Experiments at work

A while ago, we were working on an SDK, and some third-party developers who used our SDK reached out with an interesting request. We used to maintain extensive documentation in our GitHub Wiki, and they wanted to stay updated every time something changed in it. They didn't want to manually check the wiki every day, and GitHub doesn't send email notifications for wiki changes.  This got me digging around, and that's when I discovered something pretty cool - GitHub has Atom feeds for almost everything! Commits, releases, tags, and yes, even wiki changes. I tried it out myself and suggested the same to them. Problem solved, and I thought, why not share this little gem with everyone? /**  * @disclaimer  * This post covers GitHub's publicly available Atom feeds  * These feeds work for public repositories  * For private repos, you'll need authentication  * Please feel free to leave comments if I've missed something */ What are Atom Feeds? Atom feeds are XML-based...

So you want to build an AI assistant? Maybe for customer support, maybe to search through documents, or maybe just to automate some boring stuff at work. You keep hearing words like "prompting", "RAG", "fine-tuning" thrown around in meetings. But what do they actually mean and which one do you need? Let me walk you through building a customer support AI assistant and show you how each of these concepts fits in. /**  * @disclaimer  * This is an educational post based on my learnings.  * I'll share actual experiments in future posts.  * Your use case might be different, so take what applies to you. */ What even is an LLM? Before we jump into the techniques, let's start with the basics. What is an LLM? Think of a Large Language Model (LLM) as someone who has read most of the internet but has zero memory of your conversation once it ends. Models like GPT-4, Claude, or Llama have been trained on massive amounts of text data. They know a lot...

This interesting thing came up with one of our libraries that a colleague found out when he got stuck. I am just here to amplify and talk about it. The Problem: The issue was related to the server-side rendering of a react application. When attempting to render a page on the server side, one of our internal libraries kept giving a "not defined" error on the window object causing a failure in the server-side rendering of a page. This was the code that caused the "not defined" error: Now, before getting into what's wrong with the above code, we need to understand the difference between "undefined" and "not defined" in Javascript. "undefined" vs "not defined" When a variable is declared but is not initialised to any value, then by default it holds "undefined" as the value. This "undefined" is one of the primitive data types in Javascript that is used as a default value for a declared but not initialised va...

Back with another git magic. When it comes to merging a pull request on Github, there are two options Rebase and Merge Squash and Merge What is Rebase and Merge? When one chooses Rebase and Merge, all the commits in the PR are added to the target branch. For example, if the PR has 5 commits, all of those commits will be visible in the PR history of the target branch. What is Squash and Merge? When a PR is merged by choosing Squash and Merge, all the commits in the PR are combined into one PR and then added to the target branch. Once again, if the PR has 5 commits or any number of commits, they are combined and added to the target branch. Therefore, this is what Squash means. Combining 'n' different commits into one single commit is called squashing. In this blog post, we will go through the commands that can squash commits.  Advantages of Squashing commits No more redundant commits In a pull request, one may have 'n' different commits for one change. They might have bee...

As part of my work experiments, this week I would like to write down the things that one needs to know in confluence that can up-skill their documentation works. I will cover the following 5 things, How to Anchor link a title? How to Anchor link to a section? How to create a dashing dashboard? Panel - Confluence Macro Layouts - Confluence Tools Content by Label - Confluence Macro 1. How to Anchor link a title? This is the most required thing. Most useful when one has to refer to a section internally on the same confluence page. Let's consider you have a page with three different sections and titles as shown below, In this, if you want to add an internal anchor from a text in paragraph 3 to a title in paragraph 1, you can add it as follows, Choose the word that needs Anchor Click on the link icon from the Toolbar above In the link box, enter #Page Title 1 Click Insert That is it. Your anchor from the selected text to Page Title 1 is ready. This can be tested out in the preview itsel...

Hello readers. So back with another easy yet unexplored feature of npm/yarn packages. We as frontend developers / SDK developers, have to deal with more than one repositories where we actually code contribute. Most SDK developers would know this already or they use the not-so-well documented 'npm link' command . /**  *  @disclaimer  * Please read this post fully before executing any command. My scenario might not be the same as yours.  * This article below uses a repo from my current workplace as an example which is open-source and does not violate the Cisco Confidentiality Policies */ To make this article easier to understand, some representations, Host - Package that needs another local package as part of its node modules. Let's assume the path to this package is  ~/Documents/Repos/demo-app Adhoc - Local package that is added into another package as a dependency. Let's assume the path to this package is  ~/Documents/Repos/semver-monorepo What is...

I, recently got a scenario at work where the feature had to be tested out in iOS.  It has to be noted that iOS Safari, as well as Chrome, uses the Webkit Engine on iOS. Rumours are that Google is building its own iOS javascript engine but it might not be available for public usage any sooner. That said, I tested out the feature on an iOS Safari browser. Whether or not the feature worked, developers can never resist taking a look at the logs while testing, to ensure the flow. That's where my curiosity lay too.  Prerequisites MacBook device iOS device Cable that connects the above two devices Steps to follow Step 1 - On your iOS device: Open the Settings app on iOS Go to Safari Inside Safari, navigate to  Advanced Here, enable  Web Inspector Now open your Safari browser on iOS and have your Web app loaded for debugging Step 2 - Connect your iOS device with your MacOS device using the cable Step 3 - On your MacOS device Open the Safari browser on your MacOS device If...