September 2020 – Shekhar Gulati

Sending Outlook Calendar Invite using Java Mail API

Today I had to implement a functionality related to sending Outlook Calendar invite. The app backend was written in Java. As it turns out the simple task of sending a calendar invite is much more complicated than I expected. You have to construct the message with all the right parameters set else your calendar invite will not behave as you expect. I wasted an hour or two figuring out why RSVP buttons are not coming in the invite. As it turned out it was one of the missing parameters that caused the issue. Also, I wanted to send calendar invite to both outlook and Google calendar.

Writing Bencode Parser in Kotlin

This week I decided to write some Kotlin for fun. The best way to learn something while having fun is to build something with it. So, I decided to write a Bencode parser. From the Wikipedia[1],

Bencode is the encoding used by the peer-to-peer file sharing system BitTorrent for storing and transmitting loosely structured data.

Bencode supports four data types: Strings, Integers, Lists, and Dictionaries.

Strings are encoded as <string length encoded in base ten ASCII>:<string data>. So, spam becomes 4:spam

Integers are encoded as i<integer encoded in base ten ASCII>e. So, positive 3 becomes i3e and negative 3 becomes i-3e

Lists are encoded as l<bencoded values>e. So, list of [spam, eggs] become l4:spam4:eggse

Finally dictionaries are encoded as d<bencoded string><bencoded element>e. So, dictionary { "cow" => "moo", "spam" => "eggs" } becomes d3:cow3:moo4:spam4:eggse. You can have dictionary of any of the types supported.

I took the above examples from BitTorrent specification document[2].

Now that we understand about Bencode let’s start building the parser.

Paper Summary: Monarch: Google Planet-Scale In-memory Time Series Database

This week I read Monarch paper by Google engineers. The paper covers in detail design decisions involved in building Monarch. Monarch as the title of the paper suggests is an in-memory time series database. It is used by Google monitoring system that monitors most of the Google web properties like Gmail, Youtube, and Google Maps.

Every second, the system ingests terabytes of time series data into memory and serves millions of queries.

These are some very big numbers. Most of us do not have to deal with such large volume of data in our day to day work. Reading this paper can help us understand how engineers building such system make design decisions and tradeoffs.

usql: The Universal command-line interface for SQL databases

Recently I discovered a useful utility called usql while trying to find a better CLI for MySQL. I personally prefer psql PostgreSQL command-line tool so I was trying to find a similar tool for MySQL. During my search for the psql like MySQL CLI I stumbled upon usql – universal command-line interface for SQL database. I like playing with CLI tools as they play a big role in improving the developer experience.

I discovered that there is another popular project in Microsoft world with the same name. It is called U-SQL. U-SQL is the new big data query language of the Azure Data Lake Analytics service.