January 23, 2022

A decade of employment: A personal reflection

So 2021 was over, a year I believe most of us couldn’t wait to forget. So much time staying under lockdown, so many losses. I can no longer count with my fingers the number of my friends on FB who’s using a black avatar (a symbol of grievances where I come from).

But, sad pandemic stories aside, this year also marks the 10 year anniversary of me working professionally in the graphic design field, and I guess it’s a good time as any to take a look back and see how things have changed, and reminisce about people whom I’ve met along the way, how they helped shaping the man I am today. I will not be censoring company names, as they are publicly available in my resume, as well as my LinkedIn.

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September 16, 2021

Choosing a cloud hosting provider: Digital Ocean vs Linode

DigitalOcean vs. Linode | Low-code backend to build modern apps

I’m gonna make this short: avoid Digital Ocean like the plague.

As you know, my whole website used to be hosted on a VM Instance on Google Cloud Platform. However, the cost of GCP was a little much for my usage so I was looking to migrate to another provider. The most obvious names that comes to mind that wasn’t ‘Big Tech’ (AWS, Azure, Alibaba, Google) are the holy trinity: Digital Ocean, Linode and Vultr (which I didn’t test).

Among those, Digital Ocean is probably the most well known name.

They’re everywhere.
They seem to have the best UI among the cloud provider (and I’m a sucker for good UIs).
They have a pretty extensive knowledgebase that covers pretty everything in tech.
They have a huge marketplace, pretty much every self hosted project you see has a ‘Deploy on Digital Ocean droplet’ option.

DO sounds like a no-brainer. So I set out to create my account. Being a skeptical, naturally I sign up using a ‘trial’ account that offer a $100 credit for 60-day, there’s plenty of those on Google if you search for it, but don’t make the same mistake as I did, the 60-day $100 is a goddamn lie. When I added my credit card, I was told there might be a $1 charge for verification that will be refunded in no more than a week. When I added my first droplet, I was immediately charged $6.15, and I’m pretty sure it’s never going to be refunded as a few weeks have passed.

This shady practice alone should be enough of a reason for most of you to avoid DO. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s also the performance issue.

I created a nano droplet (the $5/m variant). You may ask why I decided to go for the bottom of the barrel choice even though I have $100 in trial credit. In my opinion, a service is only as good as its bottom line, and testing it should give a pretty good overview of the quality of the service being offered. And boy was that the correct decision.

Performance was good on the first day, but it only goes downhill from there. I have a total of 6 WordPress websites with virtually no traffic (only one of them has like 100 visits per DAY). And yet the droplet was slowed to near unresponsive level when I finished migrating my 4th website. SFTP would constantly timeout. If I try to visit 2 of my sites at the same time, the server would return a 504 error. It was unacceptable.

I was ready to give DO the benefit of doubt and blame the disruption of AAE-1 international internet cable line as a factor (even though the droplet I created was provisioned on the Singapore data center, which shouldn’t have been affected by that incident.

It was then that I decided to make an account on Linode and give it a shot. The sign up process was exactly the same but they didn’t even charge me a cent for verification. I fired up a $5 linode, going through the same migration process, and lo’ and behold, everything just worked! All 6 websites up and running without a hitch. The hardest part of the migration was, ironically enough, caused by Digital Ocean. As the websites keep timing out when I try to create Duplicator packages.

Normally to save space on the droplet I’d make Duplicator send the packages to my Google Drive and my OneDrive Business storage, however on the DO droplet, they couldn’t even communicate with either Google or Microsoft server at all, forcing me to SFTP in and painfully try to download the package manually, bit by bit (thank god WinSCP can do that without poping up a dialog ever 5 minutes). The failure to communicate with Google and Microsoft’s server is a testament that the connection problem was with Digital Ocean and not with my ISP.

Anyway just wanted to share my experience. Obviously I’m not endorsing either Linode or Vultr yet since I’m only on a trial run with them, but one thing is definite: avoid Digital Ocean.

That’s all for today, folks.

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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April 6, 2020

What is “Creativity”?

So one of my fellow designer recently posted this:

XbF0i5k

Basically one of his client saidthis

Using repetitive layout patterns in app design in order to improve learnability is just an excuse for being lazy at creativity.

And that raises an interesting question (for me anyway): just what is “Creativity”, anyway?

Now I’m not talking about its literal definition, we all have our own intepretation of what it is. I’m talking about how we – the people in the design community – perceive it.

Graphic designers, product designers, illustrators, painters, UI/UX designers, visual GFX artists, game artists etc. we’re own thrown into the same blanket category: “Creatives” they call us. But that word, Creativity, it’s not the same thing for all of us.

For graphic designers, illustrators, painters…Creativity is a goal, the ultimate destination where you want to take your creations

For UI/UX/Product designers…Creativity is a tool, and as with any other tool, you only wield it to serve a purpose. And in our case, that purpose is Usability.

Think about it, if you’re an artists, a painter, your work doesn’t really serve anyone else but your own creators, and those who follow their visions. The ultimate validation of your works is its creativity.

But as a product designer, your work serves other purposes

In conclusion, to answer the question: is it bad if your creation is not super innovative?

I’d say it depends on the purpose of your creation.

If it’s for show, then yes

If it’s for use, then no.

November 7, 2019

Good bye Mr. Snowball

2005:
Wasn’t particularly an eventful year.
Lots of things hasn’t happened yet.
The first iPhone wasn’t due for another 2 years.
I wasn’t even in college, just a kid fresh out of High School.
And yet one thing made that year particularly memorable to me, to all of my family.
This guy right here.
I still remember vividly the day he came into our lives, such tiny little creature, with piercing blue eyes. So small and yet nothing seems to be scaring him. Footsteps, loud noises, nothing could even make him turn his head.
(We soon found out that’s because he’s completely, utterly deaf 1f642 which is also why he never had a formal name, because nobody could’ve called him. He was simply known as “The Snowball”)
Then he’d proceed to spend the next 14 years of his life brightening up our days, without fail.
Today is no different really. After spending most of the days being awesome, he took a hearty meal from his favorite bow, went back to his favorite box, took a nap, and decided not to wake up again.
Today is a beautiful autumn day. I guess if you could choose how and when to go, today is as good as any.
Still, it’s never easy losing a friend who was with you for almost half your life.

2005-2019
Rest in peace buddy, you may have left our lives, but you will never leave our hearts.

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September 14, 2019

Kết thúc mười năm

Hôm nay tình cờ lôi quyển hộ chiếu ra, phát hiện đã đến ngày hết hạn, tự nhiên nhớ lại cái ngày này đúng 10 năm về trước, cảm giác hân hoan khi nhận được nó vẫn còn như in.

Có nhiều thứ từ cách đây một thập kỷ mà mình ko còn có thể nhớ nổi nữa, nhưng cuốn hộ chiếu này thì mình vẫn nhớ như in, vì bối cảnh đặc biệt mà mình nhận được nó.

10 năm trước là kỷ niệm 60 năm thành lập hãng hàng không JetBlue, bọn nó dân chơi offer 1 cái deal cho phép mình mua 1 cái vé $600 có thể bay đến bất cứ sân bay nào mà JetBlue có hoạt động trong lãnh thổ US. Và đó là khởi đầu của tất cả, chuyến ‘road trip’ đầu tiên trong cuộc đời, chuyến đi mở mang đầu óc đầu tiên. (trước thời điểm đó mình thuộc loại hardcore introvert, cả tháng chỉ có đến trường rồi về nhà chơi game, ko ra khỏi nhà, nếu không có bà chị lôi đi chuyến đi này chắc giờ mình vẫn tiếp tục lesor lắm).

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August 14, 2019

Moving on from bad services

I’m an loyal person, once I use a service, I tend to stick with it, even if the service quality goes down, I’d tolerate it.

But there comes a time when man must put his foot down and say “That’s enough!”

So the last month I’ve decided to switch services for many things that I’ve used for a long time:

Mobile carrier:

I’ve been a faithful Mobifone user for as long as I have a cell phone, dating back all the way to 2005 I think when I got my first phone (a Motorola L7, I could still remember it vividly). But this month I’ve decided to switch to Viettel, they’ve come a long way, and is just better overall.

Internet Service Provider:

There aren’t really any different between the major ISPs here in Vietnam, every year they get pretty much the same amount of dreadful downtime. But recently, FPT was discovered to have shady pricing schemes with their customers, so now once again I’m sticking with Viettel as my main ISP.

Banking:

I’m sure most of you can relate to this one, you use Vietcombank, realize their service is completely and utter shit, but you still have to use them anyway, because your company pays your salary through them. It’s a common issue, nobody likes them, but everybody uses them, so they don’t give a shit. They burden their customers with all kinds of bullshit fees, treating them as if they’re a burden. Well, this last month my company managed an incredible feat: breaking free from Vietcombank. (or as I’d like to call it, relieving 2000+ accounts from their burden).

We switched to HSBC because it’s convenient for my UK-based firm, but really, their internet banking is a completely different beast. I’ve never since that kind of UX since, well, kindergarten. But that’s a story for another day.

Remote Desktop:

Just by uttering the word Remote Desktop you probably would’ve guessed what I’ve been using for the last 10 years, yes it was TeamViewer, I’ve been using them ever since their first days, when nobody even know who they are. While I’ve never been a paid customer, I believe I’d paid my due by being a super active evangelist. I’ve installed TeamViewer for everyone I know who might need help, I’ve showed a handful of people how to use it. I played my part in building up the popularity that they have today, and what do I get in return?

A big FUCK YOU is what.

My account was flagged as a ‘potentially commercial account’, and connection time was limited to 30 seconds. Yes you read that right, 30 fucking seconds! Holy mother fucking shit

Luckily, like with all things in life, eventually something better will come along and kick the shit out of it. In this case, that thing is called “AnyDesk”. Not only does it work so much more reliably, it also doesn’t leave a fucking nagging message after every session. Seriously, that thing annoyed the shit out of me.