Corporate IT structure is all bullshit. Here you don’t learn anything related to programming. Here you just grow up the ladder and make some good retirement plans. The culture in here will just kill the passion inside a budding programmer.

Though being passionate about programming, writing clean codes and choosing your favorite language to code in your spare time, when you enter a corporate world having no other options, all the passion gradually fades. Things changes very soon. You tend to adapt to the crappy culture. Once inside this world, it is kind of difficult to get out and live for your passion.

Those who dare to think different always ends up quitting such manager-ass-kiss jobs and live for what they dream. It’s always duifficult to take such decisions. But it’s a now or never situation. Dare it now and may be you succeed or fail. But there is always a feeling of satisfaction that you did what you love. And its always true, if you love what you do, success will surely not so far away from you.

Recently had a visit to jubilant startup team @WowMakers. Had a brainstorming session along with my friend Nithin. Finally decided to get back to what I always wanted to be. Yes, fuck the real world and get back to coding. Just coding and coding and coding. Eat less but code more, sleep less but code more.

Will be working now on a hobby project which will help me brush up my rails basics and get back on track. As a part of this, I decided to switch full time to Ubuntu from Windows XP. My next post will be on how to set up Ubuntu 11.04 alongside windows XP.

Last year myself along with Nithin, Jaseem, Ralu and Sinan participated in this conference and had an awesome experience. Got chance to meet some peers of programming geek world along with some awesome entrepreneurs and get to know their way of business.

Hope this event too will be a great success.

Sharing a few pics from RubyConf India 2010 -

In Ruby we write regular expression literal in between forward slashes. For example, /ruby/ is a regular expression literal.
so /ruby/ matches “i love ruby language” string. To match a special character, we have to precede it with a backslash. So /\// is a pattern that matches forward slash.

Ruby uses =~ to match a pattern with a string. This returns the offset of the character at which the match occurred.
For example,

/ruby/ =~ "i love ruby language" => 7
/matz/ =~ "matz is an awesome person" => 0

When the pattern matching fails, it will return a nil.

For a detailed explanation on Ruby’s regular expression, I would recommend Programming Ruby 1.9

Why does it happen most of the time that, a talent or creativity was not given a chance just because it couldn’t clear some so called ‘stupid’ shortlisting methodology. Talents and creativity does not require any certifications to prove it’s worth. Give them a chance. Bring in some shortlisting activities which filter out the best.

A normal face-to-face interview or telephonic interview just can’t tell you that the candidate is having the potential to be a part of the team. Certification are just another piece of document which any other person can acquire with some investment and time.

Opportunity never comes again and again, so the best talent needs to be given the chance to prove their capability. People behind the scene needs to come up with some methods or activities that will give the deserving candidate the chance they deserves to prove their talents.

What would be your method to select the deserving candidate for a project rather than selecting any other person with some absurd experience , certifications and communication skills to impress the interviewer ?

You can download the source-code for the rails calendar from GitHub

You will just find two folders , controllers and views. Anyone with a running rails application can use ‘calendar controller’ and the ‘calendar views’ in their application. Once added the following files into our application, http://localhost:3000/calendar will take you to a page which will show the calendar for the present month. and you can navigate to various months. It is just a skeleton of calendar out there which can be styled and modified as per your requirements.

Some useful date functions , which can be used in this are:

date = Date.today #=> Tue, 26 Dec 2010
start_date = date.beginning_of_month #=> Wed, 01 Dec 2010
end_date = date.end_of_month # =>Fri, 31 Dec 2010

The code still looks very immature and needs improvement.

Download the PDF version of this post from here

My Ruby version :

C:\>ruby -v
ruby 1.9.2p0 (2010-08-18) [i386-mingw32]

Inorder to be an efficient Ruby programmer, you need to be pretty much comfortable with Ruby Arrays. Here i have described some of the Ruby array methods which can be very handy in your day to day coding.

1. &

[ 1, 1, 3, 5 ] & [ 1, 2, 3 ] # => [1, 3]

This will return a new array containing elements common to both the arrays and with no duplicates.

2. *

[ 1, 2, 3 ] * 3 # => [1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3]

Returns an array built by concatenating n copies of the array

[ 1, 2, 3 ] * "--" # => "1--2--3"

Returns a string.

3. +

[ 1, 2, 3 ] + [ 4, 5 ] # => [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Returns a new array by concatenating the two arrays.

4. -

[ 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5 ] - [ 1, 2, 4 ] # => [3, 3, 5]

Removes the elements from the first array, that is in second array and returns a new array.

5. <<

[ 1, 2 ] << "c" << "d" << [ 3, 4 ] # => [1, 2, "c", "d", [3, 4]]

Returns the same array by pushing the objects to the end of the array.

6. ==

[ "a", "c" ] == [ "a", "c", 7 ] # => false
[ "a", "c", 7 ] == [ "a", "c", 7 ] # => true
[ "a", "c", 7 ] == [ "a", "d", "f" ] # => false

It returns either ‘true’ or ‘false’ making a comparison of the two arrays. If both the arrays have same elements and same length, it will return ‘true’ else it will return ‘false’.

7. |

[ "a", "b", "c" ] | [ "c", "d", "a" ] # => ["a", "b", "c", "d"]

This will return a new array joining the two arrays and removing the duplicates.

8. at

a = [ "a", "b", "c", "d", "e" ]
a.at(0) # => "a"
a.at(-1) # => "e"
a.at(5) # => nil

Returns the element at index supplied.

9. clear

a = [ "a", "b", "c", "d", "e" ]
a.clear # => []

This will remove all the elements from the array.

10. collect!

a = [ "a", "b", "c", "d" ]
a.collect! {|x| x + "$" } # => ["a$", "b$", "c$", "d$"]
a # => ["a$", "b$", "c$", "d$"]

This will loop through the each element of the array and will replace the element with the value returned by the block.

11. compact

[ "a", nil, "b", nil, "c", nil ].compact # => ["a", "b", "c"]

Returns a copy of array with all nil elements removed.

12. concat

[ "a", "b" ].concat( ["c", "d"] ) # => ["a", "b", "c", "d"]

Appends the elements in second array to the first array.

13. count

[1, 2, 3, 4].count(3) # => 1
[1, 2, 3,3, 4].count(3) # => 2
[1, 2, 3, 4].count {|obj| obj > 2 } # => 2

Returns the count of the elements in the array which is either equal to the parameter passed or satisfies the block condition.

14. delete

a = [ "a", "b", "b", "b", "c" ]
a.delete("b") # => "b"
a # => ["a", "c"]
a.delete("z") # => nil
a.delete("z") { "not found" } # => "not found"

Removes the element from the array which is equal to the parameter passed.

15. each

a = [ "a", "b", "c" ]
a.each {|x| print x, " -- " }
result :
a -- b -- c --

Iterates through the array and returns the value from the block.

16. each_index

a = [ "a", "b", "c" ]
a.each_index {|x| print x, " -- " }
result :
0 -- 1 -- 2 --

Here instead of array elements, the index for the element is being passed to the block

17. empty?

[].empty? # => true
[ 1, 2, 3 ].empty? # => false

Returns true if array array contains no elements.

18. join

[ "a", "b", "c" ].join # => "abc"
[ "a", "b", "c" ].join("-") # => "a-b-c"

Returns a string created by converting each each element of the array to a string and con-catenating them, separated each by separator.

19. last

[ "w", "x", "y", "z" ].last # => "z"
[ "w", "x", "y", "z" ].last(1) # => ["z"]
[ "w", "x", "y", "z" ].last(3) # => ["x", "y", "z"]

Returns the last element, or last count elements, of array.

20. length

[ 1, nil, 3, nil, 5 ].length # => 5

Returns the number of elements in array.

21. pop

a = %w{ f r a b j o u s }
a.pop # => "s"
a # => ["f", "r", "a", "b", "j", "o", "u"]
a.pop(3) # => ["j", "o", "u"]
a # => ["f", "r", "a", "b"]

Removes the last element or last n elements from the array and returns them.

22. push

a = [ "a", "b", "c" ]
a.push("d", "e", "f") # => ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f"]

Appends the given argument(s) to array.

23. replace

a = [ "a", "b", "c", "d", "e" ]
a.replace([ "x", "y", "z" ]) # => ["x", "y", "z"]
a # => ["x", "y", "z"]

Replaces the contents of an array with the new array.

24. reverse

[ "a", "b", "c" ].reverse # => ["c", "b", "a"]
[ 1 ].reverse # => [1]

Returns a new array using array’s elements in reverse order.

25. shift

args = [ "-m", "-q", "-v", "filename" ]
args.shift # => "-m"
args.shift(2) # => ["-q", "-v"]
args # => ["filename"]

Removes the first element from the array or first n elements from the array and returns them. Also it will shift all other elements down by one.

26. unshift

a = [ "b", "c", "d" ]
a.unshift("a") # => ["a", "b", "c", "d"]
a.unshift(1, 2) # => [1, 2, "a", "b", "c", "d"]

prepends the object to the array. Also it will shift all other elements up by one.

27. shuffle

[ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ].shuffle # => [5, 3, 4, 1, 2]

Returns an array containing the elements of array in random order.

28. sort

a = [ "d", "a", "e", "c", "b" ]
a.sort! # => ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e"]
a # => ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e"]

Returns an array containing the elements of array in sorted order.

29. values_at

a = %w{ a b c d e f }
a.values_at(1, 3, 5) # => ["b", "d", "f"]
a.values_at(1, 3, 5, 7) # => ["b", "d", "f", nil]
a.values_at(-1, -3, -5, -7) # => ["f", "d", "b", nil]
a.values_at(1..3, 2...5) # => ["b", "c", "d", "c", "d", "e"]

Returns an array containing the elements in array corresponding to the given selector(s).

30. uniq

a = [ "a", "a", "b", "b", "c" ]
a.uniq # => ["a", "b", "c"]

Returns a new array by removing duplicate values in array.

So there goes 30 Ruby array methods for you to try. There are still lots of methods which I have missed from this list, if there is anything cool and important that I might have missed, please do add them as comments.

What exactly does this dream company mean? Why do we actually dream working for so and so company? There is no certain answer to these questions, but worth giving a thought on it.

This post just refers to the folks related to programming world as being a programmer myself, I have no idea what is going on other side of the world. Most of us out there may be either working for some big corporations or some startups or doing freelance works. But at some point of time you would be having or had the so called ‘Dream Company’ in your thoughts.

You choose your dream company based on the current status of that company, how successful it is and how much recognition you may get if you be a part of that family. Sometimes it is just a company where your role model is working or has worked in past. Or it’s an organization where you think your talent will be fully made use of and you grow in your career path. Organization work culture, management, technology all these are also factor which people consider when they get the idea of a dream company in their mind.

Do you have a dream company in your mind where you would like to work? What are the good things you have seen in an organization before you thought of it as your dream company?

As a new lad to the organization, you always look up your mentor to get answers to most of your questions, let it be related to work or anything. Your mentor is your single point of contact to all your queries.

What if you end up reporting to someone who is nothing but a jackass with some great experience in the industry, but is just another looser. Your expectations from your mentor will be like to increase your knowledge pool, but reporting to some moron, what good it does to you ? Does your knowledge level improve ? How do you grow in your career ? You get stuck were you are, unless you take the step to learn things by yourself.

But if you happen to report someone who is a true master in the industry, then you are one lucky bastard who can then just go learning the best art of the industry and excel out. Best mentors will guide you in right directions and give you right advice. Such mentors will make sure that they make real impact on your career. They help you grow, they help you succeed.

Do you think, working for an organization, you need a right mentor who could mould your career growth ? Have you ever been motivated or de-motivated by your mentor ?

This is a fresh beginning. Will be trying to concentrate on topics related to web technology mostly like, HTML,CSS,Wordpress,Ruby,Rails etc, but at times I may bore you with some freaking posts. Please do bear with me.

I was a pretty regular blogger starting of with personal ranting during my college days, And then some tech stuff after I started my professional voyage. Later on with lot of hip and hop with my job, I quit blogging in June 2010. Now after 6 months I am back again to share my experiences with you awesome people.

What made me get back to blogging ? I will give full credit for this to a hardcore techie friend of mine,Nithin Bekal. So Friend, I am here. And from now on, I will be pretty regular with my posts on technology related stuffs.

I am still thinking on where to begin with. Do you guys have any topic to suggest ?  Thanks, Seems you guys have started to think on topics. Please leave them as comments.