Social networking doesn’t always make you procrastinate, sometimes it pays off! When @packtauthors tweeted that they were looking for someone to author a book on PHP and MongoDB, I made contact. Few weeks later I signed a contract for writing the book. And six months after that, I am pleased to announce that PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner’s Guide is published and out for sale!

In this post I intend to share a few words about the motivation behind the book and the journey of a first time author.

The Motivation

I’m a supporter of the idea the MongoDB can potentially be the new M in LAMP. The web application data storage requirements have changed a lot during the past 4-5 years. Instead of producing contents of their own, the most popular websites are hosting contents created by their users. These contents are diverse in nature and humongous in volume. Mapping the diverse data into a rigid data structure gets harder as the volume grows. This is where the ‘Flexible Schema’ nature of MongoDB fits really well. Also MongoDB is easy to learn, developers with relational database experience should find little trouble adapting to it. There is a lot of similarity between the underlying concepts of an RDBMS and MongoDB (think documents for rows, and collections for tables). Developers don’t need to wrestle with radical ideas such as column-oriented or graph theory based data structures as some other NoSQL databases require them to. Finally, it is open-source, freely available (Creative Commons License), supports multiple platforms (Windows/Linux/OS X), have great documentation and a very co-operative community, and plays nicely with PHP! All these have lead me to believe that in near future MongoDB will be where MySQL is right now, the de facto database for web application development (I would urge you to read Stephen O’Grady’s article which makes more persuasive arguments). And since PHP is the dominating language for web programming, writing a book on web development with PHP and MongoDB felt just right.

The intended audience for this book are web developers who are completely new to MongoDB. It focuses on application development with PHP and MongoDB rather than focusing only on MongoDB. The first few chapters will try to ease the reader into understanding MongoDB by building a simple web application (a blog) and handling HTTP sessions with MongoDB as the data back-end. In the next chapters he will learn to solve ‘interesting’ problems, such as storing real-time web analytics, hosting and serving media content from GridFS, use geospatial indexing to build location-aware web apps. He will also brainstorm about scenarios where MongoDB and MySQL can be used together as a hybrid data back-end.

The Inspiration

Scott Adams, the creator of the famous Dilbert comic strip, wrote an inspirational article on Wall Street Journal. I’m going to quote a few lines here:

“I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The ‘Dilbert’ comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That’s how value is created.”

These words moved me. I like programming and I like writing, and although there are smarter programmers and better writers out there, by combining these two passions I could potentially produce something. Besides I had an amazing learning experience with MongoDB. I built an API analytics solution with MySQL which became difficult to handle as the volume of the data grew. I started playing with MongoDB as a potential alternative. A month later I moved the entire data from MySQL to a more solid and scalable solution based on MongoDB. I wanted to share this learning experience through a series of blog posts but lacked the personal discipline and commitment to do so. Being obligated a deliver a book within tight deadlines solved that problem!

I also must thank Nurul Ferdous, my friend and former colleague who is a published tech author himself. His guidance and influence has been instrumental.

The Journey

My journey as an author writing a book for the first time has been an exhaustive yet amazing one! I work in a tech startup, which naturally requires longer than usual hours and harder than usual problems to solve. I would come home late and tired, research on MongoDB topics, plan how to deliver the message to the reader, write code, test and debug the code, write the content on a text editor, fight with Microsoft Word so the content has proper formatting as required by the publisher. Then on weekends I would revise and rewrite most of what I have done over the week and hustle to make the deadline. Nevertheless it all had been a rewarding experience.

In the rewrite phase I had a lot of help from the technical reviewers – Sam Millman, Sigert De Vries, Vidyasagar N V and Nurul Ferdous. They corrected my errors, showed me what more could be added to the content and what should be gotten rid off, helped me communicate complicated topics to readers in a clearer way. I convey my sincere appreciations to them!

Time to end this lengthy blog post. I hope you find this book enjoyable and use it to build some really cool PHP-MongoDB apps! I will then consider my endeavor to be a success.

This picture was taken on a beach in Phuket, Can’t remember the name of the beach right now.

The rock at James Bond Island, named so because it appeared in one of the James Bond movie.

You are always reflective when you are on a canoe.

A colorful moment.

This baby elephant put on quite a good show.

My attempt at snorkeling.

A sunny day on the beach of Koh Phi Phi

Loh Dalum bay

This got me thinking. This guy does not care about whether or not his answer gets selected before others (so that he can bag some reputation). He took his time and explained what decorators are in a well thought-out, step-by-step manner. The end result is an answer worthy of being placed in a beginner level Python book as a chapter on decorators! So there must be other answers as awesome as this one, given by users as knowledgable as e-satis! I set out to find few more great StackOverflow threads on core Python programming, had them bookmarked for future reads, and now sharing them on this blog post. You should read each of them at least once to make your knowledge on core Python more solid.

Understanding Python decorators

As I mentioned above, great introduction to decorators in Python.

What is a meta-class in Python

Another great answer from e-satis (later turned into a community wiki). Explains what meta-classes are in Python and why are they so useful.

How to sort a list of objects in Python, based on an attribute of the objects?

The answer to this question often comes in handy!

Understanding Python super() and init methods

A short yet useful answer explaining what good is super() for. You should also read the article Pythons’s super() considered super! along with this.

What is the relationship between __getattr__ and getattr?

I always wondered; and Kimvais provided the answer! Also checkout Alex’s answer in the same thread.

The Python yield keyword explained

Another gem from e-satis. Introduced the concept of iterators and generators in Python and goes on to explain the use of yield statement.

Single quotes vs. double quotes in Python

The stylistic reasons for choosing double quotes or single quotes when coding in Python. Worth a read.

Python Compilation/Interpretation process

Very detailed answer explaining Python compilation/interpretation process to programmers not coming comp-sci background; something every Pythonist should know.

Python progression path- from apprentice to guru

Last but not the least! A great thread showing what road a Python beginner should take to achieve mastery.

If you know about any other great StackOverflow posts, please do share them on the comment section. I’ll update my list. The posts must be about Python (core Python more specifically).

1. Launch Safari
2. Click on Preferences
3. Under the tab General, choose Google Chrome Canary as the value for Default web browser

You’re probably surprised I haven’t mention “Code Complete” or “Pragmatic Programmer” or any of those books you’ve read reviews of in numerous programming blogs. Those are great books by the way, and should take the time to read at least some of them.

Masters of Doom will not teach you how to be a better programmer, it won’t preach the best practices of software development. Because it’s not a book about programming at all! It’s a biographic tale of two great programmers, John Carmack and John Romero, how their passion for playing and creating games drove them to achieve superb mastery at programming and produce legendary games, like Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D and so on.

Neither Carmack, nor Romero had what you would call a healthy upbringing. They were from broken families, at odds with their surroundings. Playing games was one of the few things they would enjoy, and eventually they started learning how to create them. They had dreams of making it big in the gaming industry, creating and publishing under their own names.

These two brilliant minds met each other at their youth as coworkers. Each admired the unique qualities in the other one. Carmack was more adept in technical details of game development, while Romero had a knack for the creative direction. Together, along with some like minded programmers and designers, they founded id Software, and set out to produce hugely popular franchises. Not only were these games commercially successful, they achieved technological breakthrough in PC gaming. Commander Keen was the first side-scrolling game in PC. Wolfenstein 3D had immersive 3D graphics never before seen in games, And Doom set the bar even higher. These were the games that drove innovation in graphics programming, and established gaming as a part of pop culture.

So what do you, a programmer, are likely to gain from reading this book? The simple message that this book conveys, is that if want to succeed in the field of programming(or any other field) you must have passion for what you do. No amount of training would make you a better programmer if you lack this key ingredient. If you are a start-up founder(or work in a start-up) and have started your journey in the scary world of entrepreneurship, this book will prove to be inspirational to you.

So if you are a programmer who is looking for something to get him inspired, I strongly urge you to read it. Or read it anyway, it’s fun.

virtualenv is tool to create isolated Python environments.

pip is a Python package installer, much like easy_install. It’s complementary with virtualenv; you’ll use pip to install, upgrade, or uninstall packages in isolated virtualenvs.

In this post, I’ll show a simple workflow that will give you the basics on how to use these tools to manage multiple Django projects.

Installation

First, get these tools installed on your machine. If you have easy_install set up, you can install pip by just issuing the following command

sudo easy_intsall pip

Now install virtualenv, using pip itself

sudo pip install virtualenv

Creating virtualenvs

Now that you have them installed, let’s try creating some virtualenvs. It’s good to have a specific location on your machine where you would have all the virtualenvs. I personally like to have them under ~/.virtualenvs directory.

Create the directory

mkdir -p ~/.virtualenvs

Navigate into it

cd ~/.virtualenvs

Create a virtualenv

virtualenv -p python2.5 --no-site-packages projectA

The ‘-p’ option specifies which version of the Python interpreter you want to use for the virtualenv(In case you have multiple in your system). If not specified, the default interpreter will be used.

The ‘–no-site-packages’ option means do NOT inherit any packages from /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages (or wherever your global site-packages directory is). Use this if you don’t want depend on the global packages and want more isolation.

Finally ‘projectA’ is the name of the virtualenv, named after the project itself(not a rule, just a good convention).

You’ll see the directory projectA created once the command prompt returns. This is the virtualenv, feel free to explore it.

Activating/Deactivating the virtualenv

Once pip have finished downloading and installing the packages, hopefully without any glitches, activate the virtualenv

source ~/virtualenvs/projectA/bin/activate

You should see “(projectA)” in your command prompt.

To deactivate it type ‘deactivate’ in your prompt and hit enter. The “(projectA)” should disappear.

So now you have an isolated and functional environment for your Django project. You should go ahead and create a new virtualenv with more recent versions of Python/Django as your homework.

I hope you’ve got the basics properly. Check out the online docs to learn more advanced usages of these tools.

In the next post, I’ll talk about virtualenvwrapper, a tool that makes managing multiple virtualenvs a little easier.

I had quite a laugh watching the Volkswagen Superbowl commercial, where this kid dressed up in Darth Vader Ccostume trying to control everything using the Force.

Then I got a (lame)idea! What if the powerful ‘sudo’ command in UNIX, which enables you to perform task as the superuser, was replaced by ‘force’! So you can type things like “force halt” in the terminal and shutdown the system. The Star Wars fan inside me got excited, and the Unix fan set out on a (very short)path to figure out how to achieve that.

The obvious way to do this is create to an alias for command ‘sudo’ and set it to ‘force’. Here’s how this can be done:

1. Fire up your terminal program
2. Move to your $HOME directory: cd ~/
3. Open the .bash_profile file: vi .bash_profile (I’m on OS X. On other systems, like Ubuntu, this file will be .bashrc)
4. Add this line to the end of the file and save: alias force=’sudo’
5. Reload .bash_profile: source .bash_profile
6. Try it: force reboot (System will reboot after authentication)

Don’t worry about ‘sudo’, you’ll still be able to use it. You didn’t exactly ‘replace’ sudo, you just gave it another name.

Also, it’s good idea to check if your system somehow already not using the ‘force’ command. (Type force in the shell to see whether it responds ‘command not found’ message.)

I agree with the author’s view in summary. As a programmer, you may take pride in your knowledge and skills, but the hard truth is the real world hardly distinguishes you from a plumber(may be a more literate plumber, if I dare say). They don’t care if the pipes are laid out in an elegant manner, or not, as long as the water is running. They focus on results, neither the process nor the tools. I’ve tried to share this point of view in the feedback section of every “Why programming language X rocks and Y sucks” blog post I’ve encountered.

But let’s consider the hypothetical situation where you are an entrepreneur, who has an idea of an amazing software. You hire some smart engineers. They build it out and the sales guys close deals. Customers are satisfied, and they ask for more features. The programmers code some more, you bill your customers for their work. Everyone’s happy.

Now a few years later, you’re techies are bored. They are looking for new challenges, as any good hacker would do. You recruit some smart guys to take over their work. They enter a painful transition period. The greenhorns have to learn the intricate details of your feature bloated software their predecessors have built; so they can fix, change or add stuff as demanded by the customers.

And here’s where the architecture of the software comes into play. If your early programmers have laid out a solid groundwork, keeping in mind the readability of the code and the extensibility of the software itself, the new guys will have less of a hard time getting things done. On the other hand, if the programmers have never cared about those things, and  just produced code to meet the deadlines, the new guys will go through hell figuring out which part of the software does what and how do they all come together. You’re customers are still waiting for those bugs to be fixed, those features to be added. They get impatient at the delay, and displeased at the higher than usual billing hours upon delivery. At this point you may think having a good “Documentation” helps, but it hardly does. If the programmers never had the time or will to build the software right, odds are against the fact that would have so for documenting it.

I’ve seen(and am continuing to see) it happen. Management and customers were happy playing with the pretty UI. But when I popped the hood out of curiosity, I was surprised(to say the least) to see, along with other things, the spiderweb-like intricacies of the if-else branches, and left with sympathy for the poor soul who would have to ‘maintain’ this codebase(praying that I wouldn’t be the one).

I’ll draw my conclusion with the personal opinion, that a successful programmer(or product manager) knows how to strike a balance between the two extremes. Being the prima donna programmer who whines about the elegance of code should be discouraged by all means. But the coder who pays the slightest attention to quality, must be avoided. For a software shop whose sole business plan is to “build, ship and forget”, the later breed may prove profitable. But not for the enterprise who seeks to deliver innovative and useful products.

(Joel Spolsky, one of my favorite bloggers, gave a presentation on a similar topic. You can watch it here.)

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 33,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 3 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 38 posts. There were 23 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 6mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was May 9th with 336 views. The most popular post that day was Modifying PDF files with PHP.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were dzone.com, golang.tumblr.com, ict-blue.be, twitter.com, and facebook.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for rocket launcher, hammer, swiss army knife, gun, and lightsaber.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Modifying PDF files with PHP February 2010
5 comments

What kind of weapon is a programming language? April 2008
29 comments

Installing Python on Nokia N73 phone January 2009
8 comments

Installing Go on Ubuntu November 2009
17 comments

Deploying Rails Application on Apache with Phusion Passenger September 2009
3 comments

The first one.

Get it? Picture of Captain Mal from Firefly, next to it the famous line of Spock from Star Trek. Signed by Han Solo of Star Wars?!

The next one will surely irritate a fantasy novel aficionado, and a Star Wars fan.

Gandalf  the wizard, is given credit for a quote by Master Yoda, and he’s signing off as Dumbledor!

Fucking hilarious!

You’ll have to be a programmer to get the next joke.

Did it piss me off? No way. This one was so amusing that finally decided a post a blog after a long time!

You don’t get it? Did you say you’re a programmer?

Now you are pissing me off.

Photo Courtesy: Reddit.