Service Oriented Architecture is a commonly used design pattern in distributed and enterprise applications. It involves the creation and use of independent services that work together to produce the desired result. The most important benefits, of course, are separation of concerns and the ability to scale each service independent of others, leading to a clean, modular design.

A common problem faced during the design of a SOA system is the choice of communication protocol. Ideally we want our services to communicate with each other with minimum communication overhead. This involves:

What is the output of the following C code snippet?

1int n = 1;
2printf("%d %d %d\n", n++, ++n, n++ + ++n);

This is a tricky question. Any attempt to answer this question requires either a deep understanding of your compiler’s parser or a complete ignorance of C. Even if you fall under the first category and know the ins and outs of your favorite compiler, how do you know which is your interviewer’s favorite compiler?

What makes a good blogging platform?

Leaving the tech details, feature lists and other bells and whistles aside, a good blogging platform’s primary aim is twofold:

1. Make blogging enjoyable. Entice the blogger into writing more articles.
2. Make reading enjoyable. The output of the blogging platform should be easy to consume. A good support for themes and customization is a must.

I had been using Syte as my homepage. Tumblr was the underlying blogging platform and the whole thing was hosted on Heroku. As it turns out, all three of my aforementioned choices were sub-optimal as far as my blogging requirements were considered.