Should you take an online course?

The internet can be used as an effective learning platform, usually done through an online course. One of the most commonly-touted advantages of an online course is convenience and accessibility. The ability to study a material in your own time at any place sounds amazing indeed!

I enrolled in an online course offered by the University of California, Berkeley called Foundations of Data Science. This is an actual university course that they converted into an online course format. As the topic of data science interests me, I decided to give it a shot. Continue Reading

Time Letter

Taking a quick rest in my bed one evening, I suddenly remembered about my time letter. Back in 2008 I decided to write a letter to myself that I intend to open ten years later. I quickly searched for the letter in my computer, and opened it for the first time in a decade.

July 13, 2008 Continue Reading

Do what you don’t want to do

I learned a trick in life, and that is to do what you don’t want to do. Picture this: you wake up one morning and its time to go to the gym. You look outside and saw that it is raining hard. The air is cool and you want to go back to sleep. Finally you decide that you don’t feel like going out right now and you will just go tomorrow. Sounds familiar?

What you don’t want to do

We all experience times when we plan to do something but a minor inconvenience happens and we suddenly feel like no longer doing it. Oftentimes not doing the things we plan does not affect our life significantly. But it may influence how we view obstacles in the future. Continue Reading

DelayedJob Survival Guide

One day at work I noticed that emails were taking much longer to be sent out from our app. I narrowed down the problem to our background queue which is responsible for sending out the emails. The solution prompted me to write this DelayedJob “survival guide”to help others who may encounter this issue in the future.

Asynchronous processing/background processing is an important part of a web application. This ensures that running code is not blocking the rest of the process if that code does not need to run synchronously. Common examples are sending emails or code that depends on a third-party API or service. Continue Reading

Keep Moving

One night after a few bottles of beer, a friend asked me about finding your passion or mission in life: “Do you search for it or does it just stumble towards you one day?“. I said to him that I think it will eventually stumble on you, but in order for this to happen, you need to keep moving.

Where are you are going?

Steve Jobs once said in a speech: Continue Reading

Tech and FI

Technology and Financial Independence