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...

JSConf AU has been fun - great talks and great venue! It was also a wonderful opportunity for me to test out my new camera kit: SONY A7r + Sony Sonnar T* FE 35mm f/2.8 ZA + Voigtlander Color Skopar 20mm f/3.5 SL-II with Novoflex SONY E-Mount to Nikon adapter. Here’s the kit (taken by Nikon D800 + Tamron SP 24-70mm F/2.8 Di VC USD): [] Photos from JSConf AU 2014: [] Breakfast in North Melbourne: [] [] Conference: [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] Check out my Google+ Photo Album for...

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...