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."

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Styling Sort Icons Using Font Awesome for Primefaces' Data Table

So far, Primefaces has used image sprites for displaying the sort icons. This leads to a problem if we want to make a different style for these icons; for example, I would make the icon "arrow up" more blurry at the first time the table loading because I want to highlight the icon "arrow down". I found a way that I can replace these icons with Font Awesome icons. We will use "CSS Pseudo-classes" to achieve it. The hardest thing here is that we should handle displaying icons in different cases. There is a case both "arrow up" and "arrow down" showing and other case is only one of these icons is shown. .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s { background-image: none; margin-left: 5px; font-size: 1.1666em; position: relative; } .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s:not(.ui-icon-triangle-1-s)::before { content: "\f106"; font-family: "FontAwesome"; position: ...
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

Building Axon.ivy Projects on Bitbucket Pipelines

Read me  if you don't know what Axon.ivy (Ivy) is. Motivation -  Ivy projects are designed to be built on a continuous integration (CI) server like Jenkins - Today, Bitbucket supports for CI with Bitbucket Pipelines - We're using Bitbucket. Then, why not? It must be very cool and convenient for us if we can centralize our CI and VCS (version control system) tools in one place. Here is an approach We have to use a maven plugin called project-build-plugin  to build ivy projects. This plugin requires an instance of Ivy engine during building time. Bitbucket Pipelines allows us to specify our own docker image as a build environment. What we need to do  is to prepare our docker image with needed stuffs such as JDK, Maven, Ivy engine, etc. Step 1. Prepare Docker images For testing purpose, I already created two docker images: Maven and Axon.ivy engine. They are now available on Docker Hub This image for Maven using Oracle JDK 8 This image for Axon.iv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Creating a Chatbot with RiveScript in Java

Motivation "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is considered a major innovation that could disrupt many things. Some people even compare it to the Internet. A large investor firm predicted that some AI startups could become the next Apple, Google or Amazon within five years"   - Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University. Using chatbots to support our daily tasks is super useful and interesting. In fact, "Jenkins CI, Jira Cloud, and Bitbucket" have been becoming must-have apps in Slack of my team these days. There are some existing approaches for chatbots including pattern matching, algorithms, and neutral networks. RiveScript is a scripting language using "pattern matching" as a simple and powerful approach for building up a Chabot. Architecture Actually, it was flexible to choose a programming language for the used Rivescript interpreter like Java, Go, Javascript, Python, and Perl. I went with Java. Used Technologies and Tools Oracle JDK 1.8...
Post a Comment
Read more

Improving the execution time of CI pipelines

Executing a large number of tests, especially integration tests, takes a lot of time. For instance, the pipeline of one of our projects for each Pull Request previously took nearly 30 minutes, including over 1 thousand test cases. This article guides you through several good techniques that we have discovered and applied to improve the time-consuming process. Parallel stages Analyze the current phases in your pipeline and categorize them in parallel. For example, we can separate the build and verify code of Node.js and Maven modules simultaneously in our Jenkins pipelines. Please mind using the setting failFast whether you want to abort the pipeline immediately. Read more: Parallel stages with Declarative Pipeline 1.2 (jenkins.io) Parallel test execution If you use Maven, t he plugin maven-failsafe-plugin is used to execute integration tests during phases integration-test and verify  the build lifecycle. It allows us to execute tests in parallel. There are many settings related ...
Post a Comment
Read more