Gaveen's Blog - Archive (2005 - 2017)

October of 2011, the history will remember you as the month in which two pioneers of modern technology passed away. First Steve Jobs departed and withing a few days Dennis Ritchie too. I've never been an Apple fan, let alone a customer. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. However hold a deep respect for the man Steve Jobs was. I used to think that he's some rich guy running a tech company. Listening to his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University was life altering for me to say the least. Not only it changed how I saw who Steve Jobs was, it taught me to "stay hungry", "stay foolish" and more. If Steve Jobs was soaring high above there, Dennis Ritchie (dmr) was the giant whose shoulders he stood on. 'Dennis Ritchie' might not be a household name as 'Steve Jobs' is, but his legacy is far more vast. He made C . He co-created  Unix . C is not just a programming language, it's the programming language which paved t...

I did a talk on infrastructure scaling titled "Building Internet-scale Applications - The Beginning" at this months Refresh Colombo on 22 September. Refresh Colombo is a community of technology enthusiasts & professionals in Sri Lanka who meet once a month to talk about interesting things. The audience ranges from students, enthusiasts to alpha geeks. My talk ran longer than I'd have thought, and I hope it was interesting. Just for information I'm linking the slides and video here. Before you check the video I apologize for my voice. If I sound like I'm saying things like "you" where I should have said "you'd" that's my voice. It has nothing to do with the fine folks who did the recordings. Here are the slides hosted at Slideshare. Building Internet-scale Applications View more presentations from Gaveen Prabhasara If you have a Slideshare account you can download the PDF there. For those who without here's...

20 years ago on 25th of August, 1991 a student in Finland posted a message in an Internet newsgroup about a hobby software project he'd been working on. Among other things he mentioned, ...just a hobby, won't be big and professional... ...and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks... History went a long way to prove that guy wrong, and in the process so many others as well. Exactly 20 years later to the hour, I'm sitting in front of a computer powered by the same software, writing this post about what Linus Benedict Torvalds was writing about back then: Linux . This post will reach you dear reader, after going through numerous services, servers, routers and many other technological gadgetry powered by the very same software. It is also quite possible that you might be reading this on a gadget (computer, mobile phone, reader, etc.) powered by the same software. And at the moment when you read this post Linux will be silently powering things f...