Cloning remote PG database and loading in Local environment

For projects involving small to medium sized databases one may require to copy the remote (or production) database onto local environment. I was earlier doing this for my production application using custom pg_dump and then restoring with pg_restore. It was relatively straightforward but still consumed good amount of time. I wanted to automate this using capistrano and this is how I did it

You should note that this is extremely fast because it executes the command on the VPS - usually EC2 which has amazing internet speeds. And then copies it over scp as a single file. You can also add a compression step using the --format option in the pg_dump.

Hope this was helpful!

Cheers!
Braga

Stand still - and you are going backwards!

Imagine you are standing on a moving escalator that is supposed to take you from a Ground level to the Top level - only that its moving in the opposite direction. If you stand still on such an escalator you will hit the bottom soon. In order to not hit the bottom - you need to "at least" walk at the -ve speed of the elevator. For an observer it would still be standing still but thats the least one could do especially being in the software industry.

My blog once had crossed a million page views and the most active time I was during 2010. I think looking back - that was the time I had cracked any problems thrown at me. And I enjoyed it. I still could crack em only that I realise recently I've become rusty. However, I developed a variety of different skills down the road.

Alright I think I am diverging too much from what I wanted to say. In the IT world, one needs to constantly keep learning, keep pushing the limits, get hands dirty on a variety of technologies. If you are a manual tester - try poking at Automation testing. If you are an Automation Engineer - learn about performance/scalability testing. If you are an application developer - explore system development. If you are a software architect - see what is going on in that particular space and try to remain on top. That is the only way you could make sure that you are always on the 99th percentile in this industry.

One has to realise doing the mundane and similar work won't scale as we have already headed and running in the First order differentiation of time (speed). Second order differentiation (acceleration) will make us even more redundant. Can't imagine what we differentiated even one more step. The only way to sustain such challenging epochs is to learn. Learn learn learn!

Cheers!
Braga

Printing the permutation of characters from a classical mobile phone

One of the problems I recently faced.

Input: A set of numbers from a mobile keypad
Output: Print all the combinations of characters for that given number.

For example if the input is 26. Then possible outputs are am, an, ao, bm, bn, bo, cm, cn, co

Solution:

There are many ways to solve this problem. One is using a tree. Another way is to simply do it with recursion. I solved this using a linear approach. If you convert the problem from the text domain to number domain - it will seem very simple.

For example - if the input is something like ['abc', 'def', 'pqrs'] (transformed from digits 237). Then the output would have a simple rule - the first character should come from the first element, second from the second and so on. Writing in an incremental number form for the indexes, you would get:

0 0 0
0 0 1
0 0 2
0 0 3
0 1 0
0 1 1
0 1 2
....
2 2 3

That's it - problem solved. Programatically expressed it here