Rage against the dying of the light

Rage against the dying of the light

If there is one recognizable aphorism on how we should live our days to the fullest, it would be carpe diem. This is famously known to mean “seize the day”, but it is actually mistranslated. Its true meaning is closer to “gather while the day is ripe”.

This year has been hard for many of us. The pandemic brought widespread disruption in people’s lives by losing loved ones, layoffs, closed businesses, and isolation. Our family was not spared as well. This year I lost my sister to cancer. Several uncles and relatives passed away. This led me to think about the shortness of this life. Was gathering while the day is ripe enough? How can I even know if the day is ripe or not? Continue Reading

Managed investments are alright!

Managed investments are alright!

“Why did you get that VUL? They are inefficient! Just buy Term Insurance and invest the difference!“. This was me years ago after I found out that a friend just purchased a Variable Universal Life Insurance from a big insurance company. I then went on a tirade about the insurance fees, agent commission, and managed fund expenses. I continued on about why it is a bad idea to mix insurance and investments.

Was I trying to help? My intentions were good: I wanted my friend to have the best insurance and investment set up. Paying unnecessary fees is a big no-no from my perspective. Continue Reading

Life Concepts

Life Concepts

As I add another digit to my life’s marker this month, sometimes I can’t help but look back and check to see if I have really grown worthy of my age. I found that through several trials and heartaches these past year, what helped me the most are the things I learned exploring and reading about personal philosophy.

These are some concepts that I find worthy of sharing to everyone. As they only touch the general idea behind each concept, I will leave it to the reader to decide whether they are ideas worth looking deeper into. Continue Reading

Simple Web Applications using Rack

As Ruby developers, we are familiar with popular web frameworks such as Rails, Sinatra and Hanami. These frameworks make our lives much easier due to the built-in features, conventions that allow others to easily understand our code, and the use of the vast Ruby ecosystem.

Knowledge of these frameworks enable developers to create feature-rich web applications in a short amount of time. But do you know the layer beneath that framework? Are you aware that these frameworks use a mini-framework within? As part of the series on Web Application Basics, we will introduce Rack and why it is important for developers to know how it works. Continue Reading

Web Development Basics: Server

Once a web request traveled through the Internet and reached the server, it can now be processed, right? Not so fast! In a production setup, the request does not reach the application right away. We will introduce the different services that support a web application: Content Delivery Networks, Load Balancers, Reverse Proxies, Web Servers, and Application Servers.

Why do we need all of this?

Technically, it is possible to connect an application directly to the Internet and start serving requests. While this will suffice for a small Internet-of-Things home service, this is going to be problematic in a real-world production use. Continue Reading