Thursday, December 20, 2018

IPL 2019 Starting XIs


On any given day 20 overs has to be bowled. And  best of the bowlers could have a bad day. So we need at least 6 bowling options. I prefer 3/4 Seamers, 2/3 spinners in the XI. 2 allrounders in XI provides a lot of flexibility. Some of our bowlers/allrounders are not 4 overs match bowler. Like, I will never bowl Hardik 4.

Openers and #3 should always look out to hit boundaries and care less for their wk
Best batsman of team will bat at #4 either to attack or consolidate


RCB
1/2 Akshdeep Nath/Parthiv/Moeen/Milind/Gurkeerat
3 De Villiers (if any of the openers get out in powerplay De Villiers at #3 otherwise Kohli)
4 Kohli
5 Hetmeyer/Klassen
6 Shivam Dube
7 Grandhomme/Stoinis
8 Sundar/Negi
9 Coulter Nile/Southee
10 Umesh/Siraj/Navdeep Saini/Khejroliya
11 Chahal

Gurkeerat cud b used for fielding. One of Nath/Parthiv/Klassen has to play for wk. Bowling is looking Good. Batting has always been the Strength. They just have to settle on some good openers. I would suggest to try Nath & Sundar.


MI
1 Lewis/ De Kock
2 Suryakumar Yadav
3 Ishan Kishan
4 Rohit
5 Krunal
6 Yuvi
7 Hardik
8 Cutting/Pollard
9 Milne/Malinga
10 Behendorff/McCleghan
10 Markande
11 Bumrah


CSK
1 Narayan Jagadeesan/ Ruturaj Gaikwad/ M Vijay
2/3 Watson/ Raina
4 Rayudu
5 Dhoni
6 Kedar
7 Bravo/ David Willey
8 Bhajji/Jaddu
9 Deepak Chahar/ Shardul Thakur
10 Ngidi
11 Mohit Sharma


SRH
1 Shreevats Goswami/Wridhiman Saha
2 David Warner/Martin Guptill
3 Manish Pandey/Deepak Hooda/Ricky Bhui
4 Kane Williamson/ Jonny Bairstow
5 Mohd Nabi/ Shakib
6 Abhishek Sharma/Vijay Shankar/Yusuf Pathan
7 Rashid Khan
8 Kaul/Sandeep Sharma/Khaleel
9 Bhuvi
10 Basil Thampi/ Billy Stanlake/ T Natarajan
11 Nadeem


KXIP
1 K L Rahul
2 Mayank Agrawal/ Chris Gayle
3 Nicholas Pooran
4 Karun Nair
5 Mandeep Singh/ Sarfaraz
6 Henriques/Hardus Vijoen/Sam Curran/ David Miller
7 Varun Chakravarthy
8 R Ashwin
9 Ankit Rajpoot/Mohd Shami
10 Andrew Tye
11 Mujeeb Ur Rehman


DC
1 Prithvi Shaw/ Manjot Kalra (some matches)
2 Shikhar Dhawan/ Colin Munro (some matches)
3 Rishabh Pant/ Ankush Bains (some matches)
4 Colin Ingram
5 Iyer
6 Chris Morris/ Keemo Paul
7 Axar Patel/Rahul Tewatia/Jalaj Saxena or Sherfane Rutherford (some matches)
8 Avesh Khan/Nathu Singh/Harhsal Patel
9 Amit Mishra/ Sandeep Lamichhane (some matches)
10 Rabada/Trent Boult
11 Ishant Sharma


KKR
1 Chris Lynn
2 Sunil Narine/Joe Denly
3 Robin Uthappa
4/5 Nitish Rana/Shubhman Gill
6 Andre Russell/Carlos Baithwaite
7 Dinesh Karthik
8 Piyush Chawla
9 Nagarkoti/Shivam Mavi/Prasidh Krishna
10 Lockie Ferguson
11 Kuldeep Yadav


RR
1 Rahul Tripathi/Prashant Chopra or Vohra or Rahane (some matches)
2 Jos Butler
3 Samson/Aryaman Birla
4 Riyan Prayag
5 Steven Smith/ Ashton Turner
6 Ben Stokes
7 K Gowtham/Shreyas Gopal
8 Jofra Archer/Oshane Thomas
9 Dhawal Kulkarni
10 Mahipal Lomror
11 Unadkat/Varun Aaron

Sunday, September 9, 2018

Solving a 3X3 rubic cube

Hey there

This might not be the solution you are looking for .. to solve a 3x3 rubic cube. This I might be sharing at a later point of time. But today I m here to share an even bigger concern.

Before attempting to solve a rubic cube, be assured it can be solved. I mean that it is not wrongly setup. The sides and the corners. In such a way it can't be solved.

Example, instead of a blue-orange side, a orange-green side has been placed.

No matter, how much we try, it can't be solved.

And worst part it can't be determined.

I wasted a week and was not able to solve. Disassembled it, assemble it again and I was able to solve it. Though did not know exact problem but I m able to solve it now every other time almost.

For
1. how to solve a rubic cube and
2. Disassemble & assemble it back
Keep watching this space.

If urgent, pls drop a comment. I will get back with you.

Saturday, August 25, 2018

RESTful API Designing guidelines  —  The best practices


Even if we are not writing APIs for other developers and products, it is always very healthy for your application to have beautifully crafted APIs.
There is a long debate going on the internet, about the best ways to design the APIs, and is one of the most nuanced. There are no official guidelines defined for the same.
The API is an interface, through which many developers interact with the data. A good designed API is always very easy to use and makes the developer’s life very smooth. API is the GUI for developers, if it is confusing or not verbose, then the developer will start finding the alternatives or stop using it. Developers’ experience is the most important metric to measure the quality of the APIs.
The API is like an artist performing on stage, and its users are the audience


1) Terminologies

The following are the most important terms related to REST APIs
  • Resource is an object or representation of something, which has some associated data with it and there can be set of methods to operate on it. E.g. Animals, schools and employees are resources and delete, add, update are the operations to be performed on these resources.
  • Collections are set of resources, e.g Companies is the collection of Company resource.
  • URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is a path through which a resource can be located and some actions can be performed on it.

2) API endpoint

Let’s write few APIs for Companies which has some Employees, to understand more.
/getAllEmployees is an API which will respond with the list of employees. Few more APIs around a Company will look like as follows:
  • /addNewEmployee
  • /updateEmployee
  • /deleteEmployee
  • /deleteAllEmployees
  • /promoteEmployee
  • /promoteAllEmployees
And there will be tons of other API endpoints like these for different operations. All of those will contain many redundant actions. Hence, all these API endpoints would be burdensome to maintain, when API count increases.
What is wrong?The URL should only contain resources(nouns) not actions or verbs. The API path/addNewEmployee contains the action addNew along with the resource name Employee.
Then what is the correct way?/companies endpoint is a good example, which contains no action. But the question is how do we tell the server about the actions to be performed on companies resource viz. whether to add, delete or update?
This is where the HTTP methods (GET, POST, DELETE, PUT), also called as verbs, play the role.
The resource should always be plural in the API endpoint and if we want to access one instance of the resource, we can always pass the id in the URL.
  • method GET path /companies should get the list of all companies
  • method GET path /companies/34 should get the detail of company 34
  • method DELETE path /companies/34 should delete company 34
In few other use cases, if we have resources under a resource, e.g Employees of a Company, then few of the sample API endpoints would be:
  • GET /companies/3/employees should get the list of all employees from company 3
  • GET /companies/3/employees/45 should get the details of employee 45, which belongs to company 3
  • DELETE /companies/3/employees/45 should delete employee 45, which belongs to company 3
  • POST /companies should create a new company and return the details of the new company created
Isn’t the APIs are now more precise and consistent? 😎
Conclusion: The paths should contain the plural form of resources and the HTTP method should define the kind of action to be performed on the resource.

3) HTTP methods (verbs)

HTTP has defined few sets of methods which indicates the type of action to be performed on the resources.
The URL is a sentence, where resources are nouns and HTTP methods are verbs.
The important HTTP methods are as follows:
  1. GET method requests data from the resource and should not produce any side effect.
    E.g /companies/3/employees returns list of all employees from company 3.
  2. POST method requests the server to create a resource in the database, mostly when a web form is submitted.
    E.g /companies/3/employees creates a new Employee of company 3.
    POST is non-idempotent which means multiple requests will have different effects.
  3. PUT method requests the server to update resource or create the resource, if it doesn’t exist.
    E.g. /companies/3/employees/john will request the server to update, or create if doesn’t exist, the john resource in employees collection under company 3.
    PUT is idempotent which means multiple requests will have the same effects.
  4. DELETE method requests that the resources, or its instance, should be removed from the database.
    E.g /companies/3/employees/john/ will request the server to delete john resource from the employees collection under the company 3.
There are few other methods which we will discuss in another post.

4) HTTP response status codes

When the client raises a request to the server through an API, the client should know the feedback, whether it failed, passed or the request was wrong. HTTP status codes are bunch of standardized codes which has various explanations in various scenarios. The server should always return the right status code.
The following are the important categorization of HTTP codes:

2xx (Success category)

These status codes represent that the requested action was received and successfully processed by the server.
  • 200 Ok The standard HTTP response representing success for GET, PUT or POST.
  • 201 Created This status code should be returned whenever the new instance is created. E.g on creating a new instance, using POST method, should always return 201 status code.
  • 204 No Content represents the request is successfully processed, but has not returned any content.
    DELETE can be a good example of this.
    The API DELETE /companies/43/employees/2 will delete the employee 2 and in return we do not need any data in the response body of the API, as we explicitly asked the system to delete. If there is any error, like if employee 2 does not exist in the database, then the response code would be not be of 2xx Success Category but around 4xx Client Error category.

3xx (Redirection Category)

  • 304 Not Modified indicates that the client has the response already in its cache. And hence there is no need to transfer the same data again.

4xx (Client Error Category)

These status codes represent that the client has raised a faulty request.
  • 400 Bad Request indicates that the request by the client was not processed, as the server could not understand what the client is asking for.
  • 401 Unauthorized indicates that the client is not allowed to access resources, and should re-request with the required credentials.
  • 403 Forbidden indicates that the request is valid and the client is authenticated, but the client is not allowed access the page or resource for any reason. E.g sometimes the authorized client is not allowed to access the directory on the server.
  • 404 Not Found indicates that the requested resource is not available now.
  • 410 Gone indicates that the requested resource is no longer available which has been intentionally moved.

5xx (Server Error Category)

  • 500 Internal Server Error indicates that the request is valid, but the server is totally confused and the server is asked to serve some unexpected condition.
  • 503 Service Unavailable indicates that the server is down or unavailable to receive and process the request. Mostly if the server is undergoing maintenance.

5) Field name casing convention

You can follow any casing convention, but make sure it is consistent across the application. If the request body or response type is JSON then please follow camelCase to maintain the consistency.

6) Searching, sorting, filtering and pagination

All of these actions are simply the query on one dataset. There will be no new set of APIs to handle these actions. We need to append the query params with the GET method API.
Let’s understand with few examples how to implement these actions.
  • Sorting In case, the client wants to get the sorted list of companies, the GET /companies endpoint should accept multiple sort params in the query.
    E.g GET /companies?sort=rank_asc would sort the companies by its rank in ascending order.
  • Filtering For filtering the dataset, we can pass various options through query params.
    E.g GET /companies?category=banking&location=india would filter the companies list data with the company category of Banking and where the location is India.
  • Searching When searching the company name in companies list the API endpoint should be GET /companies?search=Digital Mckinsey
  • Pagination When the dataset is too large, we divide the data set into smaller chunks, which helps in improving the performance and is easier to handle the response. Eg. GET /companies?page=23 means get the list of companies on 23rd page.
If adding many query params in GET methods makes the URI too long, the server may respond with 414 URI Too long HTTP status, in those cases params can also be passed in the request body of the POST method.

7) Versioning

When your APIs are being consumed by the world, upgrading the APIs with some breaking change would also lead to breaking the existing products or services using your APIs.
http://api.yourservice.com/v1/companies/34/employees is a good example, which has the version number of the API in the path. If there is any major breaking update, we can name the new set of APIs as v2 or v1.x.x

Thanks to Mahesh HaldarReference : https://hackernoon.com/restful-api-designing-guidelines-the-best-practices-60e1d954e7c9

Sunday, July 1, 2018

Our success and our happiness are as personal as our toothbrush

Our success and our happiness are as personal as our toothbrush.

Sooner we learn and accept it better it will be for us. This applies to everyone including adults, especially working professionals.

Monday, January 15, 2018

Massive unsaid, undocumented shift in Return Policy by E-Commerce companies

Monday. Jan-15-2018. 1:10 pm

E-commerce buyers are restraining online orders after recent changes in policies mainly return policies. The bigger players Flipkart, Amazon, Ebay, Shopclues does not accepts returns that simply.

It is no more like the televised ad from Flipkart which shows you can try and return, if did not like it

Recently Flipkart and Ebay declined my return requests despite products not being up to the expected quality.

One unexpected story is from Amazon. Bought a product, requested replacement. Executive took the returned item but it was not shown on Amazon India. I was taken aback and totally surprised. How is it even possible for Amazon?

Moral : Order items only if we are too sure it is going to be useful quality item.

Love and Value, what we have

Monday. Jan-15-2018. 1 pm

I had bought a Reebok Jacket-cum-Cheater, way back in 2012. It became my loyal companion wherever I had go. On bike, foot, or to my hometown. It shielded me from wind, dust and little bit of cold. I could reach places without my actual clothes getting dirty.

I got married in 2014. By then my loyal companion, the Jacket had lost some of its sheen and luster. My other companion, my wife said, it doesn't look good anymore. May be I should consider replacing it. I did not heed any attention to her words. Every few months, she kept repeating. It got to my mind, she had a point. I started looking out for new jackets but was not able to buy any, whatever reasons may be.

My office gifted me a sweat-shirt. Instead of Jacket, started using the new one on my commutes, but I was not comfortable. It did not shield me from morning or evening winds. I used to shiver, a little.

In meantime, my old companion got angry. Zip stopped working. I had to use sweat-shirt.

A month or two went by. One day I wore my old companion despite runner not working. Got it fixed, on route to office. And I was happy and comfortable again.

Moral : At times, we do not value what we have. We learn their values in their absence.

This moral was not new to me but I never had felt it myself. Today, I did. Let's love and value what we already have than what we desire to have. 

Be like salt. People may not notice you, in your presence. But they must miss when you are not there :)