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

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

4 Remarkable Notes for JSF Apps Using HTML5

In the previous post , I've already shared with you how my team consults clients by using a HTML prototype. This post is about the used technologies for reusing the provided HTML template and communicating with backend. What is the issue when using HTML elements with Primefaces components? Primefaces is a great extension for developing JSF web apps. However, it is really frustrating in case we have to make it work with an existing HTML template. Why? - Primefaces has its own theme for styling. - Primefaces changes the HTML structure. Therefore, that would be a huge effort to use the Primefaces' components to replicate the elements of the HTML template; especially it is impossible for images drawing by " canvas " tag. That requires us to find a better approach. Since Java EE 7 (introducing JSF 2.2 included), it supports to use HTML5 elements . The idea is that JSF components don't effect the style and HTML structure, so we can easily reuse the provided HTM...
2 comments
Read more

How to convert time between timezone in Java, Primefaces?

I use the calendar Primefaces component with timeOnly and timeZone attributes for using only hour format (HH:mm). Like this: <p:calendar id="xabsOvertimeTimeFrom" pattern="HH:mm" timeOnly="true" value="#{data.dateFrom}" timeZone="#{data.timeZone}"/> We can convert the value of #{data.dateFrom} from GMT/UTC time zone to local, conversely, from local time zone to GMT/UTC time zone. Here is my functions: package vn.nvanhuong.timezoneconverter; import java.text.ParseException; import java.text.SimpleDateFormat; import java.util.Calendar; import java.util.Date; import java.util.TimeZone; public class TimeZoneConverter { /** * convert a date with hour format (HH:mm) from local time zone to UTC time zone */ public static Date convertHourToUTCTimeZone(Date inputDate) throws ParseException { if(inputDate == null){ return null; } Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance(); calendar.setTime(inputDate); int ...
Post a Comment
Read more

AngularJS - Build a custom validation directive for using multiple emails in textarea

AngularJS already supports the built-in validation with text input with type email. Something simple likes the following: <input name="input" ng-model="email.text" required="" type="email" /> <span class="error" ng-show="myForm.input.$error.email"> Not valid email!</span> However, I used a text area and I wanted to enter some email addresses that's saparated by a comma (,). I had a short research and it looked like AngualarJS has not supported this functionality so far. Therefore, I needed to build a custom directive that I could add my own validation functions. My validation was done only on client side, so I used the $validators object. Note that, there is the $asyncValidators object which handles asynchronous validation, such as making an $http request to the backend. This is just my implementation on my project. In order to understand that, I supposed you already had experiences with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Updates to the Scrum Guide - The 5 Scrum Values

This article is available at blog.scrum.org , here I just quote my favorite points and give my comment at the end of this post. Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, the creators of Scrum delivered a webinar on their latest update to the Scrum Guide .  The update was a simple one, adding the 5 values of Scrum to the Guide: These values sound easy? Well, there are many misunderstandings and common problems when applying these values. Here are some example: Value Misunderstanding Getting the value right Commitment Committing to something that you don’t understand because you are told to by your boss. Committing yourself to the team and Sprint Goal. Focus Focusing on keeping the customer happy Being focused on the sprint and its goal. Openness Telling everyone everything about all your work Highlighting when you have challenges and problems that are stopping you from success Respect Thinking you are helping the team by being a hero Helping peop...
Post a Comment
Read more