Author: Nigel Pereira

Technology evolves just as life does. Nigel Pereira looks into the evolutionary history of one such form of technology, the increasingly ubiquitous data center. In simple terms, a data center is a dedicated space to house computer systems along with all the associated devices like switches, routers, servers, and storage systems. What essentially started off in the 1940s as a way for the US Army to calculate artillery fire and even develop the first thermonuclear bomb, has today become the backbone of what we call the internet. While the physical architecture and technology have changed dramatically to cover the IoT…

Online gaming is all the rage, and there is money to be made there too. Nigel Pereira finds out how cryptocurrency plays into the online gaming landscape In the aftermath of the global Covid-19 pandemic, gaming has emerged as one of the most popular online activities. However, making money while gaming has always been more complex than it appears to the layperson. This isn’t to say that there aren’t professional gamers who make loads of money gaming for a living, but the average person doesn’t associate playing Candy Crush with a steady source of income. In fact, most people who…

While the entire world is facing an economic slowdown with the coronavirus and the war in Ukraine, India’s gig workforce is expected to grow to 24 million by 2029-30. Our in-house expert Nigel Pereira is here to take us through the highs and lows of gig economy. The gig economy refers to an exchange of short-term labor, based on ‘standardized’ outcomes, for money through a transaction facilitated by a digital platform. Examples of digital platforms where you can find a gig include Upwork, Fiverr, TaskRabbit, Handy, and Freelancer. In addition to labor, asset-sharing platforms make up a big part of…

APIs bring in and share data from apps and sites like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook or Youtube with the user. For those curious about APIs, Nigel Pereira gives you a rundown of the same. Imagine you’re developing an application that advises people about the best holiday destinations for outdoor activities like hiking and camping. You want to be able to give your customers live updates on the weather at all the locations that you are covering, but you don’t want to write a weather app from scratch. Application Programming Interface (APIs) are software programs that allow software programs to communicate with…

Artificial General Intelligence might seem like a pipe dream to many but to the engineering community the idea that AI might go beyond what it was programmed for is both a prologue to utopia and a premonition to dystopia, writes Nigel Pereira. It’s been a crazy month for the scientific community with a researcher at DeepMind claiming “the game is over” in reference to the quest for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), only to be followed by a Google engineer who has since been suspended for breaking his NDA and claiming Google’s AI is sentient. To the average person, these headlines signify…

Nigel Pereira finds out why big tech moved from monolithic applications to a superior form of programming in the form of microservices A famous Mark Twain quote reads “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one.” That’s precisely the point of switching to microservices from monolithic applications that are getting too large or too complex to handle. Monolithic applications or “Monoliths” are software programs written and deployed as single units. While this is how most programs were developed in…

From ordering taxis to getting movie tickets, checking into airplanes, and hotels, or even booking reservations and doctor’s appointments, modern Chatbots can do it all, says Nigel Pereira While people have always questioned the authenticity, intelligence, and overall effectiveness of Chatbots when dealing with real human problems, Insider Intelligence predicts that consumer retail spending via chatbots worldwide will reach $142 billion, up from just $2.8 billion in 2019. That’s a huge jump and a lot of it can be attributed to how modern AI-powered Chatbots are revolutionizing the overall Customer Experience. From ordering taxis to getting movie tickets, checking into…

Nigel Pereira on the NFT market which is currently valued at $35 billion and expected to cross $147 billion over the next 5 years While we’re definitely going to get technical with this post and explain how JPEG files of funny-looking animals can sell for millions of dollars, the Beeple story is without a doubt what most people want to hear so let’s get to that right away. If you were to meet Mike Winkelmann a few years ago, you probably wouldn’t guess that he would soon be one of the world’s top three most valuable living artists. Especially since…

It’s not just the job of the security team anymore! An important aspect of DevSecOps is a shared sense of responsibility towards security, writes Nigel Pereira As the focus of the enterprise has shifted towards pushing changes to production as quickly as possible, security is often left on the back burner. In a mad scramble to harness the power of the cloud to remain relevant and competitive, organizations end up leaving huge gaps in security that cannot be addressed as an afterthought. These gaps could be caused by anything from a misconfiguration to an insecure service being enabled or even…

Organizations like Netflix, Amazon, Google, Instagram, and Facebook (which practice DevOps) have set the bar pretty high concerning the end-user experience Most people have probably heard the term DevOps being used a lot lately, either from people who work with software or from an online post like this one. DevOps is hard to explain, even for those who practice it. This is because as opposed to well-defined concepts like Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), and automation, DevOps is a culture of collaboration that encompasses several different concepts. While CI/CD and automation are about software, DevOps is about the people…