Do what you don’t want to do

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

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

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

Late-to-the-party guide to Vim and Tmux

Late-to-the-party guide to Vim and Tmux

In my first job we used Emacs as our main text editor. However, I have no idea how to use it properly so I just used it more like Notepad++ than Emacs. In our team there is one person who refused to use Emacs, instead he was using vi (without the m!). To be honest, it looked painful watching him edit code with no syntax highlighting, no line numbers, and no plugins whatsoever. We tried constantly to convince him to use Emacs but he always refused and stuck to using vi. I thought the guy was crazy.

Fast forward 12 years in my career. I was attending a Ruby conference with my peers and one of the speakers (Brad Urani) demonstrated zshell, vim, and tmux and how he does development in his machine. It looked cool! Some of my peers also uses vim and tmux so its not a new concept to me, however I always decided to use gedit all these years. This time, they probably thought I was crazy. Continue Reading

Investing is like Planting a Tree

Investing is like Planting a Tree

Investing can be daunting especially for people beginning to learn how to manage their money. One way to make it easier to understand the concepts and avoid doing things that can hurt financially is to think that investing is like planting a tree.

You don’t eat it while it is a sapling

All plants and trees start out as a seed and then a sapling. Even the largest trees in existence today started out as small saplings many years ago. This is also true with wealth: all of the wealth today started out as a small investment decades or centuries ago. Continue Reading