JVM – GC Tuning March 6, 2007
Posted by Saravanan in Programming.add a comment
Have you ever encountered the situation where your application goes down in production every day and you are clueless what to do? I went through that situation when we moved our application from iPlanet to Tomcat and it started going down every day during peak hours. After tuning the heap and GC parameter, we stabilized it. While working on this, I searched the internet for JVM tuning primer but could not find one. Though lot of information is available, a primer stuff that will help in identifying the parameters was missing. In the next couple of post, I will put my learning’s in the form of primer and hope it will be useful for others also.
Trekking at Wayanad January 11, 2007
Posted by Saravanan in Personal.6 comments
Last weekend we went to Wyanad for a short trip and enjoyed the trekking through unexplored routes. We started from Bangalore around 3:30PM on Friday afternoon and reached Kalpetta at 8:15PM. Roads were good expect for few places. It took another 90 mins and 23 KM drive to reach RestInMist, where we stayed. On Saturday at 9:30 AM, we started trekking through streams, rocks, thick forests, swamps, pepper estates, leeches to reach a waterfall and returned at 5:30PM. It was an amazing experience.
Our Trekking
Improving user experience in SOA January 5, 2007
Posted by Saravanan in Programming, Software.add a comment
User experience in SOA is the delight your service consumers have while using your service. First time service providers find it very difficult to match the user expectations leading to integration issues and schedule impacts. The main reason for this is the way the service is visualized by the provider. During the API design, the first time designer does is to think the service from his web application context and expose fine grained APIs which cannot be used by different consumers. These fine grained APIs restricts the API usage during integration with other services. The following are the guidelines I learnt by mistakes which will help you in improving user experience of your API.
1. Never expose a fine grained API unless and otherwise required.
2. Document, Document, Document
3. Don’t change the exposed API signature. Changing API signature will be nightmarish if you have fine grained APIs and is under usage.
4. Exceptions – You can use Runtime Exceptions but document it so that consumers can catch if needed.
5. Log, log, log – Log everything at API level. What comes in and goes out has to be logged. Never assume anything as trivial and skip logging. Storage is cheaper than spending hours in support and debug. If someone complains about your service and if you don’t any log to prove it wrong, till you prove you are culprit.
6. Keep track of your consumers and understand how they access your service. If the way they access is very much different, include unit test cases to check the connectivity if you change your container or argument names.
How to be a programmer January 3, 2007
Posted by Saravanan in Software.add a comment
Whenever I read the article “How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary“, I find it new and get a new perspective. A must read for all working in software and IT industry.
Software Services Management in high SLA environment January 2, 2007
Posted by Saravanan in Software, Technology.add a comment
SOA is touted as it going to remove all the integration pain points. But with disparate technologies and platforms supporting the services within the organization, managing the softwares is a big pain. Managing the end points and configurations to support *ability (maintainability, extensibility, availability… ) are becoming a operations nightmare in managing them in high SLA environments where penalty clauses are included for service non availablity. Everybody will prefer a platform where services autodiscover others and manage the connectivity themselves during failovers. You can incorporate this when you are working on greenfield project or with a refactoring budget. But during the course of a release, if you (as a developer) want to refactor to make your life better, you can put the following things which will help both development and operations. The following is mostly based on webservices. I will put another post for ESB models.
1. Separate the application and connectivity configurations. Let the operations manage the connectivity configurations. Application configuration has to be managed by developers and released to operations. If a application configuration changes frequently, let operations handle that parameters. Configuration loader has to manage it intelligently.
2. Put singleton configuration loaders to load the configurations and have a JMX or similar module to support refreshing. With this we can avoid restarts in high SLA environments.
3. Put the heart beat monitors to check the health of other services. By taking proactive steps, we can minimize the impact due to non-availability.
4. Put a seprate monitor to monitor the health of your service. With this you will not let down your consumers during a critical work flow.
5. Design the application for failover.
HCL Talking Numbers Campaign September 19, 2006
Posted by Saravanan in Business, Technology.add a comment
HCL is now making lot of right noices to build their brand in India. They unleashed HCL Talking Numbers campaign in the indian television channels now. I liked the innovative idea of using ‘0′ and ‘1′ in the campaign. You can find the campaign videos here. Also you can find here how this was conceptualized and made.
The Second Commander – COO August 15, 2006
Posted by Saravanan in Business, Leadership.add a comment
Many times I used to think what is the exact role of Chief Operation Officer (COO) in many organizations. The first impression of the job title might suggest that their role is to run the business on daily basis. Nathen Bennet & Stephen A Miles in their article in “Indian Management” (July 2006 issue) lists 7 kinds of COO and the roles they play.
The excerpts
1. The executor - Responsible for executing the strategies developed by the top management. Responsible for delivering results on a day to day basis
2. The Change Agent – To lead a specific strategic initiative or a major organisational change.
3. The Mentor – To mentor a young inexperianced CEO. As the CEO develops, this COO role might either disappear or be heavily restructured.
4. The Other Half – To compliment the CEO’s experiance, style, knowledge base
5. The Partner – If CEO is a kind of person who works best with a partner.
6. The Heir apparent - To groom the company’s CEO Elect
7. The MVP – As a promotion to an executive considered too valuable to lose
My Airtel Broadband Experience August 6, 2006
Posted by Saravanan in Business, India.add a comment
It had a been a week since I got my Airtel Broadband at home. I am very happy with the service and this post is about my experience.
When I wanted to go for broadband, my friends suggested Airtel and told me about their customer service. I decided to go for it and visited their Koramangala office enquiring about their plans and tariff’s. It was on a Saturday and on Monday, their field in charge contacted me after the feasibility analysis. I filled in the form and immediately, the sales guy called their office and my details were entered in their system. On Tuesday, the cabling and telephone installation were completed. On Wednesday, modem and broadband configuration was completed and voila… I was connected to internet through broadband in 3 days. But for the broadband, BSNL informed that they need 15 days to provide a telephone connection and another 15days for the broadband connection. The same thing, Airtel provided in 3 days.
Airtel gave me another surprise when their customer service agent called me back to provide the update on my request. For the first time, I got a call from a customer service agent to provide the update on the customer’s request.
No wonder Airtel rules the telecom market in India.
Mission Statement and Employees August 2, 2006
Posted by Saravanan in Business.add a comment
This is in continuous to the earlier post of Mission Statement and India Inc. Earlier it was the quality statements mattered most than the mission statement and taglines. Whether the mission and quality statements really matter for the employee? Whether the mission statement is broken down to every level and clearly communicated to every employee about his role in the mission.
HBW published a article where impact of mission statement on the employee motivation is discussed as part of a larger article on “Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation“. They state “Stating a mission is a powerful tool. But equally important is the manager’s ability to explain and communicate to subordinates the reason behind the mission. Can the manager of stockroom workers do better than telling her staff that their mission is to keep the room stocked? Can she communicate the importance of the job, the people who are relying on the stockroom being properly maintained, both inside and outside the company? The importance for even goods that might be considered prosaic to be where they need to be when they need to be there? That manager will go a long way toward providing a sense of purpose.“
I wonder how many companies write their statements based on what they want to achive. I had seen many companies writing the statements with word play to look great within the golden frames in their office front office. Whether they will be able to make an impact on the people?
Mission Statement and India Inc August 1, 2006
Posted by Saravanan in Business, India.add a comment
“The Hindu Business Line” published an excellent article on mission statements and corporate branding where they trace the branding strategy of Infosys along with other indian companies. Infosys even changed their PR consultancy when they shifted their branding strategy from CEO brand to corporate/employee brand. The article list few of the Vision Brands that have managed to zero in on one word to explain their mission. HP: invent. Microsoft: Potential. HCL: Guts. Honda: Dreams. Philips: Simplicity. LG: Inventive.
What is the impact of corporate brand on the employees. Quote from the artice: It helps if batchmates, former colleagues and competitors comment on it in airports. It helps with the in laws and the wife’s friends at the PTA. It helps if your company’s ad comes when you are watching the World Cup Final with your teenage nephew. The litmus test is: if the cab driver knows your office building! But most of all, it must help get the CEO invited to The Big Fight!
I love my company builds the brand in India. Everytime when somebody asks where do I work, I have to tell the company name followed by the nature of business. And do you know the next question they ask me… “Are you not working for Infosys or Wipro“ Its the success of their brand building.
