Software engineer, founder, storyteller.

Hello everyone, Sumit here from the Himalayas. I have been on a career break since November 2022. I was working with Hearth Display as their software engineerin...

I have somehow always mixed the worlds of Personal and Professional relations and paid huge price for that mix up. It is an aspect that I am still learning, but...

I have been traveling all across SE Asia since November 2019. This was part of my long term digital nomad lifestyle which would have otherwise taken me to live...

I started talking freely about mental health a couple years back. Initially I used to have enough lack of confidence that I was not even able to share that I ha...

This happens a lot it seems. I am 36 years old now and it has been about 13 years from my first blog post in 2006. Also, in between I already blogged once about...

2020 will be a year to remember. But I am not going to write about the perils of 2020. Rather I want to talk about what is important to accept that is it OK. I...

Hey folks, it has been a while since I posted. I was in a peer group discussing some of these terms recently and then a friend, who was writing a post to demyst...

Introduction Are you chasing deadlines? Finding yourself looking at the Monday to Friday cycle every week and feeling like sheep in an economic system where peo...

I have primarily been a backend web developer, started out with PHP around 2005 and then moving to Python in 2011. I have worked with a lot of JavaScript, mostl...

Look around your office desk for a moment (you can imagine an office if you are not at office). What do you see? People focusing on the daily tasks, glued to th...

I am going to create a repository of common configurations related to web development software. These would include stuff that I use, or I have used earlier and...

It has been three and a half months since I relocated to Hamburg, DE. Working at a medium sized company is a very different experience from the entrepreneurial...

Yes it has really been a while since I had blogged last. 2 years, according to the date on the previous post. I have been feeling to write for sometime now, but...

Today I had some trouble getting libxml to work in PHP. I was compiling PHP 5.3.10 for a client's Joomla site and it needs libxml. The issue seemed to be common...

A friend of mine needs a web application to be revamped. I had originally created it about 2 years back using a custom PHP mini framework that I had built for m...

I have been using Amazon Web Services for all of my (or companies' I work with) compute or storage needs for the last 4 years. That include AWS S3, EC2, SimpleD...

For the last 3 weeks that we have started working on Mag, we have been talking to a few prospective clients or other knowledgeable folks out there. We want to u...

First an apology to anyone who read my previous blog post. I had used wrong rates for throughput capacity. I noticed this since my calculations seemed a little...

Its been just about a day that I have been going through the documentation of the newly released Amazon DynamoDB. Using the PHP SDK and getting a basic Table up...

Amazon's latest announcement (and offering) could not have come at a better time for Mag. I am talking about Amazon DynamoDB here and I feel it is a good fit fo...

For the impatient: link to spreadsheet. For the last few weeks I have been looking around a lot on the web, checking for details and prices of VPS or dedicated...

This is a quick tip, I haven't had the time to dig deep into this. I am working on a Facebook app, and was doing a demo with static HTML. Everything was set, in...

This is a quick tip: I am currently working on a Facebook app. I have a demo for a custom Page Tab. But somehow the height was not setting properly. The canvas...

Today is Friday, January 6, 2012 (Indian Time). Last week I was at MobStac at this time. That was my last day at MobStac. 2012 started with fun, food, a short d...

The last couple weeks we have been thinking to shift from our current web serving platform which was powered by nginx + Apache + mod\ wsgi to nginx + uwsgi. The...

We are preparing for our new product's launch at TechCrunch Disrupt SF2011 (Startup Alley) and to be honest we are fighting with all our might. The last 3 weeks...

Hi there! Am blogging after a few months now. I have settled in the MobStac team as an all hands engineer. I have shifted to Bangalore with 2 friends from Kolka...

Recently at MobStac we restructured our layout of EC2 on Amazon Web Services so that we are more secure than earlier. We wanted a scheme that would not be painf...

Today (June 9, 2011, India) Google's doodle on Les Paul is just a great time killer. Spent the whole morning interacting with it. I got interested to understand...

For the last few days Nitesh and myself were discussing team building, work, processes, leadership, business and everything in between. As a full time team lead...

Feb 20, 2011 was a fun filled day for many bloggers of Kolkata. Probably for the first time here we had two back to back blogging events organized separately in...

The list of the hottest buzzwords in the industry would certainly include Cloud , Mobile and Social. The impact they each of these have is immense, and when com...

When you do software development (or any other work for that matter), getting to the first 60% is comparatively easier than the rest 40%. The initial 60% work u...

I have deliberately titled this blog post such that it gets more hits when people search one of the most common issues related to hosting: free web hosting :D....

For a long time I have used PHP as the template language with nothing else on top of it. No template engines ever. This was all fine till the point that we want...

We are re writing few base codes in forums.com and one of things re written is the pagination logic. We needed something very simple, good looking, yet works. T...

In our effort to build forums.com there are a lot of things that we must learn, one of them being the art/science of getting users. First of all I must tell you...

Just yesterday and day before a friend came up to me and said he was confused. He was building iPhone apps and was earning very well. But he was not sure if he...

We have planned a Kolkata meetup (adda) at AD38, Salt Lake Sector 1, on November 3, 2010, from 6PM onwards. Its a no agenda meet, the original adda, Bengali for...

I had a fine opportunity to catch two movies back to back today all by myself. The movies were "Letters to Juliet" and "The Other Guys". "The Other Guys" wasn't...

Recently read a notice on Google Groups Announcements Page that Google Groups will no longer support pages and files. From November 1, 2010 Google Groups will n...

We have a setup for background jobs for all the websites we manage like forums.com, files.com, payments.com, etc. The background jobs play around with lists of...

We are looking for a senior developer for software.com. Here are the details: At least 4 years experience in developing with PHP At least 1 year in a large E co...

Software.com needs developers again (work from Salt Lake, Kolkata office): 1 x experienced backend PHP developer with Magento e commerce experience, there will...

After a long battle I finally got my first look at ESPN HD on our newly installed Airtel DTH HD. We have a Samsung Series 5 40" LCD (LA40C550) which is a full H...

We recently bought a new Airtel Digital TV DTH service for our Salt Lake office. All was fine until I noticed an upgrade to Airtel DTH HD (High Definition) at a...

At forums.com we are trying to look at something similar to what Facebook and other sites do when it comes to displaying external content. Users usually refer t...

Its been a while since I have written anything. Well I have been very busy with work lately (forums.com to be precise, which will launch soon). More on that in...

Hi all, At the Upper Wood Street CCD we came across a blog post on Venture Woods, informing an Angel Investor Event happening on the 21st of this month. During...

Hey Kolkatans, Kolkata had another splendid OCC, on Sat Aug 29. We did have some glitches, with the Internet not working at the Park Street CCD venue. And since...

We need a very experienced PHP developer willing to work full time on a contract basis. This is telecommute work so you can work from anywhere. You will be work...

Hello Kolkatans, I am glad to make this blog on what happened yesterday at our first attempt to bring people to a CCD. That does not sound out of the ordinary r...

Hello fellow Kolkatans, Wednesday, August, 26th, 2009 we are kicking off Open Coffee Club in Kolkata. You may already be aware of OCC. Its simply bringing your...

Webhosts like GoDaddy and other similar often limit how much you can import with the online control panel (phpMyAdmin in most cases). So here is a simple PHP sc...

Continued from Introduction to Amazon EC2 (Continued...)... If you have come this far then I can assume you have an Amazon account, Firefox, Elasticfox extensio...

Continued from Introduction to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)... So now that you have seen the feature lists and have some idea, lets start with the...

Continued from Dummies Introduction to Amazon Web Services... Imagine you need a web server. The hardware and the software, all together. You have a website whi...

It's been a long while since I got lost. Well personal, professional and all other kinds o nals. But its good to be back. Have been doing a lot of Amazon WS the...

Lot of you may have heard of this. Well certainly you have heard of Amazon.com and if you are into software/IT/web there is a good chance someone in your compan...

Writing after a really long time. Just doing my usual work stuff when I suddenly found search on Google has changed. Almost every other site on the web is now u...

Seems Google has made a quick fix. First the redirect URL now seems forbidden: And after that all seems back to normal. A search through most common terms takes...

I have learnt a lot in past 4 years of PHP and here are some tips I want to share: Think in code : Many times when we learn a foreign language we are told to th...

Well I somehow felt I could yum erase sqlite since I do not need it. Well I did not see the dependencies that would be removed too! The result: yum, rpm, php, h...

Well two months back I bought my first laptop. A Compaq V3155AU with following configuration: AMD Turion64 (single core) 2.0Ghz Hyper Threading support 512MB DD...

"There is a problem importing one of the Python modules" : ever faced this error after installing an running yum. Well I faced that. And searched on Google for...

Well I had to do some phpBB (phpBB2) issues for a client who runs hispanito.com. He had a forum which ran on probably phpBB2 version 2.0.7 and with MySQL 4.x. N...

My ISP has a little fault that I use to my advantage. The software that they use works kinda in the following way: Before I login to their network all my extern...

Recently me and some friends changed from our web hosts to a full dedicated server. We took a nice server from Layered Technologies (http://www.layeredtech.com/...

Me an some friends took a new server two days back. We threw in Xen and made four guests. I being in one of the guests which runs Fedora Core 5. I had to instal...

I wanted to do some PHP Extension making and so started googling around for help. Most help is about using VC++ 6.0 or have project files for the full VC++ IDE....

The banyanTree Project Introduction: The banyanTree project is intended to be the central resource to bring volunteers (interested professionals, students, prog...

Its Exam time going on now... so cant think much :P But for few days two different ideas have been making rounds in my brain(ahh brainless has a brain o.O). The...

Discussion on banyanTree (freenode): [14:31] ai2097: Hate to be Mr. Negative... but shouldn't the details about what is being provided be pinned down first? Is...

How to successfully complete this project ? Well the answer follows as a roadmap: 1. Atom module presents the features of Atom syndicating protocol and it seems...

Me in a Drupal project : I am a PHP coder for almost 3 years now. I have knowledge of C / C++ and so I chose PHP 3 years back for web programming due to the sim...

Introduction : GData is a (new) protocol from Google which is based on RSS and Atom and combines both of them. Infact underlying GData are actually RSS and Atom...

Further Clarification on Apache SCT (Simple Config Tool) With regard to discussions on httpd dev channel on freenode yesterday I am posting some more details: T...

Simplifying Apache configuration : The intention of this project is to make a tool or application which will greatly simplify the configuration process for Apac...

The College project : An 8085 Microprocessor Kit Emulator The project, done in C++ tries to emulate the functions of an 8085 emulator ditto as a hardware traine...

A Sample Settings Form: Welcome back, Sumit Edit settings for your website Website domain Tip: This is the domain name for this site. Do not use http:// I have...

Name : Sumit Datta Project Title : Simplifying Apache configuration Synopsis : The intention of this project is to make a tool or application which will greatly...

Oh hello, 2006: I am Sumit (brainless or techfundas on some IRC channels). A student web developer from India. Interested in Computers, Music, Movies. You know...