Levels of Excellence

Azimuth

Over on Google+, a computer scientist at McGill named Artem Kaznatcheev passed on this great description of what it’s like to learn math, written by someone who calls himself ‘man after midnight’:

The way it was described to me when I was in high school was in terms of ‘levels’.

Sometimes, in your mathematics career, you find that your slow progress, and careful accumulation of tools and ideas, has suddenly allowed you to do a bunch of new things that you couldn’t possibly do before. Even though you were learning things that were useless by themselves, when they’ve all become second nature, a whole new world of possibility appears. You have “leveled up”, if you will. Something clicks, but now there are new challenges, and now, things you were barely able to think about before suddenly become critically important.

It’s usually obvious when you’re talking to somebody a level…

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Cloud Services With Azure

Cloud Computing has been among the biggest buzzwords of the last 5 years and while over this time, I have managed to get a decent fundamental and conceptual understanding, practical implementation has always been an issue (usually due to the cost factor). That is until now!

I’ve been really messing around with the Windows Azure platform and my employers have also helped out by providing me with a free subscription as well as a group of peers who are as passionate about the technology as me and who are more than willing to share their knowledge. This has been the biggest driver to motivate me and help me learn about the core concepts of Cloud Computing in a practical way, so that no matter what the Cloud platform is in the future, Azure, Google Compute, Amazon EC2, etc., I can be agile enough to adapt to any of them.

From a high level, Azure provides us with a lot of pre-built templates. Things such as Cloud powered Websites, Cloud Mobile Services, Cloud Media services, Virtual Machines, SQL Storage and a lot many more, just makes the lives of developers really easy. Over that, the Azure SDK integrated so well with my Visual Studio that I didn’t have to waste any time configuring and could get to producing code in no time.

As for the techniques, the fundamentals of Service Bus with Queues, Topics, and Relays for message passing, running remote Virtual Machines, storing large files as Blob storage in SQL Databases, opened opportunities to me to really implement some of the ideas in my head, which had seemed infeasible to me before.

Add to that a cloud powered IDE, a sleek web interface to monitor all my resources and multiple programming language support (yes, I did all my cloud coding in Python!!) complimented with amazing and easy to understand documentation on MSDN really made the whole learning experience that much more enthralling.

The point of this post is not to show off the capabilities of Azure. Rather I want you to go out and pick a cloud computing platform of your choice, and really learn of the amazing capabilities provided to you and realize the brilliant ways in which you and others can leverage these capabilities to make the whole world a much better place!

Hope to hear some success stories in the comments. Eviva!