Skip to main content

Looking back on my 2021


As of this writing, the COVID-19 pandemic still persists. In Vietnam, people have just passed a horrible time of lockdown, we needed to stay at home for nearly 4 months. I have even got covid infected and spent a quarantine time for more than three weeks.

My balcony garden

More books read

This year, I read 22 books of various kinds. Reading books becomes my habit.

English books

  1. Grokking Algorithms: An Illustrated Guide for Programmers and Other Curious People
  2. The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
  3. Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't
  4. The Tao of Microservices
  5. Software Architecture for Developers: Volume 2

Vietnamese books

  1. Nhân tố Enzyme 
  2. Nếu biết trăm năm là hữu hạn
  3. Đạo giáo
  4. Tâm Thành và Lộc Đời
  5. Lịch sử tư tưởng Nhật Bản
  6. Totto-chan bên cửa sổ
  7. Thiền sư và em bé 5 tuổi
  8. Swiss Made
  9. Suối Nguồn
  10. Hạnh Phúc và May Mắn
  11. Một đời quản trị
  12. Con chó nhỏ mang giỏi hoa hồng
  13. Cách nuôi dạy những đứa trẻ dễ cáu giận, khó bảo
  14. Muôn kiếp nhân sinh
  15. Fear: Trump Ở Nhà Trắng
  16. Dấu chân trên cát
  17. Biết chính mình

Tech Lead at UMB Solution (ubitec)

Tech Lead was my official job title at ubitec. I have worked closely with two teams (7 developers in total) for developing two products ubichat and ubibot. My responsibilities were divided into three following roles:

- Software engineer: joined teams to implement/solve several challenging problems

- Technical consultant: for developers, Product Owners, Product Managers, and customers.

- Mentor: grew the teams in both technical skills and soft skills

Mental care

In my spare time, I enjoyed reading books and watching videos. I have been doing "meditation" in ... every moment in my life (no kidding 😊)

The following was my favorite 2021 Youtube channels:

- The Quoc Khanh Show Premium (TQKS Premium)

- Bar stories - Dustin On The Go

- Johnny Trí Nguyễn

Making life easier

This was a tough year due to COVID, however fortunately I could get my car driving license and buy a new house.

---

Happy new year, 2022!

Comments

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...

Gzip upload on browsers

Today, I faced a problem that I could not upload my archive file with gzip format on Firefox, even it worked on Chrome. I was using macOS. My application had a setting to whitelist accepted files. I’ve already added "application/gzip" to that list. "It’s strange!", I thought. I finally figured out that my uploaded file's type actually was "application/x-gzip" on Firefox. I also asked my colleagues to check their uploaded files on Window and Ubuntu. Hmm… they were totally different! It was "application/x-compressed" on Window, and was "application/x-compressed-tar" on Ubuntu. In fact, gzip is already standardized by IANA. There is a note in RFC-6713 as below: "Some applications have informally used media types such as application/gzip-compressed, application/gzipped, application/x-gunzip, application/x-gzip, application/x-gzip-compressed, and gzip/document to describe data compressed with gzip. The media types defin...

Java 8 - Persistent data structure

The following is a series of posts about "functional programming in Java" which is the result of my understanding by reading the book " Java 8 in Action: Lambdas, Streams, and Functional-style Programming, by Alan Mycroft and Mario Fusco ". 1. Why functional programming? 2. Functional programming in Java 8 3. Java 8 - Using Functions as Values 4. Java 8 - Persistent data structure Persistent data structure is also known as a simple technique but it's very important. Its other names are functional data structure and immutable data structure. Why is it "persistent"? Their values persist and are isolated from changes happening elsewhere. That's it! This technique is described as below: If you need a data structure to represent the result of a computation, you should make a new one and not mutable an existing data structure. Destructive updates version public static A doSomething(A a){ a.setProp1("new value"); return...

Fulfilling Your Contribution Needs

Human resource management motivation Managing human today is quite different from the industrial age which treats people as just "chickens". Rather than people now are very important to the success of an organization. People are an organization's special resource. They should be encouraged to grow to contribute their effort and creativeness to their beloved working environment because the contribution is one of their most needs in life. Training people: getting rid of the ineffective model and adopting the new one The ineffective model of training people: Hiring new people --> giving them a crash course once --> expecting them working effectively.  That somehow makes sense but you're about to expect a luck because you do not really spend your effort for mentoring them. If they can work effectively, well...lucky you! Otherwise, you will blame that these people are ineffective and you let them go and hire the new ones. What a waste of time! The new effe...

Daily Meetings - Coordinate and Communicate Every Day

Using daily meetings for frequent course corrections. However, you should keep the meeting short because time is burn rate . Though good collaboration doesn't guarantee a project's success, poor collaboration almost always guarantees a project's failure What benefits does the daily meeting bring to you? - Keeps inexperienced developers and experienced ones on-track. - Avoids reinventing the wheel. - Limits  tumbleweed developers ' damage. - Leverages the entire team’s experience to solve problems quickly. - Improves team communication. - Helps every people have a big-picture point of view. Who are tumbleweed developers? We’ve all worked with a few tumbleweed developers. These developers lose direction and drift through their days. They wade through the random code and “improve” it, cleaning up method signatures, polishing algorithms, and reformatting brackets. Tumbleweed developers lack the discipline to finish any task you ask them to do and generally c...