Forem: Rashid Wassan

Introduction to AWS

Rashid Wassan — Sun, 05 Mar 2023 07:14:08 +0000

AWS, or Amazon Web Services, is a cloud computing platform that offers a wide range of services to help businesses and individuals build and run applications on the cloud. AWS is one of the most popular cloud computing platforms in the world and is widely used by businesses of all sizes. In this article, we will provide an introduction to AWS and some of its most popular services.

What is AWS?

AWS is a cloud computing platform that provides on-demand access to a wide range of computing resources such as computing power, storage, and databases. It was launched by Amazon in 2006 and has since grown to become the world's largest cloud computing platform. AWS provides a wide range of services that allow businesses to build, deploy, and manage applications on the cloud.

Benefits of AWS

One of the biggest benefits of AWS is its scalability. AWS allows businesses to scale their computing resources up or down based on their needs. This means that businesses can quickly and easily add or remove computing resources as their needs change.

Another benefit of AWS is its reliability. AWS provides a highly reliable infrastructure that is designed to be fault-tolerant and highly available. This means that businesses can rely on AWS to keep their applications running smoothly even in the face of hardware or software failures.

AWS also offers a wide range of security features that help businesses protect their applications and data. AWS uses advanced security measures such as encryption, identity and access management, and network firewalls to keep applications and data secure.

Popular AWS Services

AWS offers a wide range of services that can be used to build and run applications on the cloud. Some of the most popular AWS services include:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

This service provides virtual servers that can be used to run applications on the cloud. EC2 allows businesses to quickly and easily create, configure, and manage virtual servers.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

This service provides scalable storage for data on the cloud. S3 allows businesses to store and retrieve data from anywhere in the world.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

This service provides managed databases on the cloud. RDS allows businesses to quickly and easily set up, operate, and scale databases on the cloud.

Amazon Lambda

This service provides serverless computing on the cloud. Lambda allows businesses to run code without the need for a server or virtual machine.

Amazon API Gateway – This service provides a managed service to create, publish, and manage APIs at any scale.

Conclusion

AWS is a powerful cloud computing platform that provides businesses with the ability to build, deploy, and manage applications on the cloud. With its scalability, reliability, and security features, AWS is a great choice for businesses of all sizes that are looking to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing.

The Birth of Modern Computing

Rashid Wassan — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 19:37:07 +0000

The motive of this article is to give you clear & concise understanding of modern computing, its evolution, and basic principles of it.

It all started in 1940–1945, when the United States and Britain worked independently on creating computers to gain an advantage during the war. By 1951, there was a commercial computer on the market. Information could now be processed and manipulated automatically. Here’s the story of how it all happened.

In 1942, the first all-electronic digital computer, Atanasoff Berry Computer (ABC) was constructed. It was a breakthrough since it used electronic vacuum tubes to perform calculations, rather than wheels or mechanical switches as previous computers did. However, the computer was not re-programmable or general purpose at all.

The successor to ABC, was ENIAC, which was the first programmable digital computer. It was a 15-meter-long machine that weighed about 30 tons. The worst part? There were 17,500 delicate, prone-to-breaking vacuum tubes, if any one of the broke, the whole machine halted working.

After the war and the ENIAC project, Mauchly and Eckert decided to use this new computer technology to make life easier. In March of 1951, after six years of work, the university pair sold the first general-purpose computer to the United States Census Bureau: UNIVAC.
After vacuum tubes, it was time for something new. In the 1930s, Bell Labs’ director of research (Bell Labs was the research branch of AT&T — the company founded by Graham Bell), Mervin Kelly, recognized that a better device was needed for the telephone business to continue to grow. He had a feeling that the solution might lie in semiconductors. This marks the birth of transistor. We will get back to that later.

Origins of internet: In 1958, American Telephone & Telegraph, the company mentioned above as AT&T & now global leader in internet service providers, came up with digital version of modem which could provide internet with speeds up to 110 bits a second. With that speed, an average webpage (500 KB) would have taken fifteen hours to load. Imagine clicking on a video, then coming back to watch it two and a half months later.
In the same year (1958), the world saw the first graphical video game called ‘Tennis for Two’. The controls were simple — a twistable knob to adjust the angle at which the player was about to hit the ball, and a push button to fire the shot. The game was so appreciated that it took very less time to get into the mainstream.

Transistors proved to be much efficient than vacuum tubes, being useful in radios, but their use in functioning computers was limited. If enough transistors could be packed into a sufficiently small space, there could be serious computing power. This introduces the concept of Integrated Circuit. Our modern CPUs use Integrated Circuits, packing billions of tiny transistors. In the starting days, William Shockley (the founding father of transistor) formed a lab called ‘Shockley Semiconductor Lab’. The Lab brought together a pool of talent that would become the foundation of what we now know as Silicon Valley. Robert Noyce & Gordon Moore were one of them. Due to Shockley’s paranoid nature, these eight soon left Shockley’s Lab and pioneered a new firm called ‘Fairchild Semiconductor’ now known as Intel. These people later got their title as ‘The Traitorous Eight’.

Intel soon created new chip called ‘Intel 4004’ chip, packing in 2000 transistors. 70s saw production of mobile phones and video games were in mainstream. In 1975, concept of personal computing begun to emerge.
Among the major players in computer market were Apple & IBM at that time. Since Apple had their own operating system, IBM needed one, for that purpose, IBM approached renowned computer scientist Gary Kildall (the man who could have been Bill Gates) to create an operating system for them. On Bill Gates’ advice, IBM team paid a visit to Gary’s house. Despite of Gates’ hint “Treat them right; they’re important guys!”, Gary didn’t take it seriously, so the deal wasn’t successful. Then the IBM approached Bill Gates and he didn’t miss the chance. Soon Gates came up with DOS and founded Microsoft.
Martin Cooper shocked the world with the very first mobile phone, the Motorola DynaTAC x 8000, in 1984. Apart from that, web explosion was observed. It began in August 1991 with one website, The World Wide Web Project. By 1992, there were ten websites. Initially, there was no commerce allowed on the internet, but this was overturned by Congress in 1992. The following year, CERN made the web free and public. By that end of the year, there were already 14 million internet users worldwide, but only 130 websites.
Sony launched their first Playstation in 1994 and launch of Windows 95 followed in 19995.

Beginning of 21st century brought mp3 players in the mainstream, thanks to Apple’s iPod. By 2002, social media started to rise with the launch of: Friendster (2002), Myspace (2004) followed by Facebook in the same year. YouTube connected the world through videos in 2005 and saw an exceptional growth. Smartphone era begun in 2007 with iPhone. After the success of iPhone, ‘The App Boom’ was observed in 2008, the Android phones were originated in the same year.
Till then, the CPUs became so powerful that the power of whole US-Spread ENIACs could be fit into palm of the hand. Data could be processed at phenomenal speeds, this made computer scientists to shift their focus towards Artificial Intelligence. Physical limitations regarding transistor size brought new concept of Quantum Computing.

Today, computers have become integral part of our lives, we are deeply involved in AI & ML and moving towards Internet of Things.
This was the brief chain of innovations that formed the world that we see & observe today, lot much to come yet…

Is Flutter Future-Proof?

Rashid Wassan — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 18:25:27 +0000

Flutter is a mobile application development framework which allows you to develop cross-platform mobile apps with single codebase.

Flutter has surpassed many of its competitors in hybrid app development. Here are some of the features that make it ideal for many of the developers:

Performance
Single Codebase - WORA
Not restricted to mobile apps only
Has its own, fast rendering engine
Greater control over native device features
Reduced code development time

Besides that, Flutter’s GitHub repository has got more than 130k starts, which is a pretty huge number (just for the sake of comparison, React Native's GitHub repository has around 100k stars).
Flutter is great for 2D mobile apps that are meant to run on iOS and Android devices both. It is also a smart choice for interactive apps that you want to run on desktop or web pages.
Keep in mind that Flutter has strong support by Google and is open source having very active community. Thanks to these two factors, Flutter is growing and is being improved at much faster pace. This reduces the chances for Flutter to become obsolete soon, we will talk more on that later.

Here are some reasons why Flutter is going to live longer:

Hardware Improvement
One of the biggest reasons for hybrid apps making their way into the mainstream is technical advancement. Just a few years ago, hybrid apps were not so performant due to hardware limitations. But now, things have changed. Our smartphones have became very powerful in terms of raw CPU as well as Graphics performance. Since Flutter renders all the widgets with the help of GPU, improvement in graphics capabilities of devices directly improve the performance of a Flutter app at the point where the performance difference between a Flutter app and native one is diminished.

Always Up-To-Date Framework
I started learning Flutter about 15 months ago and I found it very dynamic. Lot of things have been changed till now, there are some good additions and enormous improvements along with good code readability. Introduction of null safety makes it more robust. Improved Dart & Flutter plugins for various IDEs are very accurate in terms of code lints and predictions and are increasingly helpful in assistance.

Power of Dart
Dart was introduced in 2011 and has been growing exponentially ever since. One of the main reasons of this growth is beauty of Dart. Dart takes amazing features of all other programming languages and is mesmerising combination of those features. Google engineers use Dart to create many in-house apps, including some that are essential to Google’s business. For example, if you use the Google Ads web or mobile app, you’re using a Dart app that supports much of Google’s revenue. We did talk about Fuchsia as well. With the passage of time, more Google apps are being shifted to Dart, increasing its chances to become next big thing from Google.

Fuchsia OS
As the Android operating system was originally developed for digital cameras, the new and smartphone-specific operating system was in need. Google started working on that dedicated smartphone operating system called Google Fuchsia. The operating system is coded in Dart & it is expected that the Flutter will be the primary development framework for Fuchsia. This also makes Flutter a prominent choice.

Increasing Cross-Platform Support
When Flutter was announced, it was only limited to mobile platforms like Android and iOS. Now, Flutter supports Web, Windows, Mac, & Linux, and this support is getting increased and improved with much faster pace, making Flutter the prominent choice for those who want to develop small scale apps for PC platforms as well. Honestly, Flutter is going to be the strong contender for other desktop app development frameworks & libraries for lighter tasks.

Great Support and Community
Flutter community is no doubt one of the fastest growing open-source communities, members are so dedicated that they are constantly working to make Flutter better, thousands of pull requests are being merged with each release and those releases are frequently out. All new features are added to keep the framework up to date, recently, in Flutter 2.5, Material You support was added. To sum up, Flutter provides a rich development experience.

Skia Engine
Flutter uses Skia to render widgets on device screen. The Skia Graphics Engine is an open-source graphics library written in C++. Skia supports several (platform-dependent) back-ends, including one for CPU-based software rasterization, one for Portable Document Format (PDF) output, and one for GPU-accelerated OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan, and Metal. The engine is very well optimised (thanks to C++), making it an efficient part of Flutter.

Pixel Perfect UI
As Flutter renders UI like games, it has control over each pixel of device’s screen. Thanks to its powerful Skia Graphics Engine, modern & very complicated user interfaces can be drawn with almost no difficulties. Flutter’s all widgets are customisable. This makes Flutter an ideal choice for making complex designed which will be introduced in future.

These were some of the key points in my opinion. I hope this clearly explains why or why not Flutter is going to live longer.

Flutter Optimisation Tips

Rashid Wassan — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 21:01:05 +0000

Flutter apps are very performant if some of the performance optimisations are kept in mind while developing the apps. No doubt, apps can become laggy and janky.

1: Use smaller image files:
No doubt, images are essential for any mobile application. And this is the area where performance gets the hit by a good margin, if not managed correctly. I started my journey as an Android Developer and I soon experienced lot of lag and poor performance in my apps. Later, I found that I was using the images which were of several MBs each. The resolution of image assets was much higher than required.
This took lot of time for device to load the assets and draw pixels, increasing CPU & GPU’s work. Sometimes, images even failed to load, making app completely unresponsive.
Here are some tips to follow to avoid performance issues related to image assets.
Try reducing size of you images from tinypng.
Lower the resolution of image here. Make sure the resolution is not more than any higher end device’s resolution.

2: Avoid Unnecessary Animations
Animation is a foe of performance, using animations may cause your device resources to constantly work (since the animation values are generated again & again). CPU constantly needs to generate values & GPU has to redraw widgets.

3: Remove Redundant Widgets
Personally, I used lot of redundant widgets like useless containers & other widgets which did not contribute to overall UI feel of the app. Gradually, I realised that this was becoming my habit. Although this can be subjective. Make sure to use only those widgets which are necessary.

4: Proper State Management
A proper state management solution can make your app very efficient & avoid computational overhead. A typical Flutter app may contain hundreds of widgets. Updating these widgets & redrawing them again & again may cause your device to work more. The proper state management allows only necessary widgets to update their state or redraw. Let’s assume that you are using Provider as your state management tool for the app, Provider will only notify its listeners i.e consumer widgets. Only widgets listening to that Change Notifier Provider will update.

5: Use Dart Dev Tools (Flutter Dev Tools)
Dart Dev Tools is a combination of some useful profiling tools which can help to determine which widget or functionality is taking much processing power and cause lag or jank. Dev Tools illustrate a clear picture of things happening at main & UI thread.

6: Use Const Widgets Wherever Possible
It is good practice to use the keyword const for constants that we can initialise at compile time. Let's also not forget to use const as much as possible for our widgets, this allows us to catch and reuse widgets to avoid unnecessary rebuilds that are caused by their ancestors.

7: Avoid Functional Components
Flutter is all about widgets, creating a custom widget can be done in two popular ways. Either create a function returning respective widget (functional approach) or create a whole new widget. It is highly recommended to create either Stateless or Stateful widget rather than creating a function.

I hope this article will help to make performant Flutter apps.