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Nam Vu Personal SiteNam Vu Personal SiteNam Vu Personal SiteNam Vu Personal Site
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December 22, 2024

I made a free website to screenshot tool

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Side Projects, My Apps

So after my first encounter with creating a note taking tool programmatically using AI agents, I was inspired to create another tool, this time entirely from scratch, not forking off someone else’s work. This was actually a tool I created earlier, utilizing Puppeteer to create screenshot of websites at specified resolutions, which is something a designer like myself need to do quite often.

It was originally a CLI only tool, but with the help of the recently made free CoPilot, I was able to put together a WebUI for it using Tailwind CSS and a bunch of JS. Here’s how it look:

Check out the Github here: https://github.com/vnt87/puppeteeer-capture

Now if you came here from r/selfhosted, I know what you want, a docker image that you can deploy on your own hardware. I got you covered, just use this docker-compose.yml:

services:
  app:
    image: ghcr.io/vnt87/puppeteeer-capture:sha-1a9e996
    ports:
      - "5432:3000"
    volumes:
      - ./screenshots:/app/screenshots
    environment:
      - NODE_ENV=production
      - PUPPETEER_ARGS=--no-sandbox,--disable-setuid-sandbox

December 22, 2024

Back on the market P2, and how I got scammed into providing a week’s worth of free labor

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Randomness, Rants

As I recently shared, I’m back on the job search journey again after over 6 years of happy employment, and boy oh boy, is the market is such a shitty place right now. About half the post on r/UXDesign are complaints. There was a thread about leaving the industry, that then got reposted into a viral post in LinkedIn, before eventually got reposted back into the sub again, truly a wild ride. And then there’s also this trend of visualizing one’s job search journey on Linkedin that spawns a bunch of follow ups.

image 3
I might create one of my own someday when I actually get to the ‘Accepted offer’ step

This highlights just how low Linkedin is as a employment platform these days, but that merits its own post, on another day. Anyway, back to my own story. As I said market is completely flooded with shitty job posts, mostly low-paying jobs for entry level designers or low-paying jobs for superhuman designers with every skills in existence listed in the JD (for those who don’t know, these were probably made by recruiter who have zero understanding what’s the difference between visual designers and front end engineers). But once in a while, you spot 1 or 2 job posts for senior positions where the recruiters actually know what they’re looking for. Those are the ones where I sent out my CV to.

Most of them ghosted me, just like the people on UXDesign reported. And the ones who did respond are, well, not exactly stellar either. Today I’ll tell you about my interview process with a company whose name I won’t be mentioning here for obvious reasons, just know it’s yet another generic Singaporean startup.

I went through the entire process, didn’t get selected. That’s fair, I’m not mad about not being selected, it’s something to be expected in this journey. I’m mad because how much time that whole thing took. I went through 4 friggin’ rounds of interview (5 if you count the initial call with the recruiter), did a 2-part design assignment that took a whole week, with zero compensation for my time (remember I did this in a work week while still fully employed by my current company). I remember last time I was on a job search, Gears Inc. offered to pay for my assignment if I didn’t get selected despite it being only a 2-hour task, that is completely unrelated to the company’s real business. This one took over 20 hours to complete, included a 2-part design challenge that involves the actual features that the company is looking to implement in their product. I had to perform competitor analysis, best practice check and then present my work on 4 separate calls with the Header Product Manager, 2 different PMs and the tech bro CEO himself. Why the CEO is involved in the recruitment of a designer, your guess is as good as mine.
Now that I come to think about it, this might’ve been one of those companies that utilizes the interview process to score free labor.

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December 18, 2024

I forked my first real project using AI

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 2 comments /
  • Under : My Apps
TL;DR:
image 1

Here’s the repo with instruction:

https://github.com/vnt87/textpod-toc
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November 11, 2024

Back on the Market (sort of) P1

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Randomness, Rants

After almost 6 years, I found myself on yet another sinking ship.

First time was back in 2014 when that internet media company went under and I found out they weren’t paying any employee social insurance despite deducting that amount from everybody’s paycheck.

Second time was in 2018 when DeNA sold off our game studio to a shitty JP offshore software development company and changed the whole management team to incompetent JP expats.

Now I find myself on the brink of the 3rd extinction.

During covid, my company’s parent company purchase another software development company in India. At the time, we didn’t pay much attention to it. Yet another M&A happening at the top level that us drones shouldn’t pay too much attention to, right? After all this wasn’t the first M&A they did. We never realized it was our death sentence. For the Indian center has many advantages that we did not: closer proximity to the UK (and thus better working time zone relative to the clients in the EU), they have an extremely high ratio of English speaking employees (English is still taught in school over there after all). Their staffs are far more open to learning new things and sharing that knowledge with the rest than the Vietnamese staff. We didn’t realize it at the time, but they were a friendly new colleague, they were a direct competitor with our company (since we don’t take on local projects after all, we depends entirely on the onshore team to feed us projects).

Ever since that acquisition, projects have gone dry in the S-shaped land. The management blame that on Covid, which is partly true, but we all know the root cause.

The Vietnamese staffs are just too stagnant.

Not only do we slow to adapt, we’re extremely resistant to learning new things. Even learning something as basic as English are considered a nuisance among the devs here. I keep telling them English is not only used for basic communication, with the recent breakthrough in LLMs model, it’s going to be THE most popular programming language soon. As a dev if you don’t want to become obsolete, you better haul-ass and get learning.

But apparently it wasn’t enough. Despite the management reassuring the staffs on every Town Hall meeting that everything’s fine, layoffs are being handed out left and right. More senior staffs that hold essential skills and can speak English well like me are being kept, but barely. It’s been 4 months since my last assigned projects, and things are looking bleak.

image
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September 14, 2024

The day my world changed forever

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 1 comments /
  • Under : Randomness
  • 13 years ago, I met a this girl.
  • She was married, but not happily so.
  • 12 years ago, she officially divorced.
  • 10 years ago, she found out she had a unicornuate uterus, which significantly reduce the chances of her ever conceiving a child. But I didn’t care.
  • 8 years ago, we got married.
  • 8 years ago, I entered a marriage, fully expecting to never be a father in this lifetime.

But life can never be predicted.

After hundred of trips to various different clinics, 3 failed IVF attempts and countless shed tears, that girl, my wife, did it.

At 21h30, September 14, 2024. Our baby dragon is born!

  • IMG_4950
  • IMG_4962
  • IMG_4961
  • IMG_4956
  • IMG_4926
  • IMG_4920
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This is why Google is losing the AI race
August 21, 2024

This is why Google is losing the AI race

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Rants

It’s August 2024, almost 2 years in since AI exploded. Flux.1 was just released and everyone is going nuts over it. Whether you have your own model like Luma or KlingAI or you’re just hosting 3rd party models like CivitAI, Shakker, TensorArt…everyone is in a racing to market with whatever they have.

And then we have Google, the village idiot, still region locking their Imagen generator like it’s April 1st, 2004. I mean I get it, they sunk billions of dollar into this race and only have an inferior model to show for it, even free & opensource models are leaving them in the dust. But gatekeeping’s definitely not the solution to that.

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March 24, 2024

Happy 70s Birthday Dad!

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Randomness
dad70s
Fun fact: I am currently exactly the same age as my Father was when the first photo was taken.

Time flies


March 5, 2024

Fixed Portfolio and Photos pages

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Randomness

So as you may or may not be aware, the Portfolio page and the Photography page have been broken for the longest time, well today I managed to finally fix them. I’m not going to use the old “too busy” excuse to justify why they’ve been broken for so long (although it’s true), but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why the shortcodes couldn’t parse. So eventually I decided to say f*ck it and decided to nuke everything and restore from an old backup from last year, which somehow magically fixed those pages (and also the bug where the 3D effect doesn’t work on Firefox, don’t ask me how).

Anyway now that they’re back, I should probably update them with more recent works. I don’t think I’ve added anything new for several years.

Here’s hoping I don’t take another year before getting around to actually doing it.

Okay first one down, 34 more to go. (oh yeah btw, I may have nuked my entire home server along with over 30 services running on it including Phimhub because I trusted ChatGPT to handle docker management, lesson well learned)


February 15, 2024

New Year, New Post

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Randomness

It’s been ages since my last post.

It’s not that I haven’t been trying to write, but lately I find it increasingly difficult to finish a post, or even a thought.

Just look at the amount of drafts I have pending, some of which dated back several years.

image

Even as I’m writing this, I’m not entirely sure if this will eventually make it to the blog page, or end up as another draft. Still, I needed to start writing again, or I might forget how to. Tonight is the Eve of the Lunar New Year celebration here in Vietnam, but I have no doubt it will be much later until I can finish this blog post. We’ll see.

With my wife having to lie in bed all day, I’m now responsible for making breakfast, lunch and dinner. Between preparing meals and doing the dishes, I can now barely have enough time to work on my day time job, let alone some 30 minutes to write out these thoughts. It’s tough but it also gives me a whole new level of respect for my wife, she’s been doing this for years without complain, I don’t know how she managed to pull it off while running a successful start-up, such a super human.

On a personal note, looking back on 2023, there wasn’t anything particularly eventful that I can recall. It wasn’t a bad year, per se, but it wasn’t a great year either. I visited the hospital a whole lot, perhaps more than any other year up until now. My parents had all kind of health problems as they slowly approaching 70s, my wife had a severe case of food poisoning on our only out-of-town trip of the year, we booked a 4-star resort in Vũng Tàu only to cram together on a tiny hospital bed in District 1, HCMC. And as I sit here writing, we just got back home from a week long stay in Đông Đô Hospital. To be honest, I could really use a year without going near any hospital but at this rate, things are probably not going to change this year.

But 2023 wasn’t all bad, I still managed to learn many new things. I finally got an entry level 3D printer (Kingroon KP3S Pro v2) and printed a bunch of useful stuffs, wow’ed a couple of friends, learn how to modify basic meshes to I can make things fit my need. On top of that, there’s also the AI stuffs. 2023 was the year of AI explosion, and I managed to dip my toes in some generative AI stuffs. Learned how to use Stable Diffusion, MidJourney, ComfyUI etc. Realized how useful AND dangerous this stuff is (seriously, if you post a photo of yourself on Facebook these days, you might as well be naked, as that is only a few clicks away). My only regret is that I still don’t have anybody to teach these stuffs to. I love sharing knowledge but haven’t a platform to do so.

I haven’t finished writing yet but my time for today’s up, and because I don’t want to start this new year with yet another Draft post, I’m going to hit Publish.

Happy New Year


October 6, 2023

So I can speak Japanese now…

  • Posted By : Nam Vũ/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : AI Art

Well at least my AI version can, anyway.

A quick look at Joshua Xu’s new service: HeyGen


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