Gayan's Personal Blog

I recently got a recommendation to read Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams" by a colleague, and I borrowed it from the local library and read. It is a great book and it is the very very interesting book I’ve read this year. It’s completely changed the way I think about sleep and shifted it much higher on my priority list. So I couldn't stop talking about it with my friends > few of them asked me to share some things I learned, so I'm writing below points for anyone to refer. I strongly recommend you to read it.     Key Learnings: What About Memory? Sleep isn't just for rest – it's like a superhero for memory. It helps lock in new stuff you've learnt so you don't forget it the next day. What About Learning? Sleep makes you a learning machine. Rather fascinating how your brain soaks up new skills and knowledge like a proper sponge. What's REM Sleep For? Those wild dreams during REM sleep a

Recently I went through https://learn.deeplearning.ai/, and below is my notes I optimised using chatGPT API :) Introduction: Language models like ChatGPT have become increasingly powerful and versatile tools for various applications. To maximize their effectiveness, it's crucial to understand and implement certain principles and tactics. In this blog post, we will explore the key strategies for working with language models to achieve better results. We will also discuss their limitations and offer best practices for prompting, as well as explore exciting use cases and applications. Principle 1: Clear and Specific Instructions When interacting with a language model, clarity is paramount. To obtain accurate and relevant results, follow these guidelines: Provide longer prompts: Detailed prompts offer better context and understanding to the model. Use delimiters: Separate different sections of input

Hi folks, Been diving deep into Spring Testing lately, and today I'm sharing my learnings about mocking in Spring. I've noticed many developers struggle with this, so let's break it down in a simple way. What is Mocking? Mocking is our way of creating objects that simulate the behaviour of real objects during testing. Rather brilliant, eh? When testing complex systems, we don't want to call actual databases or external services - that's where mocking comes in handy. A typical Spring test setup with mocking involves two main components: Mockito - the brilliant mocking framework that Spring plays nicely with Spring Test context - Spring's testing support that lets us write integration tests Terminology: What is @Mock? @Mock creates a mock implementation for the interfaces or classes. It's like having a stunt double for you

As I reflect on two years of remote work, I had many challenges and turned out it gave me many perks too. Here are the key takeaways that have shaped my perspective: Building Strong Connections: Remote work demands a deliberate effort in making one-on-one relationships. in absence of casual office interactions, I always tries to have casual chats(Slack/MSteams) with my team members Strategic Meeting Approach: We had team members from different time zones, so we had to move some of our meetings to times to suit everyone - like we had our daily standup in 2.30 PM in my local time Clear and Concise Communication: Mastering the art of concise written communication is paramount. “Communicate well, communicate often” - is a saying my CEO repeats a lot which helped me to over communicate. Over-communication becomes a guiding principle in remote work. Providing comprehensive updates, regular check-ins, and seeking clarifications foster collaboration a

If you have worked with AWS and GCP, you should have understood that AWS' Elastic Beanstalk and Google's App Engine(GAE) enable deploying our applications without the need to understand how to build or scale the underlying infrastructure. Their promise is great, and for most use cases as there are no servers to maintain. We simply upload our applications and they are ready to go. If everything works as promised Beanstalk or the Google App engine will take care of scaling, load balancing, traffic splitting, logging, versioning, roll out and roll backs, and security scanning etc. Pretty simple , ah? Today I am going to share simple steps to deploy your first Spring boot (with Java and Maven)  application to  Google Cloud App Engine. So let's create s simple create a Spring Boot Java API on Google App Engine. I asume you have set up Google Cloud SDK in your local. (https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud). Alternatively you can use Cloud Shell. $ gcloud auth list $