes go further keeping them transfixed for a quantum of time and in those moments I am lost in the addiction to the diction as if time itself has stopped. It is not just the lustre and the luminosity of those words that cast a spell, it is also the meaning and depth conveyed, some times with the truthfulness of a friend, some times with the mentorship of a teacher, and some times with the mysticism of a saint. I call them mesmerizing words, and I will be posting them in my blog whenever possible.

During my recent wanderings, I faced a mathematical problem which had to be solved by a Java program. The problem is: You are given a number n. Find the smallest number N, which is divided by n, with the condition that N should have only 0s and 1s.

As a software developer or architect, you would have encountered and used NoSQL. Even if you haven't used it, it is good to have the basics of NoSQL and MongoDB at your fingertips. A couple of times, I faltered while discussing NoSQL / MongoDB. Hence this compilation of basic points, as a ready reference.