Mahboob's Journal

The technology world faces new trends frequently. New technologies typically promise to get things done faster, reduce costs, and open new market segments, thus improving the financials of a lot of firms. From Service-oriented Architecture to mobile and cloud computing, all of them stake their claim to deliver these benefits. However, the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will impact the world economy in a way that no technology in the past was able to. This is the core thesis of Martin Ford’s 2015 book, 'The Rise of the Robots', sub-titled 'Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment.' If AI can unleash a tsunami of unemployment, how should America deal with it?

The Human Resources manager informed that employees working in the corporate headquarters (CHQ) will have the second and fourth Saturday of the month off. This affected the leave balance calculation method in my Rails application. If a CHQ employee applies for leave and a second or fourth Saturday falls in between the start date and end date, they should not be deducted a leave. I was already using the Rails date library. Given a date, I could get the beginning of the month and end of the month in which the date occurred. Before I could figure out how to proceed with this info, I went to stackoverflow.com and put up a question[1].

I use the prawn gem to generate pdf documents in my Rails application. It has a drawback that it does not have built-in support for displaying bulleted text. So I wrote a simple function that took a string parameter and printed it with an indent and a leading asterisk.

I got a requirement in my Rails application in which the user would add a set of "Terms & Conditions" in the Offer screen. These are typically standard, but the user should be able to customize the individual clauses. It sounded oxymoronic, but remembering Scott Meyers' words, "pretty this ain’t, but sometimes a programmer’s just gotta do what a programmer’s gotta do," I set out in right earnest to figure out what can be done.

I got a requirement in my Rails application to give the user the ability to input a variable number of records with multiple fields. The fields were of text type as well as select comboboxes. These rows had to be saved to the database as child table rows.

First blog post at the beginning of the year, as was last year's, is a quantified compilation of my personal activities outside of my day job.

The novel 'Everyone Has a Story' by Savi Sharma is structured on the classic three acts of a romantic story: lady meets man, man goes away from lady and lady gets man back. Lady's goal is to become a writer. It was a breezy read for me and appealed to me as a record of the good-heartedness in people.