Getting started on Go Lang with Slack

It is a Republic Day today here in India, January 26th and a national holiday. During one of our random morning conversations with Manoj. Hashicorp cropped up into the topic and that quickly escalated to "Go Lang".

Go Lang has been on my radar for quite some time. I wanted to get started with the language. It's my personal thing that lots of new tools and products are being built on Go and I'm still stuck with JVM. After all moving to Devops demands some change in how I operate right? 😃

While getting started with a new programming language, I always write a simple tool using it and open source it. I wrote a Live NSE Stock information fetcher while I was learning NodeJS 4 years ago and a uClassify Scala client while I was getting started with Scala 3 years ago.

On the similar lines, introducing Slack webhooks library in Go. It's similar to it's Java counterpart, it helps you post messages to slack using a Incoming Webhook url.

Github - https://github.com/ashwanthkumar/slack-go-webhook
Usage - https://github.com/ashwanthkumar/slack-go-webhook/blob/master/README.md

This is still my first Go lang code so any kind of feedback will be helpful.

Chrome Tamil TTS Engine powered by SSN Speech Lab

In an attempt at first good impression that went wrong this was the outcome.

I got to know about SSN's Speech Lab yesterday and built a Chrome extension that builds on top of it as a TTS Engine. These guys have a wonderful system built - You should check out 'em out.

Right click on any Tamil text, right click and listen to it in a Male / Female voice.

You can install the plugin from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lhalpilfkeekaipkffoocpdfponpojob

The code is available on https://github.com/ashwanthkumar/chrome-tts-tamizh

Details for other extensions using the TTS
- Language - ta-IN
- Gender - male and female
- Voice names - Male is Krishna and Female is Radhae

Introducing scalding-dataflow

For the last 3 days, I've been working on trying to understand the Google Cloud Flow pipeline semantics for batch processing. Result was a ScaldingPipelineRunner for DataFlow pipelines.

NOTICE (You've been warned)

1. It is still in very very early stages. 
2. It doesn't have all translators implemented (as of writing)
3. It isn't tested on a Hadoop Setup yet

It runs WordCount though :) Do give it a spin. 

Github - https://github.com/ashwanthkumar/scalding-dataflow

It goes well with scalaflow - Scala DSL for building dataflow pipelines. 

Special thanks to Cloudera's spark-dataflow project. Couldn't have done without it :)

Winning Amaz-ing Hackathon - Meghadūta

Last weekend was fun at Chennai Amazon office. In association with Venture City, Kindle Team at Chennai organized a hackathon on the theme - "Building Scalable Distributed Systems". The name was theme was good enough to attract me to register for the event :) I went there with Salaikumar and Vijay Kumar to the event under the team name - "Salaikumar".

You can find the problem statements given at the hackathon here.

We won two awards at the event - "Best Voted Award" and "Ultimate Hack Award".

You can find our code at https://github.com/ashwanthkumar/meghaduta.

Few pictures taken during the event

Me doing the presentation of our hack

Salai helping me with the screens

Our prize, a Kindle Paper White each and some certificates :)

Find that missing Host in Hadoop Cluster

I've started to manage 200 node hadoop clusters recently at work. All these are running on AWS with latest CDH5. We went from separate HDFS + TT model to co-locating TT and DN daemons together.

These machines are all Spot machines backed by a ASG (Auto Scaling Group). If any of them die because of spot prices, they would come back up in a while. So to manage these machines better we attach our own custom generated DNS names to these machines.

Once in a while, the machines that come up doesn't have either a TT or DN daemons running. They would have failed at startup for variety of reasons. The task was to find that missing hosts (generally 1 or 2) of the lot. So I wrote a script that would help us get the missing hosts which don't run one of the process.

Gist - https://gist.github.com/ashwanthkumar/3624a4e69ab26236a746