Blog Archive

For the past 2 years I have been meaning to migrate this site away from its previous platform. I have been using Ghost CMS for this site, and while it's beautiful and functional, it's becoming unbearably expensive. With a virtual machine running on Azure, along with all the requisite services, and I had been meaning to move to a static web application to save on costs.

The biggest hurdle by far was migrating data. While it was fairly easy to obtain a JSON file that contained all of your Ghost entries, and with so little content, this was the easiest first step.

But what do I do with that data? I ended up having to take three more steps.

Read More

One of the major concerns I had when I shifted away from my software developer role was the uncertainty over the future.

Just like any developer I had aspired for a career that steadily progressed from junior to a senior developer, and beyond that I imagined becoming some sort of software engineering manager, head of software engineering, or even a CTO role. But the role shift that had happened threw me off of that track, and it was jarring, unsettling, and uncomfortable trying to, all of a sudden, reimagine a future far different from what I've envisioned in the past.

The stakes were also higher as I have a daughter entering university soon, and the financial implications of her schooling added one more thing for me to worry about.

Read More

A week ago, I announced my resignation from leading the Philippine .NET Users Group, after an 11-year run.

I wasn't really committed into making the announcement at that specific time, but I made the decision because making it official was the only chance for me to detach myself from the role. In those 11 years my name became synonymous to PHINUG. I didn't intend it to be that way, but I cannot blame people who told me that it was for thinking that.

After all, most of us, when asked who we are, tend to answer with what we do.

Read More

My colleague Ken and I were having one of those eternal-question software management conversations about what Joel Spolsky in the past had called two different developer types: "smart" vs. "smart and get things done". What occurred to me was a thought of how gamers tackle their games.

There are two types of people when it comes to finishing open world games like the Grand Theft Auto series: completionists and speed runners.

Read More

One of the most beautiful words in the Tagalog language is the word for "job" or "work", which is "hanapbuhay". The word is a combination of two more Tagalog words: "hanap", which means to search, and "buhay", which means life.

Read More

This is the second of a four-part writeup based on the talk "Five Years without QA: What I learned, What I missed, and What I wish I could change for a better software quality culture" that I presented at SOFTCON 2022: Metaverse Continuum held online on October 26, 2022.

Part 1 of this series can be found here.

I have an unpopular opinion, at least for Philippine software shops: I think that QA testing doesn't fit-in with Agile methodologies. Handing off development work to a separate QA tester for scrutiny harkens back to the Waterfall model of software development, where verification was a separate activity to implementation.

Read More

This is the first in a pair of writeups based on the talk "Five Years without QA: What I learned, What I missed, and What I wish I could change for a better software quality culture" that I presented at SOFTCON 2022: Metaverse Continuum held online on October 26, 2022

When I joined PageUp in early 2018 it was the first time that I joined a company without a dedicated Quality Assurance (QA) team. It was curious at first, but I realized the process didn't differ too much – just that developers were more conscious about possible bugs due to the increased responsibility over specific stories.

Over the years I have had my own fair share of support cases where there was no one else to blame but myself and failing to test specific scenarios. It was really just a different way of doing things at first. Sometimes though, there would be triggers that would you lead you to scrutinize the way things are done at work.

Read More

A chance viewing of a YouTube video of Daniel Pink's TED talk on motivation sparked a journey for myself a few years ago. During that time I was struggling with my own very demotivated self, and questioning why I was having a hard time peeling myself away from my social media addiction, all while work was becoming this massive glob of questions and self doubt in my head.

Daniel Pink's talk was even more relevant as I was facing a change in management in the workplace, where there was a massive shift in the change of management styles. This perfect storm of personal and external questions to motivation and passion led me to read more on Pink's book Drive:

Read More

One of my biggest fears when I was young was having a son who is gay.

At a very early age I had always known that I wanted to have a family. I wanted to marry a beautiful girl, I wanted to have kids, I wanted at least one son. I did not understand where these desires came from, but part of this may have been that, for our branch of the clan, I was the only remaining potential patriarch who would carry the name; my sibling was a sister, all my cousins from my uncles were girls.

There was a tacit expectation that the family line relied on me. They were part of the expectations that a patriarchal society would bequeath any lad my age, especially one that attends a Catholic all-boys school. I was well aware of the stigma my gay classmates were suffering from. I didn't want to have a gay son, because that somehow was an expectation of a man.

Read More

It's so easy to find yourself lost and paralyzed by the difficulty to write anything down. It's not just writer's block or a lack of creativity, but it's a function of the questions in your head: Is it worth writing down? Am I creating value? Is my voice worth hearing? Are my thoughts and opinions important?

This becomes more true in the light of even more serious hits in life. The last time I talked about this, it was a health problem that forced a reset. Now it's the medium term effects of the pandemic – the financial hit that we've taken having had a travel business that had income and credit lines dry up leading to liabilities we can't repay.

We had to give up some things, and we were forced to stare failure in the face. We had to ask for help after years of believing we've got everything we need to be independent. We had to give up living in our little piece of heaven.

It's hard.

Read More

There had been a lot of talk the past month about Github's decision to move away from the name 'master' towards 'main'. Scott Hanselman's writeup on  this issue explains both the history of the terminology and how one could easily move away from using it. When I initially had read about the issue I had thought little of it, and had even agreed tongue and cheek with Reddit's sarcastic take on the whole master to main issue.

And then it hit closer to home.

An online discussion among people I know went out of hand. Feathers were ruffled. Some were offended by others who had expressed indifference on the matter. Mediators were needed to calm the situation down and remind everyone to check themselves.

A question was presented to me at the time: when should it matter to us? How could a person express their personal feelings and opinion that "it isn't a big deal" without hurting someone else?

Read More

It feels like Groundhog Day. Or perhaps Edge of Tomorrow. You put it up, you build it, then something happens.

You forget to renew your domain – been there a couple of times.
You have writer's block.
You stop caring, you become resentful.
You just become sarcastic.
You become addicted to short, concise, but ultimately empty one liners of social media posts.
You limit your expression to 160 characters. And it's not even Twitter's fault.
You can't afford the hosting, or just don't bother.  
You're too busy and then you've gone six months to a year without a post.
You become sick, and don't seek treatment.
You feel like an insignificant fraud.

It's all heavy. It all happened. I've gone through that.

But then you wake up again, just like in both movies: back at the start of the plot. Back to that day where it all just begins to unfold. You wake up. But this time, you know a little better.

Then you try again.

Read More