I am writing about my thoughts and experiences
I finally gave this site a visual refresh. Here is what changed. The background I drew a grass field in SVG and set it as the background wallpaper. It sits behind everything, fixed in place, with a gentle sway. In dark mode it dims so the text stays readable. I want the site to feel calm, like writing outdoors. The design I stopped using Simple.css and wrote my own stylesheet from scratch. The layout is simple — a centered column for reading, a clean header, and not much else. Every color and spacing value comes from a small set of variables at the top of the file, so changing the whole look is just a few lines. The site now uses the Inter font, which is designed for screens and easy to read. It also has dark mode that follows your device setting automatically. Other small things Tags are now small pill shapes instead of rectangles Post summaries on the homepage are longer and do not cut off mid-sentence Code blocks look nicer with a card-style background I added Prettier so the code stays formatted What did not change Eleventy still builds the site. GoatCounter still tracks visits without cookies.…
Time for a new resume update. Since I joined SEEK, I did not write here much 😭. I spent my time on day to day work, so public posts stopped. Now I am updating my resume to include the work I've done for now. I passed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification. It was challenging for me because I needed to balance work time and study time. But it was really worth it. I managed to fill some AWS knowledge gaps: main AWS services I did not really know before because they were not relevant for my past work or I never had a use case. I highlight this certification in my resume to show I can use cloud services, which now is a must-have skill for every web software engineer. Next, I added my SEEK roles and achievements. SEEK is the biggest company I have joined so far, and I learned a lot there, especially about working with people. Soft skill is harder to write, so I hope to show my maturity working with people during interviews and conversation. I also included some highlights from the SEEK teams. SEEK is mostly TypeScript, Node.js, and React, so I felt at…
I was on a job hunt in early January 2021, so it's time to revise my resume. As per the last resume review, I did this résumé following this very concise guide from the freecodecamp blog. But this time, I also paid a friend that is quite senior in the IT industry to review my resume. He asked me to highlight more on achievements rather than just work that is done. Follow the X-Y-Z formula. My friend also advises me to add a summary. Honestly, I did not put much thought into it, I just write up a quick paragraph summarizing my background and what are my strength. It is quite easy for me to know my strength since at Vase we have one-on-one sessions where I can ask for feedback. Working at Vase or possibly any early to mid-stage startup is recommended if you want to get your hands dirty on multiple things at once. For most of my interview sessions, I can talk a lot about my experience, challenges, what new things I learn, and how I contribute to the company. I am proud of working at Vase and will be forever thankful they took me when I…
This is my second month doing learning update, I've learn a lot this month, this month also includes some of the things I started in May and completed in June. Coursera: Intro to CS I joined this course since May 2020, and I found this course a bit different from Havard's CS50. For starters, the course is from Princeton University and it is thought in Java. So I think this would a great exposure to Java since Java is one of my language bucket list. As per any intro to CS MOOC, their grading system for assignments is automated, and quite good. It has been a while since I grind myself doing algorithm questions, but so far so good. One immediate impression I have for Java is, the language is pretty strict in structuring the program. Each file must contain one class, and very minimum opportunity for programmer to do things their way. Since I come from a JS background, this impression is expected. Google Cloud's Cloud Run I walk through Jonathan's ebook Deploying Node.js on GCP and followed the step by step commands to deploy to cloud run. The ebook is pretty tight since it shows all main methods…
Starting this month, I want to record and track all my learnings in this blog. I have been learning so many things, but I did not track or wrote it down systematically in one place. This is my attempt to capture all my learnings or at least what are the subjects that I read or practice. Since this is the first in this series, I want to record things that I have learned since Jan 2020. Serverless framework I did an endpoint using serverless framework with NodeJS runtime. It does have quite tight integration with AWS Lambda so deploying to AWS is as easy as running a deploy command. Nuxt.js Nuxt is a Javascript frontend framework using Vue. It does have interesting modes to suit your use cases. Assuming your content is stored in a database, here are some of the modes and use cases: Server Rendered (Universal SSR) Loads content in the HTML then served to the client. Usually picked to improve SEO. Suitable for user-generated content, new content will be available instantly. Deploy as a separate service alongside your backend API. Single Page Applications (SPA) Loads an empty HTML, then populates the content via Javascript, some web crawlers…
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