Randomness - Nam Vu Personal Site

November 11, 2024

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.

September 14, 2024

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!

March 24, 2024

Happy 70s Birthday Dad!

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

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

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.

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

September 8, 2023

Giới thiệu SheepIt: Renderfarm miễn phí dành cho người dùng Blender

(this post will be written in Vietnamese as those are the main target audience)

SheepIt là một dịch vụ render đám mây phân tán, miễn phí, giúp người dùng chia sẻ tài nguyên máy tính để tăng tốc quá trình render đồ họa 3D. Hệ thống hoạt động dựa trên sự đóng góp của cộng đồng, nơi mỗi người tham gia có thể sử dụng sức mạnh xử lý từ máy tính của mình để giúp render các dự án của người khác và ngược lại. Nhờ vào mô hình cộng đồng, SheepIt mang đến một giải pháp tiết kiệm chi phí, linh hoạt và hiệu quả cho các nghệ sĩ 3D, nhà làm phim và nhà thiết kế, hỗ trợ họ hoàn thành các tác phẩm một cách nhanh chóng và dễ dàng.

Full disclosure: Mình là team founder của team Vietnam trên cộng đồng SheepIt. Nếu các bạn tham gia đóng góp computing power của máy mình trên SheepIt, các bạn có thể join vào team mình. Khi ở trong team các bạn sẽ được sử dụng điểm chung của team để render dự án của mình. Các bạn cũng có thể tham gia chém gió cùng các thành viên khác trong team Vietnam trên kênh Discord chính thức của team tại đây.

September 8, 2023

Server migration (again)

So I’ve switched to yet another cloud provider. This time it’s Hetzner.

While I prefer to self-host most of the services that I use (media server, team chat, password manager, CCTV etc.), I still keep my WordPress sites on a separate VPS. The main reason why I do this is because I prefer to keep all my self-host services containerized in docker, but the LAMP stack is one of the few things that runs just so much better bare-metal than containerized. You don’t have to worry about volume bindings, multiple db container vs single db container, PHP settings etc. Plus it never hurts to have a VPS laying around in case you need a sock proxy.

My VPS history:

Started with Google Cloud Platform, it served me well and taught me a lot about managing VPS. Performance was top-notch (it’s still Google after all). Google later revised their pricing which put it outside of my price range. I then looked into Oracle Cloud since I heard a lot of good things about their free tier VPS. Unfortunately though its performance was horrible for me. I couldn’t get any of the fabled ARM VPS with 24GB RAM that they offer, but for me I would be fine even with the micro 1 vCPU 1GB RAM instance, IF it worked. Unfortunately it was unreachable most of the time (I registered for the South Korean datacenter, it was before the Singapore DC was available). So I started looking else where, finally decided to settle with Linode’s nanode.

It worked, for a while. Until performance became a problem again. With the $5 nanode (1 vCPU, 1GB RAM) I was constantly getting database timeout errors. It was clear 1GB just wasn’t cutting it. Unfortunately adding just 1GB more RAM would’ve doubled the monthly fee to $11. I was unhappy with that value.

So anyway, long story short, I switched to Hetzner as per many recommendations on reddit. And you know what, redditors know their stuffs. For less than the price of a Vietnamese Starbucks I’m getting 2 vCPU, 2GB RAM, 40GB Storage and 20Tb bandwidth per month. This beats the absolute living shit out of any offer from Vulture, Linode, DigitalOcean, OVH etc.

The downside is of course, this pricing only applies to VM instances located in Europe. I suppose Hetzner has some sort of home turf advantage that enabled them to keep the cost down. They recently introduced a new data center in Singapore. I tried provisioning a VM there but the monthly cost is more than triple the price of Helsinki. But I can live with a little of latency if that means I can keep the cost at a reasonable level. Otherwise I’d just bring everything back to run on my home NAS.

March 21, 2023

Good bye VNPT, hello FPT

Gigabit Internet AND TV Streaming service for $12/mo? Yes, Please

We (our family) have been using VNPT as our primary ISP for years. They are the largest ISP in Vietnam and generally we have been happy with their services. That rapidly changed during the last year.

Here’s my list of complaint with VNPT:

Unreliable Connection: constant disconnection and inability to access the CDNs of some of the most popular websites including Shopee, Facebook, TikTok (as of Mar 2023, only Shopee is still affected, and mostly during night time). This started to become a problem around Covid19 lockdown time, they probably had a customer base explosion and their infrastructure couldn’t keep up. I get it, but 2 years? Letting that lasting as long as it does is a clear sign of incompetency.
Website Blocking: so they have this habit of straight up disabling access to certain websites, completely without their customer’s consent. I don’t have a comprehensive list of blocked websites but it include most of the pornographic websites like Pornhub, Xvideos etc. which I guess can’t be helped because they were mandated by the government (FPT also blocks these). But they also block 2 websites that doesn’t serve any adult content at all: Medium (where most of the UX editorial articles reside), and most recently, Behance (where people come for UI showcases when Dribbble shots don’t cut it). Naturally, you can see why I, as an UI/UX Designer, would have a major problem with this. I don’t want to have 1.1.1.1 running at startup just because I’m using a pussy ass ISP.
Now to be clear, FPT doesn’t block Medium and Behance, I have checked. And yes, I am aware that the lawmakers who are responsible for these blocks are incompetent short-sighted pieces of shit but remember, it was us (the people), who allow these people to hold these positions. So in the end it’s essentially our fault. My expectation for government officials of a developing country like VN was already extremely low to begin with but…holy shit.
Shit Equipment: VNPT provided a 2-port modem on their first installation. Yep you read that right, 2-fucking-port excluding the WAN port. You can plug in a computer and a NAS and…that’s about it. You can of course phone up customer support and ask for a 4-port version, which I did, but com one. If they’re gonna cheap out on end users like that, what else are they cheaping out in the back? Perhaps that’s why their connection keeps going on and off intermittently. And also, the firmware on these modems though, holy shit I’ve probably haven’t seen such shitty software since the 90s, perhaps because they were probably made during that time. The UI and UX was straight up 90s-esque. They were ugly as shit and unintuitive to use. Took me way too long (and a lot of help from the WiFi community group on FB) to figure out which part do what. Who the fuck refer to port forwarding as ‘virtual server’ really?
Anyway by the time I switched to FPT, the WebUI console of the VNPT modem has become completely inaccessible. Some kind of SSL error blocks access to it completely. I could probably phone up customer support for the 100th time and let them send another technician my way. But I’ve decided the next time I’m picking up the phone and calling them, it’d be for informing them that I’m dumping them.

For reference, for the same price I’m paying ($10/mo) I’m getting more or less the same speed (150Mbps) on FPT but with a free Android box and a subscription to their TV service FPT Play. (VNPT also has MyTV, but it doesn’t come with the internet package). This puts FPT values way above VNPT even for the base package. But things start to get interesting once you get to the next package tier. For an additional $2/mo, FPT buffs your downstream speed all the way to Gigabit! That’s absolutely crazy.