August 15, 2014

Dabbling with the Web


My work usually involves a lot of experimentation. Well, aside from the thinking part, the part that takes the longest is comprehending the results. The sooner I understand the outcome, the sooner I can apply and augment the experiment. That's where Data Visualization comes in. Truth be told, I got tired of reading and parsing log files, each with four million plus lines of text. Perl helped a lot in the early days. I used Perl to parse these colossal logs and create simple static web reports. The keyword here being static. Being static, I used to render the web reports and store them. Or if I wanted to compare some trials, create a new report for that too. Manual work.

I believe there was a greater scope for improvement here. Though that did help improve experimentation rate by 10x - being no small number by itself. Having an interface to deal with a huge database of raw data - would be ideal. That's where Dynamic Web comes in to picture. That meant I had to learn html, css, javascript, jQuery or whatever these web Devs use these days. Head on over to CodeAcademy and arm yourselves.

In order to test myself, I made a calculator. Styling inspired by Google's Material Design.

edit: I got myself a bitballoon account and hosted my dabbling - http://sonallearsntoweb.bitballoon.com/


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Dilapidated

This Blog is Absolutely Dilapidated.

di·lap·i·dat·ed
diˈlapiˌdātid/
adjective
  1. (of a building or object) in a state of disrepair or ruin as a result of age or neglect.
    synonyms:run-down, tumbledownramshacklebroken-down, in disrepair, shabby,batteredbeat-upricketyshakyunsound, crumbling, in ruins, ruined,decayed, decaying, decrepitMore