Skip to main content

My 2017 Review

Passion for System Design

After finishing a one year project, my longest stable team (lasted for 3 years) was separated into two smaller teams. Sadly, but that was a good chance for me to become a key member in my new team. My preferred skills were about system architectures; therefore most of the tasks of building the application structures were handled by me. In order to enhance my design system skills, I have spent much my time for reading books closely after work. These following books help me a lot.
- Object-Oriented Thought Process | Matt Weisfeld
- Head First Design Pattern | Elisabeth Freeman and Kathy Sierra
- Java 8 in Action: Lambdas, Streams, and Functional-style Programming | Alan Mycroft and Mario Fusco

Junior Technical Architect

I was requested to join a technical architect team (aka Team. Alpha) where I actually had gained experiences almost on interviewing candidates for my company (lol). Besides, I noticed myself must improve the skills of convincing people because I had had a strong debate with other members once in a sharing session (yes, I failed). It was really tough to convince others when introducing a stuff/an idea was totally new. But, "Do it Anyway" because debating makes problems clear.


New MacBook

This was something very normal but I think it's worth the money for tackling a new experience on a new operating system (macOS). I really loved it!

Facing challenges in finding a new company

I had worked at my old company (Axon Active Vietnam) for more than 4 years. It was not too long but I felt that it was the time for me to move out of my "safe zone". I had spent much time for interviewing to select a company for my new journey. Sadly, I had failed in a lot of places, from Outsourcing to Product to Startup companies. It was really a frustrated decision but eventually, I made a resignation when I didn't have a new offer. And, even my manager who also suggested a raise to keep me on my team. I appreciated that.

Fortunately, I had received several offers (exactly 3) at the end days before I left my old company. The following was my log: (Company | Applied position | Interview Notes)
  1. NVG | Senior Web Java Developer | Various questions about frameworks are being used.
  2. LenderRate | Developer | Algorithms (level: hard, difficult).
  3. ContentNet | Senior Developer | Deeply technical questions about Java core, design patterns and how to approach a technology.
  4. Absolute Vietnam | Developer | Deeply technical questions about Java core (but, it's my strong points).
  5. Innotech | Full-stack developer | Behavior questions (quickly, only <30 minutes).
  6. FPT | Developer onsite longterm in Singapore | Specific frameworks (Restful API, NodeJS, Microservices).
  7. Adnovum | Professional Developer | How you understand your most favorite projects and used technologies; algorithms (level: easy/medium).
  8. Freelancer with my beloved team | So, I passed it without conditions (Haha).
  9. Politely declined to interview at Zalora, SAI GON BPO.

Winning my first project with my freelance team

With a strong spirit of a startup, my team focused on trying to make our first project super succeed by providing a good quality and fast-building application. It was not only collaborating well with customers but consulting them to have a "better" application.

The following were key values of my team:
- Having the same vision: sharing a "can do" attitude. We organized some practical sessions each sprint such as knowledge sharing, code reviewing, and retrospective.
- Focus: reflection and adaption on whole sprint goal, not individual tasks status.
- Being agile: being flexible/effective at work rather than following strictly a process.

My desk at CirCO CoWorking Space

Happy New Year! 2018.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Huong NguyenJanuary 16, 2018 at 7:22 AM

    Holy crap! but, it was cool. Algorithms can be called as "Chi" in Kung Fu!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

[Snippet] CSS - Child element overlap parent

I searched from somewhere and found that a lot of people says a basic concept for implementing this feature looks like below: HTML code: <div id="parent">  <div id="child">  </div> </div> And, CSS: #parent{   position: relative;   overflow:hidden; } #child{   position: absolute;   top: -1;   right: -1px; } However, I had a lot of grand-parents in my case and the above code didn't work. Therefore, I needed an alternative. I presumed that my app uses Boostrap and AngularJs, maybe some CSS from them affects mine. I didn't know exactly the problem, but I believed when all CSS is loaded into my browser, I could completely handle it. www.tom-collinson.com I tried to create an example to investigated this problem by Fiddle . Accidentally, I just changed: position: parent; to position: static; for one of parents -> the problem is solved. Look at my code: <div class="modal-body dn-placeholder-parent-positi...
Post a Comment
Read more

My must-have apps for daily work

There is no doubt that cool apps can help us be more productive and enjoyable at work. For the time being, I really love the following apps which are used by me almost every day. 1. A personal Kanban In fact, a personal kanban is the most useful app for me. Why does it matter? It is not just a to-do list, but it keeps me motivated every day because it helps me be able to know what my "big picture" is. I usually set up my plans together with a path to reach them.  KanbanFlow  is my preferred tool. KanbanFlow 2. A terminal Needless to say, a terminal is a must-have app for every developer, especially the ones use macOS/Linux. Due to its importance, I love to decorate and enhance it to be super exciting with various tools such as  iTerm ,  oh-my- zsh , and  thefuck . ;) iTerm + oh-my-zsh 3. A documentation "ecosystem" As a developer, I can not remember all things that I have experimented a day. Moreover, a document is really useful for sharing an...
Post a Comment
Read more

PSMDB - A MongoDB alternative for having Encryption At Rest

Encryption is the most popular tool for securing data both in transit and at rest. - For protecting data in transit, we can configure to use the TLS connection - For protecting data at rest, we can use Percona Server for MongoDB (PSMDB), an open-source alternative for MongoDB Enterprise. License PSMDB Docker images follow the SSPL license. Therefore, it is not a problem when I only have my containers deployed in on-premises environments. Running MongoDB Replication on OpenShift I have successfully installed the replication by following the guide Install Percona Server for MongoDB on OpenShift . In order to make it work properly with my needs, I disabled some features from the default deployment. See the detail in this change Basically, I needed to create a CRD (Custom Resource Definition) to let OpenShift/Kubernetes what PSMDB is. Then, I deployed the Operator pod. Finally, I deployed the PSMDB StatefulSet. I used NFS shares for Persistent Volumes. Create CRD for PSMDB 2 git clone http...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adding a default text to the beginning of an text area

I have a text area where I can enter a SQL statement. The text "SELECT TOP 1" is used at the begining of the sql statement as a default prefix that can not be removed. In order to archive this functionality, I found three options: 1. Use an inputMask and build a pattern for the entered text. We can use the prefix inside the text area: http://jsfiddle.net/SEXAj/2130/ 2. Create an javascript event listener on event "input" and calculate to prevent the prefix is removed http://jsfiddle.net/sarbbottam/TUc94/ 3. Use another html tag like "div"/"span" that contains the prefix and calculate the suitable position + Tag "span": http://jsfiddle.net/4YzZy/ + Tag "div": http://jsfiddle.net/215b34fs/ I chose the 3rd approach with tag "div" because it's the most easiest solution and suitable for me at that monment. References: [1].  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24846041/how-do-i-add-a-default-text...
Post a Comment
Read more

Safari (older than 14.1.1) rejects TLS connections of TURN with Let's Encrypt certificates

Summary We could not make a video call successfully on Safari older than 14.1.1. The call kept disconnecting for some seconds. We got the following error in Nginx’s log SSL: error:14094418:SSL routines:ssl3_read_bytes:tlsv1 alert unknown ca:SSL alert number 48   Root cause The Safari didn’t trust our TLS certificates (certified by Let’s Encrypt) when establishing a TLS connection into our TURN server. It is a known issue that could be found at Bug 219274 - ICE does not resolve for `turns` relay candidates rooted in LetsEncrypt CA . The issue was just recently fixed (end of 2020), therefore old versions of Safari still meet the issues.   Solution In our development environment, we replaced the untrusted certificate with a trusted one. We will warn our customers about this issue in our installation guide. Technical explained WebKit is a browser engine developed by Apple and primarily used in its Safari web browser, as well as all iOS web browsers. The WebRTC of WebKit relied on ...
Post a Comment
Read more