Preface If memory serves right, it’s been several years since I first dabbled in Elixir, but it was about a year ago I really started putting some serious effort into learning Elixir, and as a result I made two libraries in the machine learning space: Simple Bayes, a Naive Bayes text classifier implementation, and Stemmer, an English (Porter2) stemming implementation. Unfortunately after I’ve released those two libraries, I hadn’t had much opportunities to work with Elixir. My day jobs have bee...

About a month ago I was in-between jobs - I had two weeks to rest up, recharge and get ready for my new job. So I thought, I should use those two weeks to learn something new. Years ago I briefly looked into Elixir when it was first released to the wild, at the time I wasn’t interested in picking it up due to its syntax similarity to Ruby, despite their vastly different underlying semantics. I love Ruby, and it’s been my weapon of choice for the past 6-7 years, so when it came time for me to lea...

Ever since I started transitioning into a team leadership role over three years ago, I had been trying to find ways to eliminate waste caused by repetitive work and to keep myself on the fringe of pushing the technical boundaries. Four months ago I started my current role where my official job title is Delivery Lead. People don’t often know what a delivery lead is, but in my mind it is a role to ensure the success of the project delivery by identifying and closing the gaps in the team and in the...

Two weeks ago as I was reading Software Lead Weekly which I had subscribed to for a while, I discovered its curator, Oren Ellenbogen’s book - Leading Snowflakes. It was a moment of discovery that lead to a stream of delightfulness. It Started with a Long Day at Work… After a long day at work, I was so beat I couldn’t even listen to audio books like I always do on my way to and from work. So I drove home that night in total silence. One thing that was on my mind at the time was - who should I r...

Today a blog post titled "Trial Week: Our Hiring Secret" has made to the Hacker News homepage. I naively tweeted my dislike and now I feel obligated to share my thoughts in a more meaningful and constructive way. First of all, congratulations to the Weebly team, as this trial week strategy is clearly working very well for them. I, on the other hand, am against using a trial week for vetting candidates, and I am going to share my thoughts. Let this serve as a reminder to the rest of us: every o...

A while ago I translated an interview with Matz done by a Chinese book publisher. The interview and the translation were well received, so this time I am translating another interview with Matz, done by Ito, the editor-in-chief from Japanese website Engineer Type. Since I don’t read Japanese, the translation is based on Turing Book’s Chinese translation. The Chinese translator has done a great job translating the interview, but there are still many words and sentences lack sufficient context and...

Update: Please check out this new interview with Matz, done by Engineer Type. A week ago I went to Shanghai, China to attend and to give a talk at RubyConf China. The day before the conference’s first day a bunch of us were invited to a VIP dinner where we met with Matz and got to play with a device running MRuby. And I heard that earlier on that day Matz was ‘adopted’ by a book publisher to do an interview. I have found the interview (in Chinese), and found it to be really useful. So I transla...

TL;DR - PHP is still a useful tool, but as a PHP developer, have you started playing with other useful tools? Here’s my story. Today Jeff Atwood’s new piece "The PHP Singularity" and Marco Arment’s "PHP Addiction" have started another round of heated discussion on PHP. As someone who started his career as a PHP developer, I feel like sharing my thoughts from a different perspective. I began my career as a freelancer - since JavaScript and PHP were the two programming languages I learnt at scho...

If you are looking at hiring developers, check out my article on this subject. The goal or the dream of working on your own startup is always full of excitement. And apart from some rare cases such as Dropbox, you probably need one or more co-founders to work with you on The Next Big Thing ™. Problem is, how do you (as a non-technical co-founder) find us? Or more specifically, how do you talk us into working with you instead of some other billion-dollar ideas? To answer this question, we need ...

If you are looking at finding technical co-founders, check out my article on this subject. In recent years developers become hotter and hotter - especially the good ones - they are hard to find, and they have plenty of employment options to choose from. Some companies (or individuals who are seeking freelancers) go the extra miles to impress developers with attractive salary/rate and perks, which is nice. But surprisingly, many companies and individuals seem to have a habit of keep doing things...