Daily notes

I recently came to know about Flutter.io which is an open source mobile development SDK from building mobile apps. Interesting thing to note here is that as per the Flutter.io page they say it can let you create native apps for both Android and iOS which is really interesting.

Few years ago I personally learned building mobile apps natively on Android and iOS. I created apps using Java and Swift and it was amazing experience. I felt really good when I also published those apps on both play store and app store.

I wanted to create more apps but honestly I never got a chance to do that again (or no one actually paid me ;)). I do have some ideas to develop more apps, not really to make a product out of it but mostly to solve some of my problems and make my life easier. I am trying to follow #IndieWeb concepts these days and as per their principles you should manage your location without sharing that information to third parties. I wanted to create the app that will track my location and store it on my server.

Anyways after I came to know about flutter I thought I should learn it and give it a try. It will probably take me 1 or 2 days to setup the SDK and create a simple application. However should I bother about learning it.

I was wondering since there are very less developers right now using flutter, it might be a very good idea to learn it and become early adopter. Honestly I sometimes do feel that I did not get into mobile app development from very early. Although it is never late but in technology sector early adopter do get some advantage. So I am actually considering learning flutter, I will probably spend a few days on it not more and share my findings.

Do begin your flutter learning first start from their website: https://flutter.io/ and then take a look at some youtube videos. I will share some of the videos below so you can also take some hints.

and

and one more

This month I spent lot of effort in turning this blog IndieWeb compliant. So far things are on right track. I was able to configure the linkback Drupal module and it is very good. There are many other things which are still pending like managing photos, checkins and webmentions from social media sites like twitter.

On Indieweb website "Known" is mentioned as the CMS which is compliant with IndieWeb guidelines and I am just thinking of using it for my secondary site. May be I can set it up on ravi.pro domain although I decided that I will use that domain for simple stuff and use github.

May be I can create a subdomain on this domain. Something like known.ravisagar.in or stream.ravisagar.in Not sure yet but let me think about it.

Trying the like class article and it's awesome!

Trying the repost class article and it's awesome!

I love meeting clients and listening to their problems. I remember working for client understanding their requirements I used to start visualising the structure of the solution. When I was working for creating a web application I used to start asking question to myself. Should I create a new Content type for this or use taxonomy instead for similar type of content. There are number of factors to consider here. Especially the fields that are required on the Content type.

In Drupal you have Content type, Jira has Issue type and quite often I ask myself same question. Should I create a new Issue type for this type of ticket or use an existing one along with Components.

In Drupal you have the option to display what fields will appear on edit form and what fields needs to be displayed. In Jira as well there are three operations - Create, Edit and View. One thing which I miss in Jira is the ability to have different types of views. In Drupal you have Full, teaser, RSS and few other types of displays.

I don't even know why I am doing this comparison. They are tools for different purposes but sometimes it is good to learn from tools in other domains. Drupal being an open source is a product of thousands of contributors and the way it has evolved is amazing.

The weather has changed dramatically in the past few days. This week there was sun for few days which is a surprise and it actually helped in changing the mood.

I just finished configuring linkback module on this site. So now you should be able to link to the blog and notes on this site and it will receive those webmention.

Pretty cool stuff and it tool me 4-5 days to configure and understanding how it works.

I am thinking of writing a detailed documentation around it.

Sometime back I wrote a blog about using a physical agile board and syncing it with your Jira tickets! Can't believe it?

Yes it is possible. Read me blog to known more about it.

Sync your physical Agile board with JIRA

Sky is the limit when it comes to using Jira for different use cases and with this ability to schedule the physical board with Jira board it opens up tons of opportunities for software teams to use Jira.

This is achieved using "Agile Cards - Printing Issues From Jira" from Spartez

I hope you will enjoy the blog.

Testing webmention

I wrote this blog about using Portfolio for managing multiple projects, cross project releases and scenarios in Jira Software.

Portfolio for Jira: Meet your deadlines across all projects

Portfolio has become one of my favourite app in Jira :)

Testing webmention

Do you want to enable live chat for you customers? If the answer is yes then do take a look at my blog "How to engage your customers with Jira live chat support". I wrote it recently to share my findings around implementing live chat with Jira Service Desk and Slack.

I am used Chatlio and Jirio which are Slack apps to enable not only live chat that can be embedded in any we application like your company website but also to create a ticket from your slack chat to your Jira Service Desk Project.

Go ahead and enjoy the post - "How to engage your customers with Jira live chat support"

This week we moved to our new office near London Bridge. Our new office is really cool and we are still getting used to it. As compared to the last office this new office is more than double. We have separate section for sales team and our Atlassian consultants have their own space.

I love the kitchen and the room where we have a huge screen to play FIFA (an may be Mario Kart).

Overall the office is cool. The best part it that is near the Borough market and there are numerous eating options and plenty of bars.

As compared to Kennigton this place is totally different. It is very lively and personally I am slightly confused. I think it will take at least 1 year to get used to the neighbourhood.

I will share some pics soon, the Shard is also quite near to our office ;)

Really excited.

I saw these people performing at London Paddington station sometime back. Usually you will find someone playing a flute or guitar there in the evening, not everyday though but when I saw these people performing this I thought I should record them and post the video on my youtube channel.

Last week when the weather was bad. It snowed heavily for few days in London the London Paddington station was closed for few hours in the morning because the snow entered the station and it was probably safe to close the station. Coming back to the band, when I saw them playing and coordinating with each other I was quite amazed. Some of them were old but their energy level was amazing and I don't think I can ever play any instrument like them.

It is such a skill and of course years of hard work. Sometimes I wonder did I work hard enough in life? or did I actually have any real skills?

Long back I also wanted to learn to play guitar, I did try few times to learn it but I never really focussed on it but just wondering should I learn a guitar may be now or in near future? Well I don't know there is so much to do in life and it is difficult to do everything. You have to choose where to focus but yes definitely one day I will surely learn how to play and may be sit with these guys and play ;)

Good night.

I just updated my twitter profile with a slightly different text today. In my opinion it is very important to know what you are and only then you can describe it to other what you are, what you do and this is very important in professional world.

I am quite active on twitter and have been using it since 2007 so today I decided to do some change in my profile.

Go ahead and take a look and let me know what you think?

Couple of days back I posted my POSSE plan for this website. One thing I managed to do was to make some changes on the site and posting quite regularly on this site and syndicating on linkedin and twitter.

I also made some changes on the site so that the images I upload are properly picked up on both of these social sites using the Open Graph and twitter cards.

However there are few other things which I would also like to do based on the principles of Indieweb. It is all about owning your data. There are few things which I would like to do more like posting pictures here instead of facebook and also make this site more organized.

Let us see how it goes.

Weather is really strange these days in London and surrounding areas. It was not like this last year. It is slightly more cold than usual since the last few days and it was snowing as well a bit.

Today however it snowed properly and it settled as well. It lasted for around 1 hour and it was a great sight. Currently it is quite cold in outside and there is a layer of white sheet everywhere.

Here is the video. I am learning #GoLang these days and as I am getting to know more about it I decided to also share my knowledge. I made this video to introduce #Go language. I hope it is useful. Thanks.

Today I came across Go programming language which I only heard of before but never tried. There are many things in the world that are interesting but you can delve into everything however Go also known as GoLang is kinda mature language now. It was first developer in 2009 and is evolving ever since.

So today being a Sunday (my day to work on side projects) I decided to do some research about it and I found some amazing stuff online, also tried this language and tried to understood the purpose why this language was created by Google and was adopted heavily by Docker.

So I made this presentation where I tried to summarize my findings.

Today for a change there is sun since morning, however the temperature outside is still freezing. So I was at home mostly and looking for some good resources on DevOps and I came across this interesting book.

The Devops Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations.

The book has very good reviews on amazon and goodreads. I also did some research online and found the the reviews to be consistent.

Book description
For decades, technology leaders have struggled to balance agility, reliability, and security, and the consequences of failure have never been greater. The effective management of technology is critical for business competitiveness. High-performing organizations are 2.5 times more likely to exceed profitability, market share, and productivity goals. The DevOps Handbook shows leaders how to create the cultural norms and the technical practices necessary to maximize organizational learning, increase employee satisfaction, and win in the marketplace.

About the Author
Gene Kim is the founder and former CTO of Tripwire. He lives in Portland, Oregon. Patrick Debois is an independent IT-consultant. John Willis was the founder and chief architect at Chain Bridge Systems. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Jez Humble is Vice-President at Chef. He lives in San Francisco, California. John Allspaw has worked in systems operations for over fourteen years in biotech, government and online media. He is VP of Tech Operations at Etsy.

If you love Jenkins then you can't ignore these top 5 popular plugins to make your life easier. I am glad to know that Jira is part of the list and of course I am also biased about it. Lately I realised that majority of DevOps people love Jenkins a lot, although Bamboo is quite good as well and we as an Atlassian consultant working for clients in London and UK our preferred choice would be to first recommend a tool that can seamlessly integrate with not only Jira but also with Bitbucket.

Jenkins is still one of the most popular tool in the market and I also enjoy working on it. In the past few months I am doing a deep dive in DevOps and Jenkins being in the Center of Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration I can not ignore it. Few years ago when we also used Jenkins for deploying the code on staging, although we were still using manual method for production as we were not very confident about the capabilities but in the past few months I learned that apart from Bamboo these open source tools can also do a lot and with these plugins the capabilities can be enhanced further.

I decided to spent the whole day today learning about Smart Contracts and understanding more about Blockchain. The plan is always a plan. I did start learning about it but then my neck started aching. I have bought some furniture after moving to London but still I don't have all the things yet. I bought sofa, dinning table, coffee table, bed and few small things but I never bought a proper office desk. Back in Delhi I have 5 desks at home. Crazy isn't it.

I was planning to buy one desk but never bought one yet but today some divine force pushed me to buy one desk so I reserved one desk on Argos website, drove to the nearest Argos and bought the desk. Yes finally I bought one table.

However in UK most of furniture needs to be assembled. To be honest I love DIY kind of stuff but sometimes you just miss the luxury of getting things done by someone else. I was not in a good mood to assemble the desk but I had to do it. So I started reading the instructions and built the desk in around 1 hour. I felt happy after that.

We take things for granted. In Delhi when you buy a furniture you buy what you see and it is delivered to your home as it is. Such a luxury, now I realise that life in Delhi is not that bad after all.

Anyways, now I have my own dedicated small work desk.

Looking forward to the weekends now :)