Over the past decade or two, both as a software developer and as a manager I have accumulated a few tips for becoming a better software developer. For context, I've been working as a software developer for more than a decade, mostly in small product-based companies; over the last decade or so I've worked as a team lead or manager in various capacities; and I've moonlighted as a consultant, freelancer and open source contributor in-between. Check out my LinkedIn profile and Github profile if you ...

Over the past few years as I gain more and more experience in not only building software and products but also in leading teams and projects, I realised that my desire of wanting an agile tool that's super simple to use yet super flexible to adapt to different needs has grown stronger and stronger. Given the COVID-19 situation that's going on at the moment, I've finally decided to spend a few nights working on a pitch deck for myself to validate the value proposition, and some high level wirefra...

Seven years ago in 2012 I spoke at RubyConf China 2012. It was a technical talk on how to become a better developer, if you're interested you can check out the video recording. Seven years later in August 2019, I headed back to Shanghai again to speak at this year's RubyConf China. And this time around, it was a non-technical talk on how to develop one's career. Check out the video recording below: video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBczdO7RgNo And, here are some photos of yours truly. :) ...

In 2010 I set up this blog on Tumblr mostly due to the ease of publishing and not having to worry about the hosting. I also went through two design iterations done in Photoshop: [] You can probably tell that these designs were done before the flat and minimalist design trend we are seeing in recent years. As I decided to revamp my blog once again, I thought I'd use Sketch this time around and aim for a simpler, cleaner and more mature design approach that's quicker to design and to build. And ...

I’ve had a productive coding weekend, and so I decided to share my experience. Now, many developers choose to treat their career as a series of 9-5 jobs, but if you’re reading this, I assume you’re like the rest of us who love continuous learning and self improvement. Preface About a year ago I started learning Elixir. So as part of the learning experience, I wrote two matching learning related libraries: Stemmer and Simple Bayes. It was a great, really enjoyable experience and I learnt a lot a...

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...

UPDATE: Reading Hacker News comments it is apparent to me that I have not explained my position and intention very well. Please allow me to clarify - I do not resent the people involved in these moments, if anything, I thought those encounters were good learning experience for me, as I know there are things I would do and say differently so others around me won’t feel I’ve been too harsh on them. I did not share these moments to complain, but to raise the awareness that kinder communication style...

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...