LIFE OF A TECHNOLOGIST

January has been pretty exciting for me since last three years, It marks my annual ritual trip to Las Vegas, this is my third trip this year. Almost all of my trips have been because of work. Since Las Vegas has some of the biggest hotels[1] in the world it has become a natural choice for some of the biggest American companies to host their internal and external conferences. As an example, CES hosts some 200,000 people every year [2].

This year I started my 30-hour flight journey, yes you heard it right I had a 9-hour layover at the London airport. Though it was far from ideal it was not that bad. If you can arrange priority pass [3] card from your credit card company or pay for it. Then you can use the lounge, showers and much more for free. I manage to steal the below picture from a hoarding at the airport. 

Then after much rest and time pass at the airport terminal, I boarded my next flight to Las Vegas. When I landed McCarran International Airport, the first surprise for me was the weather, despite rest of US struggling with cold wave because of the polar vortex [4], Las Vegas was still a good comfortable 20-degree Celsius.

Another surprise for first-time travelers would be the slot machines at the airport. I believe its the only airport in the world to have slot machines. The below photo is from my previous trip to Vegas.

When you move towards the strip [5] you realize how relatively small it is compared to other cities. The whole sole focus of the strip is entertainment, gambling, and fun.

You can see really big mega billboards, it’s really magical like you suddenly are part of a sci-fi movie. But after a point, they become just an advertisement.

Another interesting aspect of Las Vegas is its hotels, as I shared earlier it has some of the biggest hotels in the world and these hotels are not that expensive compared to rest of America. It’s common for casino hotels to lure people with low room rates as they make most of their money from gambling. These humongous hotels have some of the biggest casinos in the world.

It’s usually an endless grid of slot machines and card tables where you lose track of time. The only thing to remember while gambling in Las Vegas is “The House Always Wins” [6]

Vegas is also famous for its extravagant parties and clubs if you are a party person you are in the right place. I got a chance to attend one of the pool parties in Bellagio. Though you cannot figure out much from the image they usually are pretty big.

Couple of other interesting things to see in Vegas is to witness the magical fountains at Bellagio and Palazzo. Here is the small one at Palazzo hotel.

You should also try out the Venetian hotel, it has a very interesting shopping and restaurant complex mimicking Venice with canals and gondolas. You can even ride one !!

And there is definitely a long list of other things you could try which I still haven't.

1. Trips to the grand canyon.

2. Stratosphere Tower SkyJump

3. Slushy Drinks [7]

...

[1] https://financesonline.com/10-biggest-hotelst-in-the-world-the-highest-number-of-rooms-to-stay-in/

[2] https://www.ces.tech/About-CES/CES-by-the-Numbers.aspx

[3] https://www.prioritypass.com/en/campaigns/hk/airportlounge?sourcecode=HKGOINDIABRAND&currency=USD&gclid=CjwKCAiAv9riBRANEiwA9Dqv1emHskpIri5EAwclfKj7dW6-tPooZnKoznaU0mdwN6gdK9ZJGytSVRoC4K8QAvD_BwE

[4] https://www.weather.gov/safety/cold-polar-vortex

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_Strip

[6] https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeschultze/2017/10/27/in-vegas-the-house-always-wins-eventually/#41022ece2531

#Albufeira is a small town just 3h from Lisbon. This was our first stop of the trip. This place is absolutely beautiful. Since we went there during not so crowded time it was even more enjoyable !!

When everybody is a photographer #fail

Stairway to heaven

Symmetry

Defying #Gravity

festivities in #Lisbon

Palace of Pena

We went to #Sintra on a day trip to see the beautify national Palace of Pena. Sintra is a small town just 30 mins from Lisbon. Sintra is a very popular tourist destination, as a result, is usually very busy, so plan your trip accordingly.

Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon. We did not get a chance to see the inside of the monastery since all the monuments are closed on Monday in Lisbon.

Torre De Bellém

National Sanctuary of Christ the King.

Recently i have been trying out the new kid on the block, React.js and its unidirectional data/state management partner Flux.

The concept of React.js is very simple.

Your app is a combination of react components. 

Every component has a state and properties.

Whenever there is any change in the state or properties of the components the component is rerendered.

Though in the above points i used the state and properties very casually. Usually its very important to get your head around when to use state and when to use properties.  You can refer to this article https://github.com/uberVU/react-guide/blob/master/props-vs-state.md to find out more about props vs state. 

On the other hand Flux which calls itself an architectural pattern rather than a framework, is also straight forward.

There is a dispatcher whose main goal is to dispatch the event to all the registered objects.

There is a store, the store basically encapsulates the state of a component or group of components. The store registers itself with the dispatcher and receives the events with data from the dispatcher. it can choose which actions it should react to and modify the data it is holding.

Actions are sent to the dispatcher with a payload to be distributed to the registered objects.

This example can make it more clear

Model objects, defined by the ember-data library abstracts away the complexities involved with handling the communication with the server, serializing, as well as de-serializing of the response received from the server. In order to define your ember-data model object, you just need to extend the DS.Model object present in ember-data module as follows: Models form the core of any MVC design pattern as they describe the core business domain at hand. In Ember.js, every route has an associated model that describes the business domain that the route needs to work on. Almost all of the examples that we have seen so far operate on the static data that is returned from the model property of the routes. But most of the times the data that needs to be operated upon is not static and is fetched from a remote server.

Traditionally we have used jQuery or plain JavaScript to fetch the data from the server, using AJAX calls and then using those returned JSON objects as models in our application. This approach works well for applications that are simpler in nature, but very quickly get difficult to maintain when working on domains that are complex in nature, especially the ones that have relationships among them. We need to make sure that the correct relationship is linked and updated in our application.

The ember-data library tries to solve the problems highlighted earlier that are encountered in building single page web applications, by providing a standard way of accessing, finding, modifying, and saving the model objects of your application. By using the ember-data library, you can easily simplify your code that handles the communication with the backend server, by letting ember-data handle most of the complexity for you. This lets you focus more on solving the business problem at hand. The library also brings in a lot of optimizations to your code that improve the overall performance of your application.

Ember Data is designed to be agnostic to the underlying storage technique, and hence it works equally well will HTTP based JSON API, as well as streaming WebSockets.

The ember-data library is actively being developed and improved, and is under the beta quality. The API is highly stabilized and there are a lot of companies who have been using ember-data in production for quite some time now.

The current beta of ember-data is already included with Ember CLI and can be checked from the bower.json file, present in the project's root directory.

Defining ember-data models

Model objects, defined by the ember-data library abstracts away the complexities involved with handling the communication with the server, serializing, as well as de-serializing of the response received from the server. In order to define your ember-data model object, you just need to extend the DS.Model object present in ember-data module as follows: As you can see in the preceding code, we created a new file in app/models directory with the name book.js. The book object has a few differences from the objects we have seen so far.

Ember CLI includes the fast asset pipeline broccoli (can be found at https://github. com/broccolijs/broccoli). Broccoli draws heavy inspiration from the Rails asset pipeline. It runs on node.js and is independent of the backend platform you are working with. One of the most common ways to handle asset compilation and minifying is to use the Grunt task runner, or a similar tool. Let's say you are working on an application that involves the compilation of CoffeeScript, Sass, and other similar assets. Now to make these assets available to our application, you will have to write a Grunt task that does the compilation. When you start the active development of your application, you will realize that running the Grunt task after making any changes to your CoffeeScript or Sass files iscumbersomeandtime-consuming.So,youstartusinggrunt watchinyour application to rebuild your entire application whenever you make any changes anywhere in your application. But very soon, when your application grows in size andcomplexity,youwillrealizethatgrunt watchistakingtoomuchtimeasyouare rebuilding your entire application, even if only one of the Sass files has been changed. Broccoli, on the other hand, figures out which files have changed and only rebuilds those that were modified. This means that rebuilding is now a constant time with the number of files in your application, as you generally only rebuild one file. This is just one example of what broccoli is capable of. It has many more useful optimizations to make your development and build process simple and fast.

Some of the assets that are supported by Broccoli include: • Handlebars • Emblem • LESS • Sass • Compass • Stylus • CoffeeScript • EmberScript • Minified JS and CSS

Every Ember CLI project will contain a file called Brocfile.js present at the root of the project. This is the definition file and contains build-specific instructions for your project.

JavaScript is a multi paradigm dynamic language that supports all of object-oriented, procedural, and functional styles of writing code. This makes it one of the most powerful, as well as the most misunderstood language of all times.

Often one aims to write code that is modular, extensible, and testable. But not everyone is able to write good quality code because it requires deep understanding of the language, design principles, as well as discipline to write code that consistently follows a particular school of thought.