teknologi

For the past 5 months, I’ve been absent from writing blogs. This mostly due to new activities I’ve been pursuing and some challenges I’m facing at work. In this article, I want to cover a thing that really bothers my mind and I can’t urge enough to speak out loud about it. So this is about talking to the customer. By talking to the customer here, I mean talking to them to support them while they having difficulty using our product.

Sekitar 9 bulan yang lalu saya putuskan untuk meninggalkan pekerjaan saya yang nyaman di startup unicorn bernama Go-Jek dan pindah ke startup kecil yang baru saja dimulai. Keputusan itu sangat berat, selain karena saya sudah membangun hubungan yang kuat dengan tim, orang tua yang lebih mendukung pekerjaan saya yang nyaman di Go-Jek, dan yang paling penting meninggalkan Bos atau manager saya yang saya kagumi dan sangat membantu dalam karir saya. Namun startup ini memberikan tempat saya bereksperimen untuk mulai belajar arti dari kewirausahaan atau entrepreneurship. Untuk mempermudah cerita, sebut saja ini adalah startup X.

I want to tell story about my task today. The story began from when I was in high school. I was very interested with computer, but when I graduated from high school, my parents little bit skeptical about career in computing since they have no idea about what it is and at that time career in computing is not popular as it is now. So, I decided to enter engineering physics program in one of the biggest university in the country. Well, at that time admitted here is relatively easy. I’m not that smart and the program was not popular at that time.

It is Monday, I starting my workday by having a hands all Monday meeting in the company lounge. This is where we share each other department update. Very interesting to be part of a growing company. In the middle of the update, sometimes I take a look to some graphs of service I maintain. One of them showing me some anomaly where one of the service node having disk space usage increasing time by time in the last 5 days. I’ve been looking to it before weekend but was not take it that serious. Turned out it takes 100% of disk space and some of the functionality of the app did not work as expected. So bad.

Sometime I got a use case where I require some configuration in form of environment variables for my Docker image. And in the past I often re-invent how I create the script to fallback to some value if the environment was not set. Now I want to share about how I did it. It’ll be useful for me in the future for you.

I’ve been contributed to some projects that has an example config that similar to these or any other variations

Recently, I have a use case to build multi-language packages of Angular app which need to be done in compile time. I need a case where I need to compile the app in parallel since the number of language is increasing month by month. Although I still don’t have a good solution for this problem, I have a workaround for the number of language I have.

Finally, I can create another post on my blog after a very busy schedule for the last few months. I’ve been very busy helping my employer maintaining their disbursement system and also internal build and release infrastructure. It is because I’m a mix between software and system engineer and my employer allow me to do both at the same time. Enough about myself. Let’s talk about some idea.

As someone who encourages people to increase their productivity, I always try to be productive myself. It is including how I interact with the phone. Now, I want to share with you how to increase your productivity by doing something with your Android smartphone. Well, it is called a smartphone, it is smart enough to make you distracted. One of the most annoying experiences I have is when I suddenly hear some tone comes from my un-silent-ed phone and I just realized that it was from one of the apps I installed on my phone. More frustratingly, this kind of notification sometimes not only triggered by one app, most of the app, I installed to have this kind of alert. So, I decided to turn it off.

This weekend, I’ve been thinking that I’m not as productive as usual. While usually, I can think of any post idea I can write, this time I have little to no idea. However, I remember something about git pre-commit hook. It is something that helps me minutes to hours of manual task when I do code and keep me productive.

When I was a child I like to watch an anime series titled Digimon and I always excited with the boy using their laptop everywhere and typing with only one hand while the other hand hold the laptop and support it so that he can type. Honestly, I never succeed to type like that while standing and walking like I saw in the anime. Anyway, let’s jump to the main topic.

I like competition, but the competition I like more is a competition where the game is infinite, meaning it is not the one who win that matters, but the one who will last that matters. For that matters, I learn about how to be able to adapt and able to zoom in and out the scope of my thinking easily in any problem (whether it is engineering or daily life problem). Today I want to discuss something related to myself, so if you don’t like a selfish article, feel free to leave this page now, but I try to make this article as much as useful as my other article. So, if you like my other article, maybe you also like this one.

Like other mainstream people, I often spent days without done any fulfilling activity. Fulfilling activity may vary from person to person. For example you might be fulfilled when you meet your girlfriend or a girl you like and approach. Another people might be fulfilled when they helping people. Or if you like me, you might be feeling fulfilled when you find and idea and go back to your room and write something about it either a blogpost, scientific article or any kind of article.

The story started from an open source project I support called planet where we try to build a decentralize, internet-supported learning managemenet system optimized to run on resource-constrained device like a small Raspberry Pi machine.

Today, before I take my second shower in the evening, I take time to cleaning up my toilet and bathroom, as an early-career professional and a single person living alone in capital city here in Jakarta, cleaning up toilet is not a big deal for me. You might think that I better spent my time for doing code or learn something new, but you might be don’t know that I love cleaning up the toilet, because every time I do it, I learn something new, also this time. I want to talk about the similarity between refactor code and cleaning up toilet.

Do you know hackathon? It is a kind of competition where you doing code all night long, typically, 24 hours+, and in this competition, the winner usually judges by their ingenuity of the idea, and fast execution. Like a typical startup, my employer, Midtrans, also arrange a hackathon each year and their employee to stay competitive, happy and learn new stuff. Let me talk about some lessons learned after I finish the hackathon.

I practicing code review even practicing anything-in-version-control-review since 1.5 years ago when I started to contribute to Open Learning Exchange as an intern. It was a very interesting idea. You know my selfish mind at that time think I already good enough and what I push should be good, but not the case, but good is not enough. You know perfection is a lot of little things done right. Remember, the point here is a lot. We need to do right thing starts with the smallest fraction of our work to achieve perfection. I may exaggerate a little bit, but by doing the right thing from the start, perfection is not a very big thing.

When I was in college there is a very difficult subject that every student struggle with. It is because it is hard for us to learn forward or learn next chapter every week because most of us after the session finished haven’t grasp the whole or most idea of the chapter. So, when I say I want to learn the subject at night my fellow ask “You learn forward or learn backward?”

It is 12:40 in the middle of my lunch break time. And because I just arrived from previously working from home in the first half of the day, some random idea just popped-out from my mind.

Today, I got stuck with something in my coding work. I was in the end of the sprint and expected to finish a chore. However int he middle of doing some code, I got stuck with bunch of question from my coworkers. Since, I help the company setting up build system for majority of the services my employer has, I often becomes the one who contacted whenever there is some problem with the build system.

For the last one year, I created and developed shell scripts in the quantity I can’t imagine before, I still not completely understand shell and it scripting language, but becoming better and better understand about how to deal with it.

Today I got chat message from my old friend in college about how to do X stuff in Matlab, a computing package to do scientific computing. Yes, this package is popular among students in my department when I was in college since virtually every subject can be related to this package if we want to do stuff computationally.

For the last one year, as an early career professional in software engineering and development, I am very happy to involve in sort of distributed system development and getting exposed to several very good articles, books, and conference in the field. That’s help me to better understand nature of distributed system and see there is many thing we can play and research in this field.

Yesterday I was helping an Open Source project called Planet Learning to fix their CI system. The lead of the project wants to have a better CI by using the latest beta feature of Travis CI called multi-stage build (not to be confused with Docker multi-stage build). By using multi-stage build we can do things we can setup several stage of build and in each stage we can do more than one things.

Recently, container technology like Docker, rkt, etc gained so much attraction as it simplified the way we deploy, manage and operate software especially in web space. But in the transition things are easy to go wrong since we have previous assumption and experience (bias) when it comes to deploying software.

This is the reflection about how small things can effect bigger things.

Recently I getting involved in Kubernetes when setting up a test cluster (test infrastructure) for a project in my current company. It is pretty interesting how easy we orchestrate and organize our software infrastructure with Kubernetes.

This post is written for software engineer, developer, programmer who adopt automated test in their development workflow.

In technology and science, sometimes we use abstraction to make things manageable to be discussed, to be solved (if it a problem), and to operate. I remember one of my Professor when I was in college often called something a black box to define a theoretical object that we (student) are not fully understood or object of study. That is when I was in college taking engineering physics program, but now I am in software development field. We use abstraction to make things more manageable, to operate complex infrastructure, to build complex business logic on top of relational database, etc, you name it.

Introduction to Four-layer model of microservice ecosystem