Skip to main content

There is no expert, there is only us

Chairs in my office

Once I was chatting with my teammates...

Me: "I wonder why it is always necessary to refer to this source, that source, has anyone done it, is there any research? While no problem is the same, no situation is the same. Why not use our own brains to create a whole new one? Why do we have to be the insiders to consult the outsiders? Isn't that very paradoxical?"


My teammate: "I agree with your point that no two situations will be exactly the same and that there is no one size fits all. But there's one like this, I don't think it's all the problems we're dealing with that only we can meet. So of course, if I can find a source to refer to first, it's still better. Just like when implementing a software feature, not every problem is the same. But I still have to go check to see if I'm the only one I've met? Or if someone has met me, I have to see if their method suits me before I decide to try it, but I don't blindly "they do it, I follow it". I want to find one that can balance Do Not Repeat (+ YAGNI) and Not Invented Here."


Me: "This is the climax and the difference between your point of view and mine. I still don't think something pre-reference is better. For me, we lose our creativity from that moment on. When faced with a problem, in the past, normally, I would act instinctively “How does the world solve this problem? Has anyone encountered this problem?”, but now “Wait! slowly....“, instead I try to ask myself “how am I going to deal with this”, because I know “there is no expert, there is only us”, which means we are the best people in this problem, what is our idea first? And obviously, no one can fully understand, so the step of finding out and referencing is the next step, not the first one. There are many cases where I don't have a pre-reference but I want to see how my idea will work in practice, I want to see that idea lives, and be verified by the real world."

Comments

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...

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...

How I did customize "rasa-nlu-trainer" as my own tool

Check out my implementation here Background I wanted to have a tool for human beings to classify intents and extract entities of texts which were obtained from a raw dataset such as Rocket.chat's conversation, Maluuba Frames or  here . Then, the output (labeled texts) could be consumed by an NLU tool such as Rasa NLU. rasa-nlu-trainer was a potential one which I didn't need to build an app from scratch. However, I needed to add more of my own features to fulfill my needs. They were: 1. Loading/displaying raw texts stored by a database such as MongoDB 2. Manually labeling intents and entities for the loaded texts 3. Persisting labeled texts into the database I firstly did look up what rasa-nlu-trainer 's technologies were used in order to see how to implement my mentioned features. At first glance rasa-nlu-trainer was bootstrapped with Create React App. Create React App is a tool to create a React app with no build configuration, as it said. This too...

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...

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...