Blog
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Last week, an e-mail was sent out to an internal mailing list [1], looking for volunteers to lecture on data structures & algorithms topics, but nobody replied. I jumped at the opportunity. I volunteered to lecture on binary search trees, without any previous knowledge on the topic. Why in the world would I volunteer to…
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Look through my history, and you’ll find how infrequently I post on Facebook, however, I strongly encourage you to watch this short video clip, especially if you are approaching 30, like me, and plan on having children. This video poignantly touches on the issues, revolving around teenage homosexuality and bullying, that our younger generation is…
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I studied Spanish in high school for four years and 10 years later, I’m embarrassed that I can’t form a comprehensible or grammatically correct sentence. I traveled throughout Europe last Christmas and was impressed by the number of bilinguals. Most people fluently spoke a combination of English, French and German. My second language, Vietnamese, however,…
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I’ve been very sick this past week … coughing phelgm, swallowing pain, and battling headaches. Two nights in a row, an uncontrollable cough prevented me from sleeping. This morning, however, I awoke without a sore throat. It goes to show you how much I take you for granted when I’m healthy. My elation at regaining…
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Python progression path – From apprentice to guru is a popular StackOverflow post. To categorize whether a person should take his beginner/intermediate course, one of the commentors posted this question: I can better answer this question after reading Fluent Python. Example 1 and Example 2 deal with immutable and mutable data types – respectively. Let’s…
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I learned how to juggle 15 years ago. I remember relentlessly practicing in my room late into the night. Within a week, I was comfortably juggling three balls. Recently, I stumbled across YouTube video of someone juggling four balls and was very impressed. How much more difficult is juggling four balls than three, I thought…
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Belgian was this morning. I send my thoughts and prayers to those in Belgium, but I’m worried about the media’s knee jerk accusations of Muslim terrorists. At the moment, there’s no concrete evidence. But why is the live feed incessantly hinting at ISIS and Muslims? I can’t stay updated without feeling the media is inculcating…
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I received positive feedback on my AWS Lambda presentation in London. This post discusses how to package and deploy your lambda function. I’m sure there are other ways but I wanted something simple. This allows me to maintain separate enviroments (i.e “dev”, “production”). Makefile I use Make to create a package (i.e “sample-app.zip”). The dependencies…
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This post discusses one way we monitor our background process – which is different than how we monitor our web services. It’s difficult when you can’t send a request/poll the service. I wanted something more than checking if the process is alive. One solution we came up with is is using syslog with a log…
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I was standing outside the car, wiping the dogs’s feet when I overheard a voice. “Are you a young lady or a man?” Did I hear him right? I continued wiping my dogs’s feet and responded: “Well, HER name is Metric. And SHE’S a German Shepherd.” I wanted to make it clear that that we…