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Welcome to my website. Find articles, presentations, tutorials, experiments on various technologies. Drop me a line in case you want me to cover something specific.

Read On:

You can get in touch with me anytime at

r o m i n . i r a n i @ m i n d s t o r m s o f t w a r e . c o m

I am also active on Twitter – do follow me.

10 Tech Stories To Read This Week – May 14, 2013 Edition

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Here are the 10 stories for this week:
  • Common Mobile Design Fails: A great presentation on common issues in mobile design and how to address them. Essential reading if you are in the business of mobile apps.
  • API Security: While it is essential to have a public API, it is more important to secure your API. Do not ignore security especially when you are open to the public.
  • Mobile Platform or Customer platform: A great reminder that it is important to have a customer platform if you want to sell apps. Just selecting a particular mobile platform and writing lots of apps is not equal to selling them.
  • iOS App Submission process: A detailed guide on submitting applications to the iOS Store.
  • Programming Gestures in Android : A basic tutorial on gesture programming in Android.
  • 5 Cloud Computing Trends for 2013: Interesting to find “Hoarding” making it to the list of top 5 trends. Do you do it also? I do.
  • Android in the days to come?: Google I/O 2013 is just round the corner and while concrete things would be announced later this week, this interview with Android boss, Sundar Pichai gives some insights into the long term plan.
  • The Internet destroys the Middle class: Some serious points being raised in this analysis.
  • Infographics better than Display Ads: A study shows that Infographics are more popular. I thought that did not need a study but still it does make sense when the infographic packs the right kind of data.
  • Tipping Point for Augmented Reality? : Is the rise and rise of Big Data finally going to cause the tipping point for Augmented Reality in the year 2013. I would say yes but not in 2013 … it should still take time to get it to a wider global audience.

Have a great week !

Check out the entire series of “10 Tech Stories To Read This Week”.

10 Tech Stories To Read This Week – May 7 Edition

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Here are the 10 stories for this week:
  • Khan Academy: An article that counters Khan Academy and its effectiveness from various angles. Good read.
  • Sentiment Analysis APIs: If you are looking at mining the social web for sentiments, this list of APIs could help.
  • Amazon’s winning strategy: An article that discusses how Amazon has gone about garnering the share of the cloud services. An interesting statement there: “Amazon has lowered prices 31 times since it launched in 2006, including seven price reductions so far in 2013.” How do you compete against that?
  • Companies and Big Data: A light introduction to Big Data and what companies should be doing about it right now.
  • APIDOC: An Inline Documentation system for your RESTful APIs.
  • Parking Technology in Japan: The title says it all.
  • LinkedIn and the quest for delivering quality software: A look at what went on behind the scenes when LinkedIn overhauled its development process.
  • Hack the Police Data: A sample application that came out of an event to hack police data and create applications for the good of all. Imagine if we joined hands to create such apps.
  • How to get free marketing: If you need some marketing for your application, simply integrate your application with Twitter API, flout the API rules and then do what this developer did.
  • Consolidation of API Companies: Unless you have been living in a cave, you would have noticed that the last few weeks have seen some lot of acquisitions and investments among companies that provide API management, Tools and Directory/Developer connections. Check out this article for a great summary.

Have a great week !

Check out the entire series of “10 Tech Stories To Read This Week”.

10 Tech Stories To Read This Week – April 30 Edition

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Here are the 10 stories for this week:
  • Teach Your Kids Programming: If you are looking at teaching programming to your kids, try these leading resources. My favorite is Scratch but I am quite impressed with the Dinosaur iPad application too since it targets really young children and does it well with a subset of commands.
  • Python Monk: Looking to learn Python, try this resource.
  • Stop Designing Fragile Web APIs: A public API is your interface to the outside world of applications to integrate seamlessly with your services. You need to get it right and ensure that you don’t make many mistakes the first time around. This article gives some sound advice.
  • Bitcoin Rebuttal : This is a great counter article to the growing phenomenon of Bitcoin.
  • Bootstrap Presentation: Matt Raible gives a solid presentation on HTML5, Bootstrap and CSS3.
  • Code Monster : A great resource for any newbie to learn programming via JavaScript.
  • Teach The Web: Sign up for a course by Mozilla to help teach the Web.
  • Teens committing to Github: Developers are getting serious at a much younger age that you can imagine. Check out this trace that shows a 17-year old committing Node.js code to Github.
  • JAWS Engine : Looking to made “classic” side/top scrolling games in JavaScript? Check out this superb Game Engine that can help you write one in no time.
  • Matasano Crypto Challenges: A collection of 48 exercises that demonstrate attacks on real-world crypto.

Have a great week !

Check out the entire series of “10 Tech Stories To Read This Week”.

The Curious Case of Campa Cola Compound

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All of Mumbai is going to be on tenterhooks tomorrow, April 29, 2013. For those of you who are not aware, I am talking about the demolition planned for the buildings set up on the Campa Cola compound. The current situation does bring up some questions for which there are no clear answers.

First, a bit of history about this case, taken from a news clipping.In 1955, BMC leased the land to Pure Drinks Ltd. for establishing a factory. In 1980, it sought permission from the civic body to develop a large portion of the land for residential purposes, and signed an agreement with three builders to construct the seven buildings. Out of the seven, two are towers with 17 and 20 floors respectively, while three buildings have six floors each and two have seven floors.

According to BMC, the builders were permitted to construct only five floors and all the floors above that are illegal. The apex court, in its order on February 2013, permitted the BMC to demolish the unauthorised floors.

The demolition is scheduled for begin at 11:00 AM tomorrow (Monday) and BMC and our government wants to use this as an example of show that they will not tolerate any illegal construction beyond the stipulated rules and permissions given.

The argument to demolish unauthorized construction is correct. There can be no excuse to go ahead and justify it. However, having said that, it does bring to light certain points which I am not sure why they are not being addressed:

1. The BMC has collected Property Tax for all the floors or for just five floors, that they claim were permitted. If they have been happily collecting the amount since the last 30+ years, then while they are correct to demolish the extra floors, let us make it a point to also return back the Property Tax with interest to the residents. That is the only fair barter that can happen. You took something that you were not legally allowed to, so better return it back.

2. Anyone living in India and in a megapolis like Mumbai knows that unauthorized construction is not a new thing. However, let us just focus on this case. The residents have been residing here for more than 30 years, paying taxes and are we saying that demolition is the only way out. What about penalties and then regularizing it in some way? They are anyways not going to raze all the floors, the buildings are still going to stand where they are? So why can’t some solution other than demolition be found over here?

There are many other points that could be raked up. I might be unaware but it surely is confusing if the residents have not been able to enlist the services of good lawyers who can present their case with the above two points in mind, especially the first one? Not a day passes by where individuals have been able to enlist services of top lawyers and get cases in their favour, despite the odds. In this case, given the number of years that have passed, given that taxes have been collected and the fact there has to be some humanitarian angle considered for all this, it comes as a surprise that there cannot be a lawyer in this great country who can effectively argue this case.

Please let me know if I am misinformed and do not know all the details. I would love to know them.

Update: The BMC did give the residents a few more days of relief and the demolition is now planned for May 2. The Residents too tried a final attempt with the High Court, but it refused to intervene into a judgement that has been passed by the Supreme Court. I find the situation quite sad especially when the Supreme Court had a great opportunity to also punish the BMC and its officials for having collected the taxes, transfer fees for all these years. What kind of justice is this ?

Update – May 2: The court has given a further break to the residents of about 4-6 months, during which time they have to find alternate accommodation.

Speaking Engagements in 2013

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The year 2013 has been a great one as far as my speaking engagements go, with an event every month. By speaking engagements, I am referring to my 1-day / 2-day hands-on workshops on Android and Cloud Computing.

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The events in which I have spoken so far include:

1) January – BITS Pilani Goa – App Engine Workshop

The year kicked off with an interesting 2-day event at BITS Pilani (Goa). The event was organized by the Goa Android User Group as part of the workshops for the college’s main Tech festival : Quark. The first day saw nearly 80-90 students learn about Google App Engine via a 4 hour session. The next day we held a Hackathon for 6-7 teams to come up with an idea and develop an App Engine application as much as they can in a day. Very impressed to see some of the students put together a working app within 24 hours of their learning the platform.

2) February – Thakur Technical College – Android Workshop

This was a 2-day hands-on Android Development workshop organized for the students of Thakur Technical College in Mumbai. The event was held in first week of February and saw 70+ students spend 2 full days learning about Android, right from Hello World to uploading your application into Google Play store.

3) March - Student Dev Days – Goa

This was conducted as part of the Goa Android User Group activity. The event was a 1-day workshop on the Fundamentals of Android Development. The workshop was targeted at newbies who took their first steps in learning about what it takes to develop basic Android programs. The audience was mainly students from various Technical colleges in Goa and nearly 90+ students attended this event. The event was held in March. If you want the material, check out the Github project.

4) April - App Engine Workshop – GDG Ahmedabad

This was held in April and we had 70 participants. I took a 1-day Hands-on workshop on Google App Engine, where we began with a Hello World and then delved into various services like Datastore, XMPP, Email, Cron and also took an overview of the Administration Console. This event had a great mix of experienced professionals, students and college professors. The questions asked were top class. If you want the material, check out the Github project.

I have been fortunate to make trips to Goa and Gujarat. On both occasions, respective Google User Groups invited me for the events. In the case of Goa, it was the Goa Android User Group (GAUG) and recently in Gujarat, it was the Google Developer Group – Ahmedabad. I wish to thank the organizers of these groups for giving me the opportunity.

Google App Engine Workshop Material

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On April 21, 2013, I conducted a hands-on workshop on Google App Engine as part of the GDG Ahmedabad chapter. The event was attended by around 70 people and we went through Google App Engine (Java) right from Hello World to coverage of various services like Datastore, XMPP, Email, Cron and also an overview of the Administrative Console.

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The session was well received and I want to thank GDG Ahmedabad for inviting me over to conduct the session.

We have made the entire material available on Github for a wider audience. I encourage you to use the material if you want to learn about Google App Engine. Feel free to use the material in your local user group too if you want to. The more knowledge we spread, the more we will learn.

The material is hosted at : https://github.com/rominirani/GDG-Ahmedabad-April-2013-AppEngine-Workshop

The material consists of:

  • Presentation Slides
  • Hands-on Exercises : These are documents that you can follow to build out an example.
  • Source Code : All project source code is provided. You can directly import it into your Eclipse workspace.

Keep in mind, that we used the following setup at the workshop:

  • Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.7
  • Google App Engine Java SDK 1.7.7.1
  • Eclipe Juno with Google Eclipse Plugin

See the Application in Action

The application that we built out and which you can do too if you follow the hands-on material is hosted at http://exam-results.appspot.com. The application is an Exam Results Portal that allows an user to retrieve the exam results via the following mechanisms:

  • Web Portal : Simply visit http://exam-results.appspot.com and use the following seat numbers as sample data:  226510  or 226511  or  226512 or 226513

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  • Google Talk Client : Add the Bot exam-results@appspot.com as a friend in Google Talk. Then just type help and the bot will give you back commands that it can understand. Try giving it help or about or just send it the seat number, it will give back the result.

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  • Email : Send out an email to admin@exam-results.appspotmail.com with the seat number in the subject of the email. It will send out an email with the exam results.

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Hope you find the material useful. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to write back to
r o m i n . i r a n i  @ m i n d s t o r m s o f t w a r e . c o m

” App Engine Days Are Here Again …. !! “ 

10 Tech Stories To Read This Week – April 23 Edition

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Here are the 10 stories for this week:

  • Java 8 : Java Developers can look forward to some exciting features.
  • TweetDeck to close down: The popular TweetDeck client will pass down in the ages. This is yet another example of companies buying out competition and then closing them, although in this case Twitter did keep it running for some time.
  • LinkedIn updates mobile applications: LinkedIn is pushing the envelope and wants to get the best experience in place for its mobile applications. With a 200 million+ member community, it makes sense to do that since mobile is going to be at the center of everything.
  • 10 Important Companies in Cloud Computing: A great list that maps out what the main players in the Cloud Infrastructure ecosystem are upto. I believe there is enough for all since interoperability is a long way off.
  • Responsive Mobile Friendly Web Site: Looking for a tutorial to learn about Responsive Web Design for a mobile application. Try this series.
  • API Checklist: Designing and implementing your first public API? If yes, this is the best checklist that I have found till date. Solid material in here and a big thanks to the author for sharing this with all of us.
  • JavaScript frameworks compared: A great comparison of 4 popular JavaScript frameworks: Angular, Ember, Backbone and CanJS and how they stack up against each other on various features.
  • Future of learning to program: Learning to program for kids is taking more of a visual approach rather than a syntactical approach. Is this necessarily a good thing? I would say yes, till they reach an age where they can get into the low level syntax. Here is another great tool that will be available.
  • Google Glass API: The most anticipated device for developers now has an API. And its all driven by Web Services hosted in the cloud that the Glass hardware will interact with.
  • Browser Extension: No matter how powerful the browsers get, we still dig some lovely browser extensions or plugins that do pretty useful stuff for us. Now learn how to write one if you are a developer.

Have a great week !

Check out the entire series of “10 Tech Stories To Read This Week”.