If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

Learning

Refactoring is part of each and every story. No code is untouchable.

• Zen of Erlang
• Caching at Netflix: The Hidden Microservice
• High availability with Elixir and Erlang
• What every Node.js developer needs to know about Elixir
• Dialyzer: Optimistic Type Checking for Erlang and Elixir
• From REST to GraphQL
• GraphQL: Designing a Data Language
• Realtime communication with WebRTC
• WebRTC and Phoenix, when μ Seconds aren’t Fast Enough
• WebRTC in the real world
• Why’s that company so big? I could do that in a weekend
• Art of README
• CRDTs Illustrated
• Simple Made Easy
• CRDT: Datatype for the Apocalypse
• Apache Kafka
• Vector Clock
• Lamport timestamps
• GenState in the kitchen
• Practical Demystification of CRDT
• Communicating Sequential Processes
• Concurrency is not parallelism
• CQRS
• Understanding REST And RPC For HTTP APIs
• REST vs JSON-RPC
• gRPC
• Deep fried data
• Wave Function Collapse
• Singapore Government Funding and Assistance Schemes for startups
• Inside the mind of a master procrastinator
• Hammock driven development
• Be kind
• Why good software estimates are impossible
• Serverless - Cloud functions and the future of software architecture

• 10 Modern Software Engineering Mistakes
• Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful
• Handling the stress of startup competition: focus on brand.
• Web Audio School
• How HotelTonight scaled their stack
• Build a strange loop
• Literate programming
• Things I will tell my kids if they become entrepreneurs

Thinking

• I’ve been catching up with a lot of technologies I haven’t gotten around to properly try out: WebRTC, CRDTs, Serverless, GraphQL, etc.
• I think it’s interesting how GraphQL incorporates some of the ideas from RPC frameworks (namely the IDL) like Apache Thrift, gRPC, and Finagle in its schema definition.

• I’m interested in picking up Purescript at some point. Having used Elm and realizing that it’s missing too many things to be really production ready, the fact that Pux lets you use React components with Purescript is already a massive improvement.
• Strange Loop is becoming one my favourite tech conferences ever.
• Better input, better output.
• Everything is a remix.
• I’m really glad I stopped working on BotSquad. Today, it’d have to compete with AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions, and IBM OpenWhisk!
• Recalling after reading, spaced repetition, and regular testing are good learning tools.
• Learning how to learn.
• Functions-as-a-Service is the next logical abstraction from Platform-as-a-Service. Serverless is a pivotal step in this shift.
• Given the expected shortage of software engineers in the coming years, starting a bootcamp seems like a feasible idea.
• Why do it by hand if you can code it in just quadruple the time?
• Great products almost always come from someone scratching their own itch.
• Market > Marketing > Design > Code
• Geo-arbitrage is a bootstrapper’s best friend - why spend your living costs away in an expensive country?
• The secret to coming up with a successful business idea is putting hundreds of ideas through the meat grinder.

Books

The past few months I’ve finished reading a number of paper books. They are listed here for my reference, since I skipped a few months of retrospectives.

• The Art of Thinking Clearly
• Naked Statistics
• Elon Musk
• Anything You Want
• So Good They Can’t Ignore You
• Sprint
• Hooked
• Personal MBA
• Hello Startup

Listening

• Schala’s Theme
• No Good
• Pure Imagination

Guitar

• Machikado Swing
• Secret of the forest
• Andy McKee’s Rylynn

Elsewhere

• I gave a talk on Entity Component Systems in Elixir.
• Got my GraphQL talk accepted on a proper tech conference for the first time at GeekCamp.sg!
• I gave a talk on GraphQL.
• Trying pomodoro to tackle my procrastination problem.
• I’m now an AWS Certified Developer!
• Starting a new tech meetup group! Let’s see if there’s enough interest.
• You want to be the last mover, not the first.