I was thinking about my typical approach to coding. When writing a new feature, I tend to implement in the direction of where the data flows, starting from the user interface then to the backend and back to the frontend and wherever else that goes. I will build incrementally, using debugging tools or console printouts to ensure that each step is working correctly. As an example, here's how I did a recent web-based function: The user needs to see a new button on the screen, so I add the HTML for that button and just have the click handler be
2017 December
I had booked the Singapore trip earlier in the year, since I almost always attend Grand Prixs in Singapore as its an easy trip and gives a good opportunity to visit friends. Unfortunately, I ended up not having time to prepare for the tournament itself. Fortunately, it was a limited event rather than constructed, so I figured maybe I could wing it and still do well. (Spoiler: I could not.) Prior to the trip, my prep for the sealed format had consisted of a single pool at my prerelease and reading a few articles online the night before the trip.- I took a 5-day trip to Singapore last weekend, mostly to play in the Grand Prix, but the opportunity to get away from the country for a while was appreciated. These are some notes and anecdotes from the trip. (Not about the GP itself, that's a separate post on its own.) By my count this would be my 5th visit to Singapore. That means Singapore now ties Hong Kong for my most visited foreign destination. My last HK visit was back in 2009, there was no overlap. Normally when flying out I prefer to check luggage so that I'm not
2017 August
- The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 4 of 5 stars It was ok. Some tropes turned around. Kind of frustrating how a lot of stuff just dragged out until the end. The identify of the Hero of Ages pretty much given away early on by the flavor text at the start of each chapter. I finished it in two sittings so that's something View all my reviews
- The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 4 of 5 stars I finished Well of Ascension only two days after finishing The Final Empire. I think I enjoyed it a bit less than the first book - mainly because there's a lot of self-doubt here among the protagonists, a lot of paragraphs of "why am i doing this? I'm not good enough, etc". The plot also takes longer to solidify. Unlike the first book where they had a very solid objective until the end (the downfall of the Final Empire), the protagonists spend most of this book running
- The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 5 of 5 stars Great book. The story's pace was a bit slow at first as Sanderson was doing his excellent worldbuilding and introducing us to the magic system in his world (he's good at that sort of thing!), but it picks up about a third of the way through. A lot of the plot twists and character developments are handled very well. The pace proceeds fairly quickly towards the end - I burned through the last third of the book in one night because things were escalating quickly. Looking forward to
- I had been looking into a software performance problem for a few hours now and had decided to call it quits for the day. I turned off the lights and climbed into bed, hoping to get to sleep early for a change. I hadn't been in bed five minutes when I thought about something I hadn't tried yet. I picked up the tablet that was beside my bed and did a few google searches and soon I was back on my desktop trying out some parameters I hadn't tried yet. Ideally one practices some sort of compartmentalization. There should be
- I haven't had much time to write recently. Been busy. (I'll write about that some other time.) But I've kind of been posting regularly on this date for a while, so here we are. Ah, time. And the inexorable passage thereof. There's some kind of big milestone for me in around three hundred and sixty-five more solar cycles. Well, I don't personally consider it big, since that's kind of arbitrary. But as people are wont to say, life begins... maybe I'll save that for next year. This year, kind of at a crossroads. Considering where to go and the way
2017 July
Last week the local gaming shop had the Steam Link on 70% discount so I figured I'd give it a try. We recently got a new TV at home, so I was eager to try out some Steam games on the big screen. If you're too lazy to click the link above, the Steam Link is basically a set-top box that streams your gameplay to a TV via HDMI, allowing you to enjoy your steam games from the comfort of a couch. There was also a sale on Steam controllers, but I had a variety of controllers at home to
Last weekend I watched Aureus Solito's movie Pisay at the UP film center with a couple of friends (both of whom were my Pisay batchmates of course). For the uninitiated Pisay is the nickname for our beloved _Philippine Science High School. _It's a system of government-run schools with a special focus on science and math subjects. There's a highly-competitive entrance exam and we've always been told that students who make it in are considered the "cream of the crop." (I don't know that I've ever heard anyone outside Pisay say that though.) Students are given full scholarships and a modest
2017 June
- Random thoughts while walking at night: The structure of government can be a bit analogous to the structure of a software development project. The Constitution is like the requirements for a project. It's kind of high-level and (I believe) shouldn't be too detailed. Supposedly the requirements are written by the client. For a country like the Philippines the client is "we the sovereign Filipino people". Slight tangent: I used to know this guy who was one of those rabid "we need to amend the constitution" types and he asked me to review a "mathematical model to track the budget as
- Some time ago a friend from high school invited me to her daughter's debut. And I had to proxy for her daughter's ninong and maybe give a few words on what it means to become an adult. My first two reactions were (1) wow I'm so old one of my batchmates has an eighteen-year-old daughter; and (2) what the heck would I know about becoming an adult? (I guess (3) was "oh, it's a debut, so it's formal and I have to dress up? I hate dressing up.") I mean, don't get me wrong. I certainly consider myself an adult.
- A while back I wrote about my experience coding and maintaining an in-house web framework at a previous job. It was a full-stack web framework. We had libraries for front-end Javascript up to server-side database connections. And the entire stack was tightly coupled. But while the framework was serviceable, it was almost always behind modern trends in web development. I always felt like we were playing catch-up. And as a developer I wanted to widen my horizons and try out more things. So more than once I had discussions with higher management about using open source web frameworks in some
- "Grabe naman kasi ang ginagawa nyo sa pasahero" (This is too much for the passengers), she said. She was a short, old lady trying to get to the front of the bus so that she could disembark. But like most city buses in Metro Manila during rush hour, the bus was filled to the brim with people, many of them standing tightly packed in the aisle, holding on to handrails on the bus ceiling or the nearby seats. Her young son, a short boy of maybe 14 years, weaved through the standing bodies packed in the bus's aisle to retrieve
I don't really play Magic regularly anymore; Last year I only played Standard because I was Q'ed for the WMCQs. But when there's a local Grand Prix, oldies like me crawl out of the woodwork and try to believe we can still do well in a tournament with minimal prep. Grand Prix Manila 2017 was to be Standard format, held on June 2-4, 2017, at the SMX convention center. At the start of the year I already knew I would be playing in this year's GP Manila, but since I hadn't played Standard for well over a year, I didn't- So last April my friends and I took a second trip to Japan. This time we mostly stayed around Tokyo, while taking a few days off in-between to visit Fuji, Hakone and Nikko. I like Tokyo, so I'll talk about Tokyo for now. I've only been here twice, but I could imagine myself living here for an extended period of time. It solves my top three problems with Metro Manila: overly hot weather, poor transportation options, and poor internet. Both visits I found the temperatures to be within the generally agreeable range of around 5-25 degrees celsius. The low end
My first Persona game was Persona 4 Golden on the Vita -- a fantastic game. After that I dived into Persona 3 Portable and eventually the spin-off games Persona 4 Arena (and Ultimax) and Persona Q on 3DS. So it was no surprise that one of the game releases I was most looking forward to this year would be the next numbered game in the series: Persona 5 on the Playstation 4. Like P4G before it, the focus is on the school life of a young man forced into a new environment, interspersed with some good old JRPG dungeon crawling.- I haven't been blogging too much recently. I got busy for a while and had to skip a few weeks, and then general laziness prevented me from resuming a regular posting schedule. (Hopefully that ends now.) Most of the time my ranting was on social media, which got me thinking: Is writing on your own blog still useful in this day and age of social media? I've been blogging for a long time -- my archives say 2002 -- waaay before Facebook or even Twitter came around. If for some reason you felt like digging through my older posts you'd
2017 May
- First, the spoiler-free summary (spoilers after this part): overall a very entertaining movie to sit down and watch popcorn and to enjoy the jokes and the space battles and the different colored lights and the tiny adorable tree creature GOTG's humor was one of its strong points and for the 2nd movie, they push the comedy up a notch, perhaps a little too much in some places. Lots of funny gags and one-liners I felt like some of the character/background development stuff was pushed a bit too hard as well the movie's plot also felt a bit thin and straightforward.
2017 April
- I recently attended a few training sessions for MarkLogic held at an office in a nearby business center. Now, I'll forgive you for not knowing what MarkLogic is, as even I hadn't heard of it before six months ago. MarkLogic is (apparently) the leading Enterprise NoSQL provider. NoSQL is big and sexy right now because of the supposed advantages in handling big data, and large web companies like Google and Facebook use a lot of NoSQL in the backend. Most of the popular/well-known NoSQL solutions are open-source/free ones: MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB, and so on. But these aren't actually very popular
