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-position&quo
Post a Comment
Read more

The HelloWorld example of JSF 2.2 with Myfaces

I just did by myself create a very simple app "HelloWorld" of JSF 2.2 with a concrete implementation Myfaces that we can use it later on for our further JSF trying out. I attached the source code link at the end part. Just follow these steps below: 1. Create a Maven project in Eclipse (Kepler) with a simple Java web application archetype "maven-archetype-webapp". Maven should be the best choice for managing the dependencies , so far. JSF is a web framework that is the reason why I chose the mentioned archetype for my example. 2. Import dependencies for JSF implementation - Myfaces (v2.2.10) into file pom.xml . The following code that is easy to find from  http://mvnrepository.com/  with key words "myfaces". <dependency> <groupId>org.apache.myfaces.core</groupId> <artifactId>myfaces-api</artifactId> <version>2.2.10</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.apache.myfaces.core<
Post a Comment
Read more

Strategy Design Pattern

For example, I have a program with an Animal abstract class and two sub-classes Dog and Bird. I want to add new behavior for the class Animal, this is "fly".  Now, I face two approaches to solve this issue: 1. Adding an abstract method "fly" into the class Animal. Then, I force the sub-classes should be implemented this method, something like: public abstract class Animal{ //bla bla public abstract void fly(); } public class Bird extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Fly high"); } } public class Dog extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Cant fly"); } } 2. Creating an interface with method "fly" inside. The same issue to an abstract class, I force the classes these implement this interface should have a method "fly" inside: public interface Flyable{ public void fly(); } public class Bird implements Flyable{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.pr
Post a Comment
Read more

Regex - Check a text without special characters but German, French

Special characters such as square brackets ([ ]) can cause an exception " java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException " or something like this if we don't handle them correctly. I had met this issue. In my case, my customers want our application should allow some characters in German and French even not allow some special characters. The solution is that we limit the allowed characters by showing the validation message on GUI. For an instance, the message looks like the following: "This field can't contain any special characters; only letters, numbers, underscores (_), spaces and single quotes (') are allowed." I used Regular Expression to check it. For entering Germany and French, I actually don't have this type of keyboard, so I referred these sites: * German characters: http://german.typeit.org/ * French characters: http://french.typeit.org/ Here is my code: package vn.nvanhuong.practice; import java.util.regex.Matcher; import java.util
Post a Comment
Read more

Math fundamentals and Katex

It was really tough for me to understand many articles about data science due to the requirements of understanding mathematics (especially linear algebra). I’ve started to gain some basic knowledges about Math by reading a book first. The great tool Typora and stackedit with supporting Katex syntax simply helps me to display Math-related symbols. Let’s start! The fundamental ideas of mathematics: “doing math” with numbers and functions. Linear algebra: “doing math” with vectors and linear transformations. 1. Solving equations Solving equations means finding the value of the unknown in the equation. To find the solution, we must break the problem down into simpler steps. E.g: x 2 − 4 = 4 5 x 2 − 4 + 4 = 4 5 + 4 x 2 = 4 9 x = 4 9 ∣ x ∣ = 7 x = 7  or  x = − 7 \begin{aligned} x^2 - 4 &= 45\\ x^2 - 4 + 4 &= 45 + 4\\ x^2 &= 49\\ \sqrt{x}&=\sqrt{49}\\ |x| &= 7\\ x=7 &\text{ or } x=-7 \end{aligned} x 2 − 4 x 2 − 4 + 4 x 2 x ​ ∣ x ∣ x = 7 ​ = 4 5 = 4 5 + 4 = 4
Post a Comment
Read more