Creating a blog out of my discussions with students, friends and colleagues.
Many of my past colleagues, team members and students reach me at times on whether to make the job change or not which is on offer to them. Based on my experience and mistakes, I don’t reply with a YES or NO but rather provide the factors on which they should analyse and decide on their own.
So here are the factors we generally discuss in no particular order of priority:
–Glassdoor ratings and comments especially the negative ones
–Salary and CTC
–Benefits like insurance
–Campus
–Travel time from office to home and back
–Job type: Hybrid / WFH / WFO
–Culture
–Cafeteria
–Travel requirements in the new job
–Manager
–Team
–Growth, learning and other aspirations
–Location
–Investors, Founders and Shareholders
–Job role on offer
–Management
–Bonding and CTC / benefits / job role in current company
–Customers at current and new company
–Opportunity to work in non conflict of interest area part time
–Discussion with your prospective team / manager and some people working in the new organisation
–Profitability, products and services portfolio comparison
–Sustainability and resilience
–LinkedIn Insights
None of the above are in any order of priority and there are no absolutes. We need to find what suits us.
Did I miss any major factor?
Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in
Learnings from M.Tech. Software Systems – Semester 1 – Mid Terms @ BITS Pilani. Listing down important concepts from Semester 1 for benefit of students elsewhere.
Data Structures & Algorithms Design:
- Time complexity and its generalization for algorithms
- Standardization for various types of algorithms to build pseudo code and find time complexity from it
- Various types of data structures & their standardization / representation for programming
Distributed Computing:
- Distributed vs. Parallel systems
- Various architectures for distributed systems
- Von Neumann vs. Harvard architecture
- Omega networks
- Vector vs. scalar clocks and various techniques around it
Databases:
- Representation of queries and architecture of database layers
- ERD & EERD
- Theoretical foundation for databases
Embedded systems:
- ARM architecture & Micro-controller basics
- Basics of assembly programming
- Various tools for the ARM simulation
- Interrupts, registers, modes and various interfaces for ARM systems
Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in
Developers and managers both struggle at times to pre-plan usage of best practices in projects causing many problems which are best avoided. Providing below some learnings & best practices on using and working with Liferay – Part 1.
- Don’t work directly on the Liferay database. Use the groovy script console in CONTROL PANEL or the Liferay User Interface. Use the database at the max as a READ ONLY tool for analysis and debugging – even this is for extreme cases when recommended like for problems in reindexing and such for BackgroundTaskTable or Lock_ as per Help Center articles only. Stick to Liferay APIs (REST or Java / Groovy – based) for right results. Changing anything at database level can have unintended consequences which are best avoided.
- If you need a cloud offering, instead of deploying Liferay on AWS / GCP / Azure or similar on your own which can be a valid option, also consider and evaluate one of Liferay DXP Self Hosted, Liferay Experience Cloud Self-Managed or Liferay Experience Cloud. They are built on top of GCP with many advanced features pre-baked like CI/CD depending on the version you select. Liferay’s cloud offering decrease many of the efforts of upgrades, infrastructure, security, patches, CI/CD, monitoring and more depending on which option you select.
- Use as many out of the box features as possible, followed by configuration and lastly customization. There are 100s and 1000s of direct and indirect features for Liferay available on it’s documentation site.
- Support tickets are for Liferay product issues, reach out to Customer Success for short term engagements up to multi-month configuration, system administration, customization, audits and such areas. Global services is for executing projects, SME engagements to embed a Liferay expert into your team for technical help, team augmentation, custom packages to support upgrades, performance tuning, DevOps/Architecture kickstarts, long- and short-term customization development, etc. on Liferay. Reaching out to the right team maximizes chances of a fast resolution for your request. For support issues, refer this blog: https://liferay.dev/blogs/-/blogs/working-with-liferay-support
- Maintain a DevOps / DevSecOps / Repository strategy. Use best practices of code merging, quality and more.
- Maintain a list of customizations, custom APIs (REST) and modules that are deployed.
- Consider headless if you want extreme performance or a very specific User Interface with a non standard JS library or you want to connect with an external app with Liferay as the engine or want a very high LightHouse score. Even without headless high scores are possible in most areas.
- Understand LightHouse and PageSpeed Insights score. There are many hidden things which are NOT OBVIOUS – for example mobile performance scores. Consider investing in parallel into an in-house monitoring tool as well.
- Upgrades need preparation and multiple dry runs. Bad data, orphan data and bad customizations create problems in upgrade. So use Liferay in the optimum way as per documentation.
- Keep regular watch on End of Life support and premium / extended support phases. Pre-plan your upgrades by at least one+ years.
- Lift and shift from in-prem to cloud is not a healthy approach using AMIs. Consider setting up Liferay again via backups if you are shifting to AWS/GCP/Azure from in-prem. Otherwise consider Liferay Experience Cloud, migration would still be needed though.
- Search & database server should be monitored and optimized on routine basis.
- Search optimization needs to be a regular habit by the Liferay Administrator as the content and documents get updated. Explore concepts like suggestions, boosting, queries, filters, blueprints and more.
- SSO, Authentication, Authorization, Login and Security need advance planning and design. These topics vary widely from customer to customer.
- There are many inbuilt apps in areas of collaboration, social, workflow, content, process, documents and more. Explore and use them before doing customizations.
- Explore Liferay marketplace for technical & functional accelerators / solutions before investing in developing from scratch.
- Maintain documentation for your architecture, design, customizations, testing, security, code quality and other areas.
- Understand and study portal & system properties, they have many settings which can help in managing various scenarios directly by configuration only.
- Explore Liferay University and trainings on it.
- Clustered environments are possible in Liferay and consider planning for them right during your architecture, design phase at the start of project rather than later.
- Consider usage of Advanced or S3 filestore, Clustering, Headless, Liferay DevStudio, Docker images of Liferay, Virtual instances and similar advanced concepts as need be from early in the project.
- Understand Liferay architecture, tooling and internals like Portlets, OSGi, Liferay DevStudio, Configurations, Control Panel, Gogo Shell, Module projects, Dependencies, Modularity and such.
- Your important directories and areas in Liferay are: Liferay Home and sub-directories, Filestore / document library – data folder, Custom modules, Configuration files in Liferay Home sub/directories, Search server, Control Panel, Database, Other peripheral configuration areas like load balancer, application server, networking, clustered environments and such.
- Learn to use the Liferay forums, Liferay Blogs, Liferay GitHub, Liferay Help Center, Liferay Community site, Customer & Partner portals of Liferay well. Lot of useful information is available there.
- There are in-built areas in the same integrated DXP installation from 7.4 onwards for Digital experience, Portal, Commerce with Analytics. Consider using them from DXP platform before doing customizations for features that are available already.
- Explore concepts like debug patch, logging per module and overall logging in Liferay.
- Reach out to community slack channel which can be a great way to further connect with Liferay resources.
- Keep your portal & components updated with relevant patches & upgrades as per advisory from Liferay.
- Refer Liferay resources page with case studies & whitepapers. It has useful information on cloud migration, compatibility matrix, benchmarking, what customers are doing with Liferay and more.
References:
- https://help.liferay.com/hc/en-us
- https://liferay.dev/
- https://learn.liferay.com/dxp/latest/en/liferay-internals.html
- https://learn.liferay.com/dxp/latest/en/index.html
- https://help.liferay.com/hc/en-us/categories/5843406636941
- https://marketplace.liferay.com/
- https://www.liferay.com/liferay-experience-cloud
- https://learn.liferay.com/dxp-cloud/latest/en/index.html
- https://www.liferay.com/resources/case-studies
- https://www.liferay.com/resources
Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in
Part 1 of a series on comparison between programming languages: C, C++, Java, Python, R, Rust, Scala & C# compiled from WIKIPEDIA
C:
- Invented in 1970s
- Used widely in operating systems and driver programming
- Imperative, procedural, compiled and structured with low level access to memory
- Cross platform capability
- Has had influence on C++, Java, C# and other languages
- Concepts: Functions, Data Structures, Input Output, Pointers, Run-Time polymorphism, Recursions, Static data types
- Limited keywords
- Directly compiles to machine instructions
- Static, automatic & dynamic memory allocation possible
- Runtime problems can happen in memory and other areas
- No support for object orientation & functional programming
C++:
- C with classes, extension of C
- Support for object oriented, generics & functional programming
- Compiled & low level memory access
- Systems programming, embedded systems, games, servers and more
- Standardized by ISO
- Inherits & builds on top of most of the syntax of C
- Static, automatic, thread & dynamic memory management
- Templates with implementation of generics concept is possible
- Operator overloading
- Compile time & runtime polymorphism possible
- Support for lambda expressions
- Enum data type
- Core & standard library with multi-threading, regular expressions, smart pointers
- STL – Standard template library
- Criticism: Overtly complex
Java:
- General purpose, high level, object oriented, write once run anywhere
- Java -> ByteCode -> JVM
- Automatic memory management & garbage collection
- Generics, Spring, Functional, JavaEE, Scala, Kotlin and many other projects have come out from Java
- Mostly used for application programming
- Used in Android and as a base for many other frameworks & programming langauges
Python:
- High level, general purpose
- Focusses on code readability & uses concepts like indentation
- Automatic memory management
- Features from structured, object oriented & functional programming
- Large ecosystem of libraries
- Used in machine learning, web development and many areas of data science
R:
- Focussed on statistics & graphics
- Interpreted, features from procedural & object oriented
- Large ecosystem of libraries / packages
- Commercial options available
RUST:
- Focussed on systems programming & being looked as a replacement for C & C++ by many
- Major focus on type safety, concurrency and memory safety
- Only valid references allowed for memory except few other scenarios
- Object lifecycle & variable scope checking at compile time itself unlike many languages that do this at runtime
- Strongly and statically typed
- Generics
- Ownership & lifetimes concept introduced over objects
- Features of functional programming
Scala:
- Functional & object oriented features
- Many functional features are implemented: No difference between statement & expressions, Lazy evaluation, Currying and Type inference
- Strong & statically typed
- Options to compile & run on JVM or as JavaScript or as native code
C#:
- Multi paradigm
- Static & strong typing
- Functional, generic, object & component oriented features
- Common Language Infrastructure standard driven which helps to get Common Intermediate Language for runtime
- Metaprogramming concept is used
- Garbage collector & detailed memory management techniques exist
References:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_languages
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scala_(programming_language)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_(programming_language)
Email me at Neil@HarwaniSystems.in
Notes on Liferay search optimization – Part 1.
There are two parts to search optimization in Liferay. One is the internal search and other is the SEO / Digital Marketing for content. Below, I am sharing concepts and keywords to explore for both areas.
Liferay internal search:
- Search BluePrints
- Search Insights
- Custom Indexers
- Tags & Categories
- ReIndexing
- Facets
- Suggestions
- Boosting
- Sorting
- Low level search
- Search Options
- Similar Results
- Queries & Filters
- Google Search console / Bing search console / Google Analytics analysis and feedback into internal search
Liferay SEO:
- Open Graph
- Friendly URLs
- SiteMap
- Robots
- Meta Tags
- LightHouse / PageSpeed Insights score
- Google Analytics
- PIWIK
- Headless
References:
- https://learn.liferay.com/dxp/latest/en/using-search/liferay-enterprise-search/search-experiences/creating-and-managing-search-blueprints.html
- https://learn.liferay.com/dxp/latest/en/using-search/getting-started/search-overview.html
- https://learn.liferay.com/dxp/latest/en/using-search/getting-started/searching-for-content.html
- https://help.liferay.com/hc/en-us/articles/360029046411-Building-Search-Queries-and-Filters
- https://learn.liferay.com/dxp/latest/en/site-building/site-settings/configuring-open-graph.html
- https://learn.liferay.com/dxp/latest/en/site-building/site-settings/adding-a-new-analytics-service.html
- https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/
- https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/
- https://piwik.pro/
- https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview/
- https://pagespeed.web.dev/
Email me at Neil@HarwaniSystems.in
Ideas on Innovation around Software. We Thrive On Ideas. We are Learner Centered, Open Source & Digital Focused.