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Azure Communication Services (ACS) sponsored nwHack 2022 at The University of British Columbia. It was great to see the engagement from students to leverage open source API’s to solve daily problems. …

At the beginning of year 2021, my professional goal was to write bogs as well as to work on designing a software system. …

Last week, I read an article “Harnessing the Power of Less” published in Special Times Edition “Secrets of Success”. The beautiful line “Stretching encourages adaptation and working with what you already have, rather than focusing on needing more” …

The year 2020 was a year of unpredicted event Covid-19. In January, my wife travelled to Toronto for her co-op and I planned to spend my evenings studying algorithms and software engineering concepts alongside full time job. I planned to complete most of the study-topics in March and completed as planned. In mid-March my office shared guidelines to work from home. My wife was also back from Toronto and started a co-op remotely. I saved two hours of commute time. My office had layoffs. Some of my teammates were laid off. It was a hard time to see teammates leaving, and I got worried about myself. I started to spend more time studying software engineering topics. Usually, I develop hobby projects using technologies I do not use as a part of my job. Because of Covid-19, I got much time to work on hobby projects to explore AWS and Azure infrastructures. ...

The book “Don’t make me think” is written by Steve Krug. This is the first book that I read about UX(User Experience Design) design. This book is concise and has four sections. The “guiding principles” talks about not puzzling the user to find required content. These principles guide to omit needless content, using conventions, images and explains the web page scanning habit of user (not reading complete content). The section “Things you need to get right” has content to design navigation that helps user to find their way. The big bang theory of web design is about designing home page, using tag lines (nothing beats a good tagline), welcome blurb and testing home page usability. The section “Making sure you got them right” is all about usability testing. Resolving conflicting thoughts between developers, designers, marketing and project managers, this section also talks about usability testing on 10 cents a day. Focusing on early usability tests, do it yourself usability testing and how often, this section importantly explains feedback loop. Finally, this section has guidance about “deciding what to fix” from feedback. ...