Author: Shishir Sharma

Shishir Sharma is a Software Engineering Leader, husband, and father based in Ottawa, Canada. A hacker and biker at heart, and has built a career as a visionary mentor and relentless problem solver.

With a leadership pedigree that includes LinkedIn, Shopify, and Zoom, Shishir excels at scaling high-impact teams and systems. He possesses a native-level mastery of JavaScript, Ruby, Python, PHP, and C/C++, moving seamlessly between modern web stacks and low-level architecture.

A dedicated member of the tech community, he serves as a moderator at LUG-Jaipur. When he’s not leading engineering teams or exploring new technologies, you’ll find him on the open road on his bike, catching an action movie, or immersed in high-stakes FPS games.

Categories
Mobile Web Design Web Development

Mobile-First Design: Building for the Small Screen Up

Introduction

The mobile web is no longer the future—it's the present. With smartphones in everyone's pockets and tablet sales exploding, the days of designing exclusively for desktop browsers are over. Yet many web developers are still approaching mobile as an afterthought, creating desktop sites first and then trying to squeeze them onto smaller screens later.

There's a better way: mobile-first design. This approach flips the traditional workflow on its head by starting with the mobile experience and progressively enhancing it for larger screens. It's not just about screen size—it's about embracing constraints, focusing on content, and building experiences that work everywhere.

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Categories
Front-end Development JavaScript Web Development

Building JavaScript Applications with Backbone.js

Introduction

JavaScript applications have evolved dramatically over the past few years. What started as simple form validation scripts have transformed into complex single-page applications that rival desktop software in functionality. However, as JavaScript applications grow larger, they become increasingly difficult to maintain. Code becomes tangled, jQuery selectors proliferate, and making changes to one part of the application unexpectedly breaks another.

This is where Backbone.js comes in. Created by Jeremy Ashkenas (the same developer behind CoffeeScript and Underscore.js), Backbone provides structure to JavaScript applications by organizing code into Models, Views, Collections, and Routers. It's not a full-featured framework like some of the heavier options out there—instead, it provides the minimal structure needed to keep your code organized while staying out of your way.

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Categories
CSS Front-end Development Web Development

CSS Preprocessors: An Introduction to Sass and LESS

Introduction

CSS has served us well for over a decade, but as web applications have grown more complex, the limitations of vanilla CSS have become increasingly apparent. Writing and maintaining large stylesheets is tedious and error-prone. We find ourselves repeating colors, copying similar rule sets, and manually calculating related values. The DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle that we apply everywhere else in programming seems impossible to achieve with CSS.

Enter CSS preprocessors: tools that extend CSS with programming language features like variables, functions, and mixins. The two most popular preprocessors are Sass (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets) and LESS (Leaner CSS). Both compile to standard CSS that browsers can understand, but they let you write more maintainable, flexible stylesheets during development.

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Categories
Development Tools Git Productivity

SCM Breeze: Supercharging Your Git Workflow

Introduction

I've been using Git for a few years now, and while it's an amazing tool, the command-line workflow can be tedious. How many times have you done this?

$ git status
# On branch master
# Changes not staged for commit:
#   modified:   app/controllers/users_controller.rb
#   modified:   app/views/users/show.html.erb
#   modified:   config/routes.rb

$ git add app/controllers/users_controller.rb
$ git add app/views/users/show.html.erb

All that typing! Especially when you have deeply nested file paths. I recently discovered a tool called SCM Breeze that solves this problem elegantly.

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Categories
CSS Front-end Development Web Development

Introduction to Bootstrap: Twitter’s CSS Framework

Introduction

Twitter recently released Bootstrap, a comprehensive front-end framework that's quickly gaining traction among web developers. After spending years building and maintaining their internal tools, Twitter decided to open-source their CSS framework, and the response has been overwhelming. Bootstrap promises to solve many of the common pain points developers face when building modern web applications: cross-browser compatibility, responsive layouts, and consistent component styling.

Having experimented with Bootstrap over the past few weeks, I'm impressed by how it streamlines the development process. Whether you're building a quick prototype or a production application, Bootstrap provides a solid foundation that lets you focus on functionality rather than wrestling with CSS inconsistencies across browsers.

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Categories
Arduino Hardware Programming Tutorial

Accessing Virtual Hosts with Arduino Ethernet Shield

If you've worked with the Arduino Ethernet Shield, you've probably noticed a limitation: while you can connect to an IP address, you can only reach the default virtual host on that server. This becomes a problem when working with shared hosting or VPS servers that host multiple websites on a single IP address.

The Problem

Modern web servers commonly use virtual hosting to serve multiple websites from a single IP address. When you make a basic HTTP request to an IP, the server returns the default site—not necessarily the one you want. On commercial shared hosting, you typically can't make your site the default host.

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Categories
Customization Programming Ruby Tutorial

IRB Console with History and Logging

I spend most of my time working with IRB (Interactive Ruby) or Rails console. Over time, I've settled on a configuration that provides essential features like persistent command history, autocompletion, and Rails-specific logging. These improvements make the Ruby REPL much more productive for daily development work.

What is IRB?

IRB (Interactive Ruby) is Ruby's built-in REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) – an interactive shell for experimenting with Ruby code. It's invaluable for testing code snippets, debugging, and exploring APIs. When working with Rails, the Rails console is essentially IRB with your application's environment loaded.

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Categories
Database NoSQL Redis

Redis: More Than Just a Cache

Introduction

Memcached has been the go-to caching solution for years. It's fast, simple, and works. But it's limited – just key-value storage with expiration. No data structures, no persistence, no pub/sub.

Redis is different. It's an in-memory data structure server that supports strings, lists, sets, sorted sets, and hashes. It has persistence, pub/sub, transactions, and Lua scripting. It's incredibly fast and surprisingly versatile.

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Categories
Frameworks JavaScript MVC

Introduction to Backbone.js: Structure for JavaScript Apps

Introduction

jQuery made manipulating the DOM easy. But as JavaScript applications grow, jQuery alone isn't enough. You end up with spaghetti code – event handlers everywhere, data scattered across the page, no structure.

Backbone.js solves this. Created by Jeremy Ashkenas (also behind CoffeeScript and Underscore.js), Backbone provides structure for JavaScript applications. It's not a full framework like Rails – it's a library that enforces architectural patterns.

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Categories
Arduino Platform Projects

Arduino Ethernet Shield and Webclient

When you first get an Ethernet Shield for your Arduino (I'm using a Duemilanove), the natural thing to do is upload the example sketches to test it out. Everything was working perfectly until I hit the WebClient sketch—it just wouldn't connect.

The Problem

The WebClient example sketch that comes with the Arduino Ethernet library is designed to connect to a web server and fetch a page. The default example tries to connect to Google, but it kept failing on my setup. The frustrating part was that the WebServer sketch worked flawlessly, so I knew the shield itself was fine.

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