Notes on codes, projects and everything
Getting comfortable to asyncio takes a bit of practice, so I revisited a practice project I did when I was working for my previous company. Suppose I want to build a very simple websocket application, without use of any web application library/framework. In order to keep it simple, I also opt to just build the frontend with minimal setup (just plain ES6 without webpack/vite).
(more…)My cloud storage is nearly exploding, and I am not in a good position to start subscribing for more storage (Yes, I am still #opentowork). Considering I just moved my domain settings to Cloudflare and started using Cloudflare tunnel, I figure I probably should just back up some of my photos, and host it on my workstation.
(more…)The Internet Censorship Dashboard is a project that aggregates data fetched from the OONI API, to provide an overview of the current state of Internet Censorship experienced by users mainly in Southeast Asia. The current form was built a couple of years ago, and recently got funded to get it updated to work better with new APIs.
(more…)In recent years, I start to make my development environment decouple from the tools delivered by the package manager used by the operating system. The tools (compiler, interpreters, libraries etc) are usually best left unmodified so other system packages that rely on them keeps working as intended. Also another reason for the setup is I wanted to follow the latest release as much as possible, which cannot be done unless I enroll myself to a rolling release distro.
(more…)A few years ago, I was asked to build a game or simulation (alongside 2048) as a part of a job application. Being very impressed with Explorable Explanations, I implemented Conway’s Game of life with Javascript and jQuery (that was before ES6 became popular). Then I made a very simple grid maker jQuery plugin to dynamically generate a grid of divs. If you check the source code, you may realize I rely on Underscore.js a lot back then.
(more…)Recently I volunteered in building a site that reports whether certain websites are blocked locally (please don’t ask why that is happening). As it is a very simple app reporting status I wanted it to be easily scrape-able. One of the decision made was I want it to have things to see on first load, this practically removes the possibility of using react, which is my current favorite.
Javascript is getting so foreign to me these days, but mostly towards a better direction. So I recently got myself to learn react through work and the JSX extension makes web development bearable again. On the other hand, I picked up a little bit on Vue.js but really hated all the magic involved (No I don’t enjoy putting in code into quotes).
Recently I find some of my pet projects share a common pattern, they all are based on some kind of grids. So I find myself writing similar piece of code over and over again. While re-inventing wheels is quite fun, especially when you learn new way of getting things done with every iteration, it is actually quite tedious after a while.
Sometimes, letting a piece of code evolving by itself without much planning does not usually end well. However I was quite pleased with a by-product of it and I am currently formalizing it. So the by-product is some sort of DSL for a rule engine that I implemented to process records. It started as some lambda functions in Python but eventually becomes something else.
A new day, and a new post on job application. So this time instead of asking a snippet, I was actually asked to deliver some sort of a full application. Not sure why this was required, but I had fun creating them nonetheless. Though I would say I am not really a fan of creating visual stuff though (oh the crappy animation nearly killed me).
One of my recent tasks involving crawling a lot of geo-tagged data from a given service. The most recent one is crawling files containing a point cloud for a given location. So I began by observing the behavior in the browser. After exporting the list of HTTP requests involved in loading the application, I noticed there are a lot of requests fetching resources with a common rXXX pattern.
It is useful to have the terminal around whenever I code. However, while real screen estate is finite, having a terminal further limiting the amount of information that can be displayed at the same time. The problem with the terminal is that I don’t really need it all the time, so I usually find it buried under a group of windows.
So I first heard about Panda probably a year ago when I was in my previous job. It looked nice, but I didn’t really get the chance to use it. So practically it is a library that makes data looks like a mix of relational database table and excel sheet. It is easy to do query with it, and provides a way to process it fast if you know how to do it properly (no, I don’t, so I cheated).
Sometimes I really doubt about the advantage of recycling old stuff to fund for new units beyond goodwill. Sure you get to convince yourself that you are saving the environment by doing so, and it also saves money in the long run. However, I didn’t realize how much it generates it may be after trying to work out an answer for a fictional IQ question.
Back then in college, we were given a lot of programming practices. These questions usually shows a desired output format, and we were required to write a program to print out the exact thing. Usually it involves printing a matrix of numbers, or symbols etc. For these problems, usually a loop structure or two should solve the problem.