React and Angular do not fit everywhere


Last few years have been fascinating with several front-end frameworks coming up. I am not going to compare them; neither am I going to talk about The Good or The Bad on them. The buzz words, the new technologies are so shiny that almost everyone I speak to today wants to work on the new […]

This part of my life is called “Chasing Quality”


We will see how this goes. But, for now the 5 rules for quality for me stand even today are:

– Deliver an artifact and ensure no one can find a defect;
– I can refactor the code knowing it won’t break anything;
– Code commits work like a charm and i can deliver code in environments quickly and with certainly;
– When I send this application to my dear friends in operation, they don’t hate and curse me;
– Quality meant, once my work is done it’s done

High availability design


Of course, eventually with many fixes over time you will eradicate a lot of cases that led to failures but it would have taken you so long and the reputation that the brand holds do dear is already damaged. You can chose to design for High Availability or you can chose to be just like Indian Railways – always delayed and always cancelled – a perspective that will i don’t think will ever be fixed no matter what they do.

AEM Development Workflow – Part 2 (finding the problem)


The AEM workflow problem is not really an inefficiency in the handover of HTMLs to CQ developers but how we should have been writing the code to begin with. We start here by seeing where the problem starts and how the code has been written. Unfortunately, we do see the OOTB Code in AEM as provided by Adobe itself are not coded to solve the problem. When I speak with Adobe they make it clear that these are reference sites and are to used as “Self-learning” but little did they know at the time that people will take this a practice and convert this into a culture.

(Unit Testing) – Cost vs. Benefit


In the current world of marketing, where we have clients who want to run campaigns in next 2 weeks, we can’t be slow in how soon we release code. You can only be relevant in the industry if you can move quickly, achieve the Continuous Delivery or at least reach a point when you can get releases out in production with a reasonable speed. Those days where releases used to happen once every 6 months are gone; or at least gone in the environment/market I am operating.

We have to have Self Testing Code, We have to Unit Test, We have to have feedback loops and We have to have feedback loop as soon as possible. There is no avoidance; let’s understand and embrace Or be extinct in a few years.

Unit Testing – Why not?


Not doing Unit Testing (again not saying “automated”), is like someone telling me – Kapil, you are driving to go to your wedding and you are late and now you have to drive faster. But, instead of putting in a few more airbags and giving you better set of wheels, better brakes; We are going to take the 1 Air Bag you have today and also replace your wheels with an older set. Now, go drive else you will not get married. What do you think I would do – Drive faster and risk my life or start driving even slower because I hope that my would be wife loves enough to know that I had no option but to drive slowly. Well you get the point – While I may get married, She is going to stay mad at me for a very long time for ruining her perfect day.

Unit Testing Framework: EAMSteps


EAMSteps is a framework that makes Unit Testing easier because of its following principles: – External data store for test data like excel spreadsheet – Automated assertions using co-related inputs and outputs – Minimal lines of code to get started It all started in 2009, when I decided that in long term I would need […]