This is in context of a number of Tamil Short Films I've watched recently. It kindled my curiosity that they offered a "variety" of thanks at the beginning, and I wanted to find out the difference between all of them. I don't think I found the real answer but that didn't stop me from speculating :)

If you want to add or improve your logging or caching layers, you definitely want to consider doing them using Aspect Programming. Those are some common examples but there are numerous scenarios where touching your "core" coding layers (or, tiers or services) is not a good idea. Aspects come in quite handy on those occasions.

To make the best use of your time at work, and/or when you are in front of a machine, it is a good idea to come up with a design (no matter how high level) in mind. This way, you can hit the ground running when you get to your machine. I've seen time and again that this approach works for me.

India is a beautifully diverse country that boasts of at least 30 languages, and thousands of dialects. Every 100 miles you drive, the cuisine and culture change (amongst a number of other things). One more thing that surely changes is the expectation from a movie.

While Tamil cinema has undoubtedly made some great strides over the last few years, with many films casting female actors as leads, there is still a long way to go, and one of those improvements I am eagerly awaiting is the decision to let those actors use their own voices.

Some of us prefer a framework that offers a lot more than what we might initially want, while others prefer a library that is small and simple but offers the barest minimum. Based on that simplified definition, what do you generally lean towards?

You have to make a conscious effort to keep your codebase DRY. Every time you make a change, add a feature, or fix a bug, make an effort to find duplication and to determine design patterns. This will play a huge role in keeping your code DRY, and maintainable in the long run.

You cannot afford to make Backwards Compatibility an after thought. As your system grows, and your user base grows, you are going to continually add new features and services, and some of them will require fundamental changes to your semantics and data structure. Given that, backwards compatibility can get rather challenging but there are steps you can take to mitigate potential issues.

I've worked on making performance improvements across all tiers, and in a variety of ways within any given tier, during the course of my career and one thing I can say with a good degree of certainty is that it gets more challenging as you get closer to your goal. Reducing a page rendering time from 3 seconds to 1 second is a whole lot easier than reducing it to 900ms, then to 800ms, and then to 50ms!

This podcast is partly in English and partly in Tamil (my native tongue). And it is not technical! It is me expressing my gratitude to the "Mozart of Madras"!