Weird IE8 error. Nginx to the rescue!

As a server side developer, I don’t run into IE-specific errors very often. Last month, I ran into a very specific error, which is spectacular by itself. IE8 does not like downloads with cache control headers. The client has plenty of IE8 users and preferred we serve over HTTP for IE8 so that the site worked for sure.

Nginx has a very handy module called ngx_http_browser_module to help! All that I needed to do was less than 10 lines of Nginx config.

location / {     # every browser is to be considered modern     modern_browser unlisted;     # these particular browsers are ancient     ancient_browser "MSIE 6.0" "MSIE 7.0" "MSIE 8.0";     # redirect to HTTP if ancient     if ($ancient_browser) {         return 301 http://$server_name$request_uri;     }     # handle requests that are not redirected     proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;     proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;     proxy_set_header Host $host;     proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; } 
It's Magic GIF

Yet another day I’m surprised by Nginx 🙂

It’s been 2 years!

I can’t believe it’s been 2 years since I started working for Open Knowledge. I vaguely remember my first day on Oct 2, 2012. The strongest memory of the day is that it was a public holiday in India and my first day at…

I can’t believe it’s been 2 years since I started working for Open Knowledge. I vaguely remember my first day on Oct 2, 2012. The strongest memory of the day is that it was a public holiday in India and my first day at work. I’ve looked through the commit history to figure out what I did that day. It seems I was setting up PyBossa and I fixed a bug in it on my first day! The project looks gorgeous these days thanks to Daniel’s amazing work!

Team Picture in January 2014

In the last two years, I’ve written lots of code; traveled to UK, Kenya, Tanzania, and Germany; managed servers and documentation for the systems team; and finally moved into a new role where I’m Senior Systems Administrator and Developer at the same time. It’s been a fabulous 2 years and I’m proud to work with my fantastic colleagues.

Looking forward to more fun!

OKFestival – Berlin, 2014

For the first time, I actually attended the OKFestival. I didn’t get to attend many sessions, but the conversations I’ve had are spectacular.

For the first time, I actually attended the OKFestival. I didn’t get to attend many sessions, but the conversations I’ve had are spectacular.

The first surprise was meeting malev. A couple of years ago, we both worked together on the Ubuntu project. Now, he’s an Open News Fellow and I work at Open Knowledge. The FOSS world is truely small 🙂

I finally got to meet Christie! I’ve heard of Christie since right before she started at Mozilla, when I first heard of Open Source Bridge, and later she started at Mozilla Webdev, where I was closely involved back then.

Georg came over to say hi on Tuesday. When I realized that he was in Uganda for the Mozfest East Africa, I introduced him to Ketty who was also there, leading to an interesting conversation and great connection.

George Sattler works for XVT solutions in Australia and is our partner. He is fairly certain that I don’t sleep 😉 We’ve been having conversations over email for quite a long time and it was great to meet George in person.

The Venue

It’s been a long time since I’ve met Adam Green, the editor of Public Domain Review. It was nice catching up with him. Also, Joris! I hadn’t seen him since he moved on from OKF 🙂

I haven’t met Riju since he’s moved to Delhi and I met him in Berlin! Totally random and great running into him 🙂

The last I met Kaustubh was at Pranesh’s farewell party in October (?). We had a good time catching up.

Folks from local groups across OKF. As a part-time system, I talk to most of the OKF community folks at some point through RT. Additionally, I was going around asking feedback for the sysadmin team. It was great for me to put a face to names and I suspect vice versa as well.

The usual suspects who were great to meet, are of course, my lovely teammates. It’s nice to meet in person, grab a drink, and talk.

Congratulations again to Bea, Megan, Lou, and Naomi for making OKFestival happen!

Cutting the Cake

Cambridge and London – Winter 2014

I’m sitting in the lobby of Clink 261, a hostel near King’s Cross, hearing so many languages that my brain hurts trying to identify…

I’m sitting in the lobby of Clink 261, a hostel near King’s Cross, hearing so many languages that my brain hurts trying to identify them (Nope, I can’t). To complicate matters, the reduced sunshine is confusing. The week has consisted of meetings, plotting (to take over the world, of course), drinks, ranting, and generally fun things. It’s been a tiring but spectacular week with my team at the OKF. As a remote employee, I enjoy meeting my colleagues in person and spending time together.

As always, my trips are more about people than places. In Cambridge, once I was properly awake, I met a colleague for lunch at Cambridge Blue, where we had deer pie for lunch. My Twitter followers seemed a bit mad that I ate Bambi. From there, we went to his friends’ and had tea with them, while enjoying watching their kids play and chatting about books, trains, and comics. Later in the evening, I caught up with an old roommate and his family.

I walked everywhere in Cambridge except when I had luggage or if I was, cough, otherwise unable to walk. Our hotel was a 40-minute walk away from the venue of our meetings. I took a taxi on a few mornings, but when I could, I walked. The cold manages to wake me up, and in a few minutes, I’m nice and warm (weather hacking?!). There are other advantages too, like a lovely pastry shop on way 😉

I spent 3 days with my team plotting to take over the world with CKAN and then 2 days with the rest of the team. An extremely produtive time during the day and a good time chatting with everyone afterward, especially people from other teams. We had a “Cheese Off”, which France won, closely followed by Brazil. The close of the summit involved a puppy and cake!

I’m in London now, taking a day off for myself. I might head out and grab some lunch or take a walk. No plans for today and I’m leaving it that way.

A Month of Being a Remotee

Since October, I’ve been a remote employee, working for the The Open Knowledge Foundtion…

Since October, I’ve been a remote employee, working for the The Open Knowledge Foundtion. I was nervous about being a remotee and I talked to a lot of my friends who’re remotees at Mozilla. Shout out to ashish, fox2mike, glob, and Unfocused for helping me out. I also enjoyed reading about people who wrote what their team did, particularly, RelEng at Mozilla, shout out to you guys as well! Also, The Oatmeal was right! Although, ironically, I’ve started to wake up unnaturally early after being a remote employee 😛

The biggest fear about working from home were the distractions The most important distraction-killer is a time tracker. We use toggl for timesheeting anyway, and turning off the time tracker when I’m distracted helps. After a few times of doing that, I automatically stop myself when I’m getting distracted. I keep two Firefox profiles, one for work and one for everything else. While I’m working, the non-work profile is closed, so I can’t get distracted. I reward myself with time to look at it when I finish 2 hours of work and take a short break.

Having good communication channels is great since we’re distributed. Every day, our team gets on a stand up call. It’s great to actually hear everyone talk about their and ask for help from the team if they’re stuck. We also have a Campfire chat room and an IRC channel (#okfn on irc.freenode.net); they keep me sane. Seriously. Speaking of sanity, on some days, the Campfire room is just a world of gifs, we’re awesome like that. There’s also the weekly notebook posts to keep track of what folks in other teams do.

Time’s flown by so fast; 10 days ago, I finished a month here! It’s been a fun and busy time!

PS: If you want to work with me at OKFN, we’re hiring for a bunch of positions!