2022 September
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A couple of months ago I got access to the DALL-E, an AI/machine learning model that lets you generate images from natural language descriptions. Basically they have a server they run and you get some limited number of credits per month (?) to generate images. I only got around to trying it last week and posted some of my samples in the most recent weeknotes. Since then, I feel like there's a spike in the number of AI image generation-related news and articles I encounter. (More likely than not, I just notice them more now that I've actually played with
2022 March
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Interesting Twitter thread about naming conventions in Southeast Asia: Vietnamese and other peoples of Southeast Asia have naming conventions very much different from those in the Anglosphere. For us, writing our names overseas is a big headache. Let me first explain Vietnamese names, then I'll touch on names in other cultures. The comments in the thread are full of examples of Western people and systems having trouble with cultures that have different naming conventions. Of course, the Philippines isn't included in the discussion because we largely follow Western-style conventions. When my dad and I had to check in at the
2022 February
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We used to attend these online quiz nights where at the top of the quiz, the host would do his introductory spiel explaining how the quiz night works. This is typical of quiz nights. But this quiz group in particular always had a semi-complicated final round where each team makes a wager against how many answers you can get in the final question which has multiple answers. They introduce this mechanic during the intro spiel, and at the end of the night, if there are any new teams during the quiz, they will inevitably raise a question or two that
2021 November
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Some notes on posting to Mastodon via their HTTP API using Python. The backend of this site uses similar code to enable automated syndication to my Mastodon account. Creating an access token Go to your mastodon preferences (it's the gear icon above the search bar in the web interface) and click Development. (Or go to [yourservername]/settings/applications) Click "New Application". Specify application name. Default permissions should be fine. Save. Click your application name in the grid on the Development page. Your access token will be in the top part of the screen. Posting a status (or as they call it, a
2021 June
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HBO Max caused a bit of a stir among its subscribers last week when they accidentally sent out an email titled "Integration Test Email #1" to some large number of their subscribers, which spawned a lot of clever commentary and snarky remarks on Twitter. A few days later HBO Max sent out an apology blaming an unnamed intern for the boo-boo, which spawned a lot of "Dear Intern" tweets with many commiserating with the unnamed intern by sharing their own stories of mishaps from their younger days. There was also a thread of other developers and their stories of how
2021 May
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I'm not big on modern frontend JavaScript frameworks (mostly because I think web pages should use as little JS as possible), but when I do find the need to use one, my weapon of choice is Vue.js. I dislike React, but mostly because (a) my first experience with React was with mobile development using React Native for mobile app development, which I generally don't like; and (b) I don't like Facebook, which backs React. I have no opinion on Angular. Despite being my frontend framework of choice, I don't actually have that much experience with Vue beyond a few small
2021 April
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dorinlazar.ro talks about programming being hard: Most beginners in programming eventually end up with the same ingratiating message: „Programming is easy, everyone can do it”, with some threatening message that people doing the gatekeeping should stop doing that. I’m here to tell you that that is not true. Programming is hard, programming is not for everyone, and for the time being everyone might be able to do it, but most definitely most should not. Like most of the empty, shallow, positive messages coming with an automatic defense against refute, in this case talking about this gatekeeping thing that simply doesn’t
2020 December
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I've talked a bit about mentoring in software development before, and how early on I used to get feedback about me being "intimidating". I never got any concrete feedback regarding that, so I don't know what problems I had specifically. Though I was recently reminded of one particular incident that was a bit cringey for me personally. This was a bit more than 10 years ago I think. I was usually assigned to mentor new hires, which means fresh graduates who usually needed guidance with a Java (which was our primary programming language at that time) and with our in-house
2020 November
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I recently did a server migration since I moved to new hosting, The move was from managed/shared hosting to a VPS, these are some notes I took during the process, which I figure might be helpful if I ever tried to do this again. (And maybe someone else finds it helpful too). Links and references to helpeful resources are included. Setting up a webserver and WSGI container I already knew I wanted to use Nginx (managed hosting on the old server always used Apache), that meant needing to choose a WSGI container for the Django apps. The choices were either
2020 September
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This post is just quite a few thoughts on mobile apps and mobile app development, all mishmashed together. I don't claim to be a mobile app specialist, at best I've dabbled in them, but enough to form some opinions I guess? A Bit of History My first exposure to mobile app development when I got pulled to help my then-company's then-fledgling mobile team with cleaning up the codebase for their iOS app. This was back in maybe 2011? It was one of those projects where some devs built a quick proof-of-concept demo using new technology, then management liked it and
2020 August
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Mozilla made the tech news recently for laying off a whole lot of people. (Official statement). People were alarmed and worried about the future of what is the last major independent browser and the open web, bit it looks like it isn't that bleak. Most of the layoffs were to teams other than those working on Firefox, things like the experimental browser engine Servo, devtools, and MDN. The core Gecko team seems to be unaffected. Not that these things aren't important. MDN, if you're not familiar, is a set of documentation of web standards and browser support, available online, that
2020 July
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So recently Github secretly rolled out a new feature where you can create a file named README.md in a repo named github.com/<your github username>/<your github username>, and that markdown file would be rendered on your Github profile page. It means, you can now put basically anything you want on your Github profile! I just read this post from Simon Willson about using this new feature + Github actions and a Python script to automatically generate and update his Github profile. That seemed neat so I thought about how I would do it. My blog is already setup to publish using -
In several places on this site (like if you click Photos in the menu up top), I have a grid-like view of a list of photos/images: I used to just have each thumbnail open the post permalink on click, with the anchor set to the image itself. The image would be shown in full size inline of the post. This was a bit clunky and not so modern, so I decided to implement it so that the image lists instead will show a Lightbox-style overlay with the full image and some details and an option to click through to the
2020 June
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I had been meaning to quit Facebook for more than a year maybe, but I kept putting it off. The main reason being that I like having backups of my own digital data (still very much a pack rat), and Facebook's social media export is less than ideal, for me at least. Less than ideal why? It doesn't include a lot of content I would like backed up, including: comments on my posts (there have been some good conversations with friends over the years I would prefer to preserve) things I've reposted from other people content of certain groups I'm
2020 April
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I've had the good fortune to be on the interviewer side of technical interviews much more often than I've been the interviewee. I've been doing a few more of these over the past couple of years and made some notes, so I thought I'd talk about technical interviews for a bit. Caveat: these are largely based on my own experiences, in the local environment here in the PH. Technical Exam / Screening Many companies will ask applicants to undertake a technical exam before letting them advance to further stages of the recruitment process. This kind of screening is most useful
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Unless you’re working at a small shop that only serves local clients, software development these days is often an international endeavor. That means the aspiring software developer needs to be able to work with and get along with people of different cultures. In the company I worked with, most projects back in the day we would have a person from the foreign office in charge. Their roles were either as project manager (PM) or system analyst (SA). They were the ones who would be interacting directly with the clients so they get to decide which things need to be done
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Just last month, I wrote a method of implementing element toggles using a pure CSS approach. While that post was educational for me, it turns out there was an even simpler way of doing things. I found out about it when I read this post by Jamie Tanna. Apparently the details and summary tags already support HTML toggles, so we can do this with neither CSS or JS! I've updated the spoiler tags on this site to use this new method. I also used this method for the Table of Contents on certain posts (currently only the Covid19 diary). Sample
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A while back one of the biggest leaks of personal information in history was made by hackers accessing the Commission on Elections database here in the Philippines. More than 50 million voter registration records, including information such as full names, date of birth, address, among others. A small percentage of the data leaked also included email addresses and even passport numbers. The hack exposed more than half of the country’s population to the possibility of social engineering and other exploits. It was certainly a national embarrassment, especially for those of us working in software development. But the truth of the
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For most of my time working on software projects, it has always been for bespoke projects. Bespoke basically means a software program or package tailor-made for a specific client. The client provides all the requirements, the team fleshes out more details and specifications, some prototyping may or may not ensure, and implementation proceeds thusly. It’s relatively straightforward compared to product development. I only started getting involved with “product”-like projects over the in the latter half of my career as a software developer. A "product" is a more general use software program or package, perhaps sold to the mass market or
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It's naked CSS day, so the site looks super bare-bones today! Inspired by Laura Kalbag and Eric Meyer. Trying out the site without the CSS made me realize how I wasn't setting width and height for the svg icons I was using, so they became huge when the CSS was removed. I also rearranged the templates so the footer is at the end of the document (previously it was being put there by CSS). So at the very least this did lead to some fixes! (Hopefully I don't forget to restore the CSS tomorrow!) Screenshot of the Naked CSS version