June 14, 2021

The Product Design Process (or Cycle, to be exact)

Every new product, whether it’s an app or a physical object, follows a specific set of steps that take it from the first spark of an idea to the release of the final product. This is called the product design cycle, and it has five stages: brainstorm, define, design, test, and launch. Depending on where you work, the exact names of each stage might be a little different, but the overall process is generally the same.

graphic showing the product development lifecycle (represented by a circle)
The Product Design Process (or Cycle, to be exact) 2

In this reading, you’ll explore the product design cycle and how UX design fits into each stage. As you might have guessed, UX designers are most engaged during the design stage of the product design cycle, but they work closely with team members — like researchers, product managers, and engineers — throughout the entire life cycle. 

As a product moves through the development life cycle, the team might need to spend longer working in one stage than in others, or repeat certain stages based on feedback. The success of each stage depends on the previous stage’s completion, so it’s important to do them in order. 

Check out each of the five stages of the product design cycle!

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June 14, 2021

The many different roles in UX industry

Icon showing two smart phone screens with a green arrow pointing between them, text underneath reads "Interaction Designer".
The many different roles in UX industry 4

Interaction designers focus on designing the experience of a product and how it functions. They strive to understand the user flow, or the path, that a typical user takes to complete a task on an app, website, or other platform. At Google and many other companies, interaction designers are a specialized type of UX designer.

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May 1, 2021

Using Putty generated private keys with Guacamole

If you’re trying to use a private key with Guacamole to connect to your server but it doesn’t work, chances are you’re using one of the keys generated with Puttygen. Guacamole only accepts RSA compliant keys, so you’d want to do that.

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Opens your PPK with Puttygen again, and go to Convesions > Export OpenSSH key (the first option).
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Then open the content of that new file with a text editor, copy and paste it into Guacamole private key field and it should work.
April 19, 2021

I’ve been hacked: The danger of DMZ

For those following my post the last couple of weeks, you’d know I’ve been obsessed with building up my home server system, so much so that I made the grave mistake of exposing my computer to the world wide web through the use of DMZ (De-Militarized Zone).

Long story shot.

I’ve been hacked.

And $3,000 was stolen from my wife’s MasterCard.

What’s done is done, I’m here to tell you about what exactly what went down, how the attacker did it and how you can avoid the same mistake I did.

Let’s get started

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April 15, 2021

Integrating Jellyfin with Heimdall: just what the heck is the ‘Password (secret token)’?

So you’re probably in the process of integrating Jellyfin with Heimdall, and you’re stumped by this little field in the Add application screen in Heimdall:

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Just what the heck are we supposed to put in there? Neither the username nor password of my Jellyfin account works here, just what the heck is this ‘Password (Secret token)’ thing that Heimdall is asking for?

The more tech savvy among you probably have already figured it out, but if you’re an idiot like me, you’re gonna waste a few rage inducing hours searching for it on the Internet to no avail, nobody on the Interweb seems to know what it is. Well I figured it out, and I’m gonna tell you.

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April 13, 2021

Prettify your qBittorrent WebUI

qbit1
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I absolutely love qBittorrent but as an UI Designer, one thing that doesn’t sit well with me is its 1990-esque web interface. While they do allow you to load your custom CSS, there wasn’t a lot you could do with it beyond changing a few colors, and even the most downloaded themes in the community still only looks marginally better.

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April 10, 2021

Things I learned after a week of “homeservering”

  1. Reverse Proxy: Setting up Caddy and write a proper caddyfile for reverse proxying to different endpoints within my local network.
  2. Personal DDNS: dynamically update my domain(s) A records to point to my home’s public IP so I never have to worry about Viettel’s shitty service changing my IP every 2 damn days. This is done by setting up a cronjob and utilizes CloudFlare’s public API.
  3. AIO Clientless SSH/RDP/VNC solution: I’m sure most of you already figured it out just by reading that sentence, yes it’s Apache Guacamole, and yes I know it’s been around for a while, but I’ve only discovered it last week, and it basically changed my life forever. I’ve been kicking myself for not looking into it sooner. I can’t even remember how much time I wasted setting up TeamViewer/Anydesk/Putty on new machines. This thing just makes it feel so effortless, and it runs directly in your browser so no corporate firewall should stand in your way.

April 1, 2021

VPS Trials: Google vs Microsoft vs Amazon

This is a venting post, not an actual comparison

For people looking to spin up a VM that can be used outside of their home networks, there’s several free offers out there, including major names like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba. Personally I’d rank them like this:

  1. Great tier: Google Cloud Platform, $300 trial credit for 12 months, reasonable pricing. Realistically you’ll probably get around 10 months out of your trial if you provision your VM correctly). UI is a bit confusing but overall usable.
    Very transparent about pricing, even has a toast message showing your remaining fund and trial period. Doesn’t charge you a cent after your trial period ends, it just turns off your VM(s).
  2. Meh tier: Microsoft Azure, $200 trial credit for 12 months, worse pricing. While 200 doesn’t seem to be that much worse than Google’s offering, in reality it is a LOT less due to the higher pricing of VM provisioning. I burned through that $200 in around 3 months. The UI is more intuitive than GCP though.
    Less transparent about your trial period than GCP, but still doesn’t charge you a cent after your trial period ends, it just turns off your VM(s).
    Alibaba cloud is somewhat similar, I haven’t used it that much to have a solid opinion, but on paper it should be on par with Azure. Will update later.
  3. Trash tier: Amazon Web Service. Shitty UI, took me longer than all other services when it come to spinning up a VM, and even when it’s up and running, configuring networking to connect to it was challenging. I gave up after a few days of trying, and then kind of forgot about it. When I come back after a year, I was surprised to see my account suspended for ‘unpaid bills’. And check this out:
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Amazon quietly put a massive charge on your account when you aren’t even using your EC instance

No surprise there, having dealt with Amazon before as a student, I am positive this is a government sanctioned scam organization. Avoid Amazon at all cost!

February 26, 2021

Looking back at 2020

I mean, fucking 2020, amirite? It was one hell of year, or hellish, might I say. Almost every living creature on this planet was affected one way or the other. Despite all the crazy shits that happened during the year, it wasn’t all bad. I’d like to take a step back and look at things now.

I know, I know, you’re probably asking “Dude, it’s almost March 2021 now, why the hell are you looking back at 2020 now?”

Ok first of all, according to the Lunar calendar, it’s only barely 2 weeks over January now, plus prior to it I had a shit ton of work I need to get done. I don’t even like doing look back posts like this, but something just happened that prompted me.

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