Reading slows down time
Have your days been zooming past you and you wonder how did time pass so fast? As the world resumes and the business of life starts to demand you of your time, you have to intentionally set aside time for learning. Life is too short to just buzz through without taking your head up to enjoy the current moment. In the midst of reading, you will find time seems to slow down a little. Take a book, slow down, and learn something new today!
In this article, there are just two broad categories of general topics and technological tools I’ve encountered and wish to share with you all!
- General
- Technology tools
General
Space travel has always been the peak of technology’s advancement. The ability to have your rocket fly back onto earth, landing in an upright position. That is just beyond imagination from a software engineer’s perspective. How much code is needed for that to happen? How much test does one need to have to achieve a zero margin of error? So so proud of whatever we have achieved in the midst of earth’s situation.
A balanced read to show the situations when a compliment can be well received and other times when we should reserve our complements for a less public recognition. Overall, genuinely seek to compliment and point out your colleagues work where credit is due! Seek to have an uplifting culture that supports and encourages one another to do better than themselves everyday. (:
It is in the millions and billion in which some of the companies mentioned in the article made attempting to build huge technical systems. I often wonder how do these companies get away from not completing and thus not delivering of a contractual statement of work. Is that not against the contract? I understand building software goes beyond just technology. It involves the people, the processes and the inertia for change from the people. It can be tough but i often wonder if money can be placed with companies to achieve space exploration and having a rocket landing upright back on earth, yet a huge sum of money cannot allow them to build just softwares for web consumption. I wonder if the companies which were once tech giants are not aging and have gone complacent.
They have a video that comes with it. Thought its really cool as an attempt for them to look deeper into the cryptology since the 1930s.
All skills one way or another depends on another more elementary skill. If you want to run, you first got to walk. Before walking, you first got to stand, and before that learn how to balance yourself on two feet. There is a sequence of elementary skills you should first pursue prior to the desired skill you want to go for. If you want to learn a new language, you first got to know how people are learning it. Break that down. Perhaps grammar and noun will be the first place to start in learning a new language. Start from there, plan your skill up tree. Smartly learn your skills.
Teaching is not just able content delivery. It is about meeting your students where they are. Give them the space to voice out and to be heard. Reality padegogy is to reach out to students where they really are, making sure that their lives and backgrounds are reflected in the curriculum and in classroom conversations. Teaching is never just managing the students and their behaviours. Teaching is to create a space for connection, for feedback, for a dialogue. Given classroom responsibilities, students are now able to take charge of their own learning process. With interactive activities instead of a one-directional lecture, students are now able to engage with their peers, sharing their ideas and being mini-teachers of their own. Fundamentally, the best way to learn is to actually teach.
Teaching requires you to know the whys and rationalize your decisions and thought processes all the way through. You can fluff your way through at times, but deep down, you cannot fool yourself. If you don’t know, it’s okay to admit. It’s okay to not know, but it is not okay to continue fooling yourself. If you do not do what you’re teaching, how then do you know enough of the topic you are teaching. How much are you convinced of what you are teaching?
Features can typically be categorized into 3 main buckets: gamechanger, showstopper, and distractions.
Play this game and make sure no lines are crossed! Trains the brain to see connections and not to get ahead of yourself!
It is always intriguing to find out how softwares when utilized by the mass actually has such big implications on the national level securities. I see how technology with its scale can actually harvest such massive power. If not founded by core values, companies can easily lose sight of their focus on value creation with their technology. Reminder to self daily: “What is your core value?”. What value do you want to provide for your customers or users today? Go do just that.
Technology Tool
This article gives a simple walkthrough on how to leverage on amazon’s new interactive video service. Super easy to create your own real time livestream video. I will probably give this a try when I’ve got the chance! (:
Monitoring can be costly with high setup prices with security issues. Often times these applications are third party and thus the way they collect these data for processing may not be up to date. One has to be cautious about this hidden aspect of third party softwares. Typically for all monitoring modules, you essentially need 3 core components: your tool to collect metric from your nodes (collectD, MetricBeat, etc), your DB to store your data (influxDB, MSsql, etc), and your dashboard (Kibana, Grafana, etc).
InfluxDB is a time-aware DB with a UNIX timestamp linked to each data that is added into the DB.
Writing data does not affect the performance of the database (as sometimes happens in MySQL), since writing is simply the addition of a certain event to the timeline.
CollectD is a data aggregator that facilitates the transmission of data to the DB. By default, it captures metrics on CPU, RAM, memory (on disk), network interfaces, processes, etc. This application can be extended with preinstalled plugin enablement
Suppose that I want to check how many processes my node has. In doing so, CollectD does nothing more than make an API call to get the number of processes per time unit (defined as 5000 ms, by default). Once captured, the data will be sent to InfluxDB via a module (called “Network”) to be configured.
Grafana is an open-source tool, compatible with a wide range of databases that presents a graphical representation of metrics and allows users to create alerts on customised threshold. For example, if your CPU reaches high peaks, you can be notified on Slack, Mattermost, by email, etc. You can even configure an alert every time someone enters SSH, so the access to server can be actively monitored.
A note taking application that is made with markdown
Now you have JavaScript code that allows you to run your computations on GPU. JavaScript is known to be a high level programming language. High level programming language allows programmers to write programs that are more or less independent of a particular type of computer. They are considered high level because they are closer to human languages and further from machine language. Having a high level programming language that allows you to decide and utilise a specific physical resource is definitely an achievement that was unheard of previously.
As i start to interact a whole lot more with SQL databases, I often wonder exactly what are the differences between the different SQL databases. Why are there even differences if they are utilizing the similar concept of schemas. Perhaps the support comes from different organisations. There are transact-SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MsSQL.
One usually wonders if it is possible to create an application in which its database is an excel sheet. This allows non-tech personnels to update the database and that allows you to have version control over the changes made. Ideally that seems wonderful, but to really understand the utilization of a database along with the little configuration changes needed to keep up-to-date with business goals still requires the thinking progress of a developer. That kinda brings us back one full circle to having a developer to do an effective work. It’s always an idea to think about but not without its cons.