Remastered some old Vietnam photos for fun
What’s the point of buying a 4070Ti Super OC if I don’t put it to good use, right?
Read MoreYou know what really grinds my gears?
When people write docker instruction that makes use of docker run command without a detached flag.
Why is it annoying?
Say I SSH into a server, fire up a new service, wait for it to download all the necessary images and perquisites, got it all running nicely. Now all i want is to close the tunnel and go on doing other things. But no, you realize docker is still occupying your terminal. Closing the connection now would also kill the service you just launched. How stupid is that.
Sure it’d only take a few additional seconds to rerun it in detached mode, but that’s still an additional 15-20s of utterly wasted time. There’s no excuse to write instruction this poorly especially for a project with multi thousands users, and especially now that we can get a machine to write better instruction for you.
It’s 2025, let’s talk AI and what direction we are headed
I just got back from my 7th, and definite last Year End Party with my company. Seeing so many people saying this will their last YEP with the company filled me with so much thoughts I couldn’t sleep, I had to get up at 5AM to write it down.
So where do we start? I guess we’ll take a quick look back at 2024.
2024 was a…pedicular year, for lack of a better word. There was so many new things to learn, and yet far fewer things to do.
Read MoreCursor stole your ‘code’ command? Here’s how to revert it
I love Cursor as much as the next guy but there’s one thing I don’t like about it. When you install it on Windows or Mac, it will takeover the ‘code’ command in your terminal, which is usually reserved for VSCode (for example if you navigate to a folder and type code . it will open that folder in Cursor instead of VSCode). This is fine if you use Cursor exclusively but if you’re like me who uses Cursor and Cline side by side, then this is especially annoying when you want to launch code.
Luckily user ubergonmx from Cursor forum provided a solution on Windows, here’s how:
Open this folder %localappdata%\Programs\cursor\resources\app\bin
Delete:
- Code
- Code.cmd
That’s it. Now the code command will launch VSCode instead. If you look inside that folder you’d notice the file cursor and cursor.cmd are still there, which means if you want to launch cursor instead of code you can simply type cursor . , which is how it should’ve been.
That’s all folks
Is it time to move on from WordPress?
I’ve been a WordPress user for as long as I’ve been in tech, maybe 20 plus years. I think I picked it up as early as 2004 or something, back when it was one of the blogging platform that you can self-host just like Blogger or Movable Type. Back then Drupal, Mambo (which later spawned Joomla) and a few forum software like phpBB, InvisionBoard and vBulletin with ‘portal’ addon were considered CMS.
The reason I picked and sticked with WP was simple, it was dead easy for non-developer like myself. In the olden days, if you want to apply a ‘mod’, you need to either open up the source file, find the exact line and modify the code in there as per the author’s instruction. WordPress revolutionized this process by introducing a plugin system that essentially just works™. You only need to find the plugin, download a zip file, extract it, then FTP to your server and upload the files to wp-content/plugins and it would automagically show up in the Plugins section in your admin panel. I know that sounds like a lot of work by today’s standard, especially with the WP plugin repository just streamlined everything so you can literally add a plugin by clicking a button or two, but back then it was like magic. WordPress’s simplicity is something that many webmasters these days take for granted, but once in a while you get a reality check when switching to another legacy system (looking at you nopCommerce, having to restart the literal effing app on each plugin removal/addition is unacceptable in 2024, hell it was barely acceptable in 2012 when the project was conceived).
But enough preamble, let’s go back to the current state of things. With its ease of use, WP has now gradually grown to power close to half the whole damn internet. But 2024 has been a pretty rough year of the WordPress ecosystem, mostly because Matt Mullenweg, the guy who was supposed to be its leader, made a series of inexplicable self-destructive actions in 2024 that pretty much ruined the whole platform’s reputation. The whole thing was confusing to be honest, it started off with Mullenweg declaring war with WP Engine, a competitor to his own WordPress.org, which was a normal as any other drama, but then it got weird. Instead of pooling his resource and battle WPE like a normal person, he proceeded to destroy himself, his company and basically his entire legacy that he built over the cause of 2 decades, even resorting to thievery. It’s inexplicable, if I was a conspiracy theorist I might even assume he was working for WP Engine to begin with.
And even putting the whole drama thing aside, WordPress as a platform itself is showing its age. I learned a bunch of new things this year, even made a few fun projects using more modern tech and noticed just how fast everything is these days compare to WordPress. Some people attribute this to PHP but I disagree, Laravel is a thing and I’ve seen Laravel projects with speed that rival anything else in existence. No it’s a problem with WordPress, it’s been going for far too long, become far too bloated for its own good.
I’ve explored building a new site with Astro, migrated every post I have here over there and generally I’m happy with the speed, but I’m still too lazy to migrate over decade worth of images to the new site, so right now it’s only a massive wall of text with no images. It shouldn’t be too hard to migrate the images to imagekit or cloudinary but because I always want to take any opportunity to learn new way to self-host things (aka. likes to overcomplicate things), I want to spin up minIO and host my own S3 to keep my stuffs. That of course will take extra time, and I’m not very well known for time handling.
Let’s hope I can get some stuffs done in 2025
Back on the market P2, and how I got scammed into providing a week’s worth of free labor
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.
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.
Back on the Market (sort of) P1
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.
The day my world changed forever
- 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!
Happy 70s Birthday Dad!
Time flies
Fixed Portfolio and Photos pages
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)
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