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

Junit - Test fails on French or German string assertion

In my previous post about building a regex to check a text without special characters but allow German and French . I met a problem that the unit test works fine on my machine using Eclipse, but it was fail when running on Jenkins' build job. Here is my test: @Test public void shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters(){ String source = "ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ"; assertFalse(SpecialCharactersUtils.isExistSpecialCharater(source)); } Production code: public static boolean isExistNotAllowedCharacters(String source){ Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("^[a-zA-Z_0-9_ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ]*$"); Matcher matcher = regex.matcher(source); return !matcher.matches(); } The result likes the following: Failed tests: SpecialCharactersUtilsTest.shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters:32 null A guy from stackoverflow.com says: "This is probably due to the default encoding used for your Java source files. The ö in the string literal in the J...
5 comments
Read more

Automating deployment and managing apps on OpenShift

Previously, we maintained OpenShift templates for deploying apps in development environments as well as delivering these templates to our customers for their on-prem deployment. Customers who refer to our templates (as well as documentation) have their own configuration management tools to automate the deployment such as ArgoCD and FluxCD. My son's buildings Our developers usually modify templates (YAML) directly on OpenShift for testing and then adjust the corresponding templates stored in the Git repository in Bitbucket. This sometimes causes an issue that delivered templates are incorrect because: - Developers forget to update the templates in Git repositories. - Developers don’t test the templates Therefore, our goal was to integrate a tool into our CI/CD that can automate and manage the configuration of OpenShift apps. The delivered templates should be the ones that are able to run on our OpenShift with the following purposes: - Automate deployment from templated in Git repos...
Post a Comment
Read more

Installing NGINX on macOS

I have heard of a lot of NGINX recently. One of them was it can help for security issues; for sure, it much be more. It so happens that our team has got a ton of user stories from a security audit. It's time to delve into it. What is NGINX? In order to get a basic idea and have some fun , I've just picked some available posts from my favorite Vietnamese blogger communities as below: https://kipalog.com/posts/Cau-hinh-nginx-co-ban---Phan-1 https://viblo.asia/hoang.thi.tuan.dung/posts/ZabG912QGzY6 NGINX (pronounce: Engine-X) is a web server (comparing to IIS, Apache). It can be used as a reverse proxy ( this is what I need for security issues with configuration ), load balancer and more. How to get started? I found the below path for learning NGINX by googling "learn nginx": https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-online-resources-to-learn-Nginx In this post, I only went first step. This is installing NGINX on macOS and taking a first look at the confi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Coding Exercise, Episode 1

I have received the following exercise from an interviewer, he didn't give the name of the problem. Honestly, I have no idea how to solve this problem even I have tried to read it three times before. Since I used to be a person who always tells myself "I am not the one good at algorithms", but giving up something too soon which I feel that I didn't spend enough effort to overcome is not my way. Then, I have sticked on it for 24 hours. According to the given image on the problem, I tried to get more clues by searching. Thanks to Google, I found a similar problem on Hackerrank (attached link below). My target here was trying my best to just understand the problem and was trying to solve it accordingly by the Editorial on Hackerrank. Due to this circumstance, it turns me to love solving algorithms from now on (laugh). Check it out! Problem You are given a very organized square of size N (1-based index) and a list of S commands The i th command will follow t...
2 comments
Read more