Author: Ankur Sethi
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Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, Week 2: Io
Designed by Steve Dekorte, Io is a small, embeddable programming language that borrows its prototype-based object model from Self, its purely object-oriented nature from Smalltalk, and its homoiconicity from Lisp (although, unlike Lisp, it doesn’t use s-expressions to represent programs). The language is such a mind-expanding experience that I have now spent way more than…
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Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, Week 1: Ruby
In an attempt to get back into programming language theory and implementation—a hobby I’ve neglected since I started working full-time—I recently started reading Bruce Tate’s Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. These are my notes and observations from my first week of study. In week 1, Bruce introduces Ruby, drawing attention to its dynamic nature, expressive…
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WordPress is Maximum Cool
If you dig into my post history on this blog, you’ll find I’ve written a lot about blogging platforms. When I started writing a blog, back in the day before memes and Snapchat, I got myself an account on WordPress.com because that’s what you did in those times. Well, okay, you could also set up…
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create-react-app and the Pit of Success
On May 18, the create-react-app team announced the release of v1.0 of the project. As always, a bunch of new features made it into the release, notable ones being a new version of Webpack, support for turning your app into a PWA using the ServiceWorker API, and support for bundle splitting using dynamic import()s. If…
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E-Commerce Case Study: Building Faster Listing Pages on abof.com (Part 3)
This case study was first published on the Alaris Prime blog on January 4, 2017. You can read the original case study here. Part 1 of this case study was a general overview of how the Alaris Prime team rebuilt abof.com to load almost instantly even on flaky mobile connections, and part 2 was an…
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Migrating from Jekyll to Medium
I recently migrated my self-hosted Jekyll blog to Medium. I have no specific reason for choosing Medium, except that it’s in vogue in the communities I follow. I don’t have strong opinions about blogging platforms. What follows is a quick account of how I made the transition. Step 0: Set Up a Medium Publication This…
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E-Commerce Case Study: Building Faster Listing Pages on abof.com (Part 2)
This case study was first published on the Alaris Prime blog on October 6, 2016. You can read the original case study here. If you haven’t read the first part of this case study, I suggest you go check it out before diving into the second part. It’s a quick read that explains in detail…
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E-Commerce Case Study: Building Faster Listing Pages on abof.com (Part 1)
This case study was first published on the Alaris Prime blog on June 8, 2016. You can read the original case study here. abof.com (pronounced ae-boff dot com) is an online fashion store that’s part of Aditya Birla Group’s e-commerce strategy. Earlier this year, the company brought in the Alaris Prime team along with Ciju…
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Build a Sampler with Angular 2, WebAudio, and WebMIDI, Lesson 1: Introduction to the WebAudio API
As I usually do after wrapping up a long-term consulting project, I recently took a long break from work to level-up my programming skills. On my list of technologies to muck around with were Angular 2, TypeScript, and RxJS. I like to have a small, fun project to hack on when I’m learning a new…
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Book Review: The Essence of Camphor by Naiyer Masud
The Essence of Camphor is a collection of short stories by Naiyer Masud, considered one of the foremost Urdu short-story writers in India. This collection contains English translations of ten of his stories. This is not the sort of book I would have picked up on my own. It was Pratul who urged me to…