Shing Lyu - Articles

ADR in Code: Architecture Compliance with AI Code Reviews

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:00:00 +0000

In my previous post about ADR as Event Sourcing, I talked about capturing architecture decisions continuously as they happen, not months later when everyone’s forgotten the context. But writing ADRs is only half the battle. The other half is actually enforcing them—and that’s where most teams fail. ADRs sit in a separate wiki or documentation tool like Confluence or Notion, gradually becoming archaeology rather than law.

What if we could give our AI code reviewer the ADRs as instructions, so it flags violations automatically on every pull request?

(more...)

ADR as Event Sourcing: Rethinking Software Architecture Documentation in the Age of AI

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 23:00:00 +0000

Does any organization actually have good, up-to-date software architecture documentation? I’ve worked with enough teams to know the answer is almost always “no.” Most architecture docs become outdated the moment they’re written. Engineers don’t have time to maintain documentation while shipping features. Traditional Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) are often written after decisions are made, not during the decision-making process. And when you’re busy, you simply forget to document parts of your architecture, leaving it spotty and unreliable. With Generative AI, I think we should treat ADRs more like event sourcing—capturing decisions as they happen, not reconstructing them from memory weeks later.

(more...)

My Complete Remote Vibe Coding Setup for Busy Parents

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 23:00:00 +0000

As a busy parent, I often only have 5-10 minutes of uninterrupted work time before my child needs attention. Traditional coding workflows—where you need a laptop open, an IDE running with AI agents actively working, and constant supervision—simply don’t work for someone in my situation. I needed a setup that could run in the background without any intervention, could be accessed from any device including my phone or tablet, and would let me make meaningful progress in short bursts throughout the day. Here’s the complete remote vibe coding workflow I’ve built using GitHub Copilot and Cloudflare Pages.

(more...)

TOGAF Practitioner exam tips: A strategic approach to passing

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The TOGAF Practitioner exam can be challenging, but with the right strategy, you can significantly improve your chances of success. Unlike the Foundation exam which tests knowledge recall, the Practitioner exam tests your ability to apply TOGAF principles in realistic scenarios. Here’s a battle-tested approach that helped me pass the exam.

(more...)

10 Years of shinglyu.com

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 11:00:00 +0000

In September 2008, I wrote my first blog post, a humble guide about fixing missing screen resolutions in Ubuntu. Eighteen years and 88 posts later, I’m celebrating a different milestone: the 10th anniversary of moving this blog to its permanent home on shinglyu.com. What started as a way to document Linux troubleshooting tips has evolved into something far more significant: a chronicle of my entire career, from browser hacker to cloud architect, and a testament to the power of owning your own platform.

(more...)

Poor Man's Raycast: Replace Raycast Features Using Only macOS Built-ins

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I was really into Raycast. The global hotkeys, the instant app launching, the clipboard management – it transformed how I worked on my Mac. But I really don’t want to use their AI features. I found out it’s quite difficult to completely turn them off. With sensitive data flowing through my clipboard and workflows, I want absolute certainty that nothing leaves my machine. Also, Raycast is always in the gray area for corporate IT, and I live in the constant fear of it being banned by my employer.

That’s when I discovered something surprising: I could rebuild almost everything I loved about Raycast using tools that were already on my Mac.

(more...)

Vibe Operations—The Next Indispensable Trend

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 22:10:00 +0000

The industry chatter is loud about “vibe coding”—the AI-assisted writing of software. Yet, as someone who’s spent years observing how we build and manage cloud infrastructure (and recently preparing for the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect exam), I’ve noticed a much more profound trend quietly emerging on the operations side. It’s not about “vibe coding,” it’s about Vibe Operations.

For me, the realization hit while deep in hands-on labs that exposed the current limitations of our tooling. The true AI revolution isn’t just about speeding up code creation; it’s about fundamentally changing operational speed, precision, and skills acquisition for cloud architects and DevOps teams.

The core of this trend lies in the Gemini CLI in Cloud Shell. I believe this tool points to the future of cloud interaction.

How I Use the Gemini CLI

For those who don’t spend a lot of time in the command line, here is the basic workflow:

Open Cloud Shell: From the Google Cloud console, you click the small terminal icon. This launches a fully provisioned Linux terminal right in your browser.
Invoke Gemini: Inside the Cloud Shell terminal, I start the AI agent by typing the command gemini.
Describe Intent: Instead of looking up complex commands, I simply describe the resource or action I need (e.g., “create a private GKE cluster in region europe-west4 with an auto-scaling node pool. Explain the command you are about to run in detail.”).
Review and Execute: The Gemini CLI generates the precise gcloud command, which I can review for correctness and then execute instantly with a single keypress. This allows me to both operate faster and learn the exact syntax in context.

(more...)

Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect Exam Changes October 2025: Key Updates You Need to Know

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 21:34:00 +0000

While working on my recent exploration of Rust on Google Cloud Run, I was impressed by how seamless and developer-friendly the experience turned out to be. The container-based approach provided more flexibility and better tooling integration than I expected, sparking my interest in Google Cloud’s broader ecosystem and architectural patterns.

This hands-on experience led me to consider pursuing the Professional Cloud Architect certification. As I began researching study materials and exam guides, I discovered that Google Cloud was releasing an updated version of the certification exam in October 2025. Rather than rush into the old version, I decided to wait and understand what changes were coming. The updates include new AI-focused content and formal incorporation of the Well-Architected Framework principles.

(more...)

Poor Man's Raycast: Replace Raycast Features Using Only macOS Built-ins

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 20:49:00 +0000

I was really into Raycast. The global hotkeys, the instant app launching, the clipboard management – it transformed how I worked on my Mac. But I really don’t want to use their AI features. For the AI features it provides, I prefer using my own LLM provider. But I found out it’s quite difficult to completely turn it off. With sensitive data flowing through my clipboard and workflows, I want absolute certainty that nothing leaves my machine. Also Raycast is always in the gray area for corporate IT, and I live in the constant fear of it being banned by my employer.

That’s when I discovered something surprising: I could rebuild almost everything I loved about Raycast using tools that were already on my Mac.

(more...)

Serverless Rust on GCP Cloud Run: From Basic Deployment to Optimized Container Builds

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 19:41:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, I published a comparison of Rust across AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and GCP’s serverless offerings. I was pretty harsh on GCP, essentially dismissing Cloud Run as “not really serverless” and suggesting Google was missing the boat entirely.

The GCP community didn’t let that slide.

Multiple comments and messages pointed out that I hadn’t given Cloud Run a fair evaluation. They were right. I was so focused on function-as-a-service models that I didn’t appreciate what GCP was actually offering with their “serverless containers” approach.

I had wrongly assumed that “containers” meant always-on hosts, but Cloud Run actually uses a microVM security model that provides strong isolation while still billing you only for the time your function runs - just like other serverless platforms.

So I did what any curious engineer should do: I went back and gave it another try.

And honestly? I was pleasantly surprised. Cloud Run’s container-first approach actually works brilliantly with Rust, and the developer experience is surprisingly smooth once you understand the optimization patterns.

(more...)

Rust Serverless on the Big Three Clouds: AWS, Azure, and GCP Compared

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 20:23:00 +0000

When you’re choosing a cloud platform for your next Rust serverless project, the landscape can be confusing. Each of the big three cloud providers—AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform—offers different levels of maturity and support for Rust in serverless environments. I’ve spent some time experimenting with two platforms (more on why I’m missing one later), and the differences are more significant than you might expect.

Why does this comparison matter? Rust brings compelling advantages to serverless computing: it runs with low resource requirements and delivers high performance, which translates to improved performance and lower cloud costs. Additionally, Rust eliminates many bugs during compile time, so your code is less like a ticking time bomb that will break during runtime. This means less late night on-call madness and happier developers.

What I Mean by “Serverless”

Before diving into the comparison, let me clarify what I mean by “serverless” in this context. Many cloud providers give vague definitions, so here’s my own practical definition that guided this evaluation.

(more...)

When Customers Say No: The Unexpected Door Solution Architects Should Never Ignore

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 20:47:03 +0000

Ever been in a customer meeting where the conversation seems to hit a brick wall? As a solution architect, you pitch your best cloud strategy, only to be met with a polite—sometimes not-so-polite—rejection. Most folks would pack up and move on. But what if this is the moment you should lean in and ask… why?

(more...)

Building a Database-Backed API with Serverless Rust on Azure

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 20:50:00 +0000

In my previous post, we deployed a simple “Hello World” Rust function to Azure. Now we’re ready to build something production-worthy: a database-backed REST API that handles real business logic. We’ll create a cake ordering system for a local bakery, complete with data persistence, input validation, and proper error handling.

(more...)

Serverless Rust on Azure: Deploying a Rust Azure Function

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 19:49:05 +0000

This is the first post in my new series on serverless Rust on Azure. We’ll start simple by following the official Azure tutorial, with my notes on the caveats and tweaks I’ve made along the way. Having worked with AWS for the past 6 years, I’ll also highlight key differences from AWS Lambda.

You can find the complete code on GitHub: https://github.com/shinglyu/serverless-rust-on-azure.

(more...)

Why the % Sign Breaks Your Website (And How to Fix It)

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 20:53:00 +0000

A frontend developer friend recently reached out to me for help. Her React app was mysteriously breaking, and she couldn’t figure out why. After some investigation, we discovered the culprit: a single % character in a URL was causing the entire application to crash.

When you see a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), it often contains characters like letters, numbers, and some special symbols. However, not all characters are allowed directly inside a URL because some have special meanings, and some fall outside the allowed range of characters. This is where percent-encoding comes into play.

(more...)

How I Wrote a Book with AI

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 20:10:13 +0000

After spending over a year each on my previous two books, I decided to experiment with AI assistance for my latest project: Learning to Learn AWS. The goal wasn’t to generate another AI-filled book flooding Amazon, but to maintain intellectual ownership while dramatically reducing the time investment. Here’s how I completed a quality technical book in just 5 months, working only 1-2 hours per week.

(more...)

From DevTools Detective to Automation Hero: My Quest for Dutch Subtitles

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working on improving my Dutch by watching NOS Journaal in Makkelijke Taal (NOS News in Simple Language). It’s perfect for language learners - the vocabulary is accessible, the pronunciation is clear, and the topics are current and relevant.

But here’s the thing: while listening helps with comprehension, I wanted to read the subtitles after watching to catch vocabulary I missed during the video. The built-in video player has subtitles, but constantly pausing to point my phone’s Google Translate camera at the screen proved incredibly disruptive. I’d get tired of watching within minutes.

I already use Readlang extensively for my Dutch studies. It’s a language learning tool where you can import articles, then click on any word or phrase to get AI-powered translations with contextual explanations. The UX is phenomenally smooth, removing most of the friction from reading foreign language content. This would be a great tool to study the subtitles right after I watched the video. However, there is a problem.

(more...)

Vibe coding a PII Anonymizer CLI: how gen AI makes me build tools faster than ever

Wed, 28 May 2025 22:27:17 +0000

I use AI chatbots and agents extensively in my daily workflow. Sometimes I need to provide them with documents converted to markdown, but I don’t want to give away too much personal information. Markitdown is an excellent tool for converting PDFs and Word documents to markdown, but I lacked a CLI tool that could redact PII from the output. There are existing tools out there, and cloud services too, but I wanted something completely offline that wouldn’t raise any IT security team’s eyebrows. Then I stumbled upon Microsoft’s Presidio library, which can anonymize Personally Identifiable Information (PII) easily. So I decided to flex my vibe coding muscles and code a CLI myself.

(more...)

Agentic Software Installer - A Genius or Terrible Idea?

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 20:24:13 +0000

AI agents like Cline can now install complex software by interpreting documentation and handling environment differences automatically. Is this the future of software installation, or are we creating new problems by delegating these tasks to AI?

I’m a bit late to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) party. While everyone was enthusiastically exploring the capabilities of MCP months ago, I only recently started diving into this ecosystem. My first experience was with the Logseq MCP, which provides some basic but useful functionality for the note-taking app. Then I tried the Brave Search MCP, which allows AI assistants to perform web searches directly.

What struck me wasn’t just the functionality these MCPs provided, but rather the installation process. As a developer who’s set up numerous environments and tools over the years, I found myself watching with fascination as Cline, the AI assistant as a VS Code Plugin, took over what would typically be a manual, error-prone process.

(more...)

Make AI Draw Architecture Diagrams with AWS Icons

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 22:02:39 +0000

Last year, I wrote about turning hand-drawn architecture diagrams into digital diagrams using generative AI. While that approach worked well for creating editable digital diagrams, the result was quite basic—mostly rectangles and text. But if you’ve ever seen presentations by AWS solution architects, you’ll know that colorful AWS service icons can make architecture diagrams much more visually appealing and easier to understand at a glance.

I’ve since figured out how to leverage AI to not only create the basic diagram structure but also incorporate those recognizable AWS service icons. In this post, I’ll walk you through the process step by step.

(more...)

Engineering Better Online Meetings: Hardware, Software, and Environment

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 22:20:24 +0000

Since COVID, online meetings have become an indispensable tool for collaboration, communication, and productivity. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting your career, mastering the art of online meetings is crucial for success. Having spent four years in a customer-facing role, I’ve participated in countless online meetings across various time zones, gaining valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t. This blog post shares my experiences and provides practical tips to help you engineer better online meetings by focusing on two key areas: hardware configuration and software optimization. By addressing these elements, you can create a more professional, engaging, and productive online meeting experience for yourself and your participants. Here are some tips for better online meetings.

(more...)

Building a Fast and Accurate Transcription Tool on Linux

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 16:02:52 +0000

As a developer, I often find myself needing a tool that can let me type with voice. While macOS boasts a variety of excellent GUI-based transcription tools, the Linux landscape leans more towards command-line utilities. This presented a challenge, but also an opportunity to build a custom solution tailored to my workflow. I kept delaying it, but now I finally got time to build a fast and accurate transcription tool on Linux, leveraging the power of command-line tools and the flexibility of the terminal. I used VSCode, Cline, Gemini 2.0 Flash (in Plan Mode), and Gemini 2.0 Pro (in Act Mode) to help me build this.

Why Whisper and Faster Whisper?

When it comes to transcription accuracy, Whisper models from OpenAI consistently outperform many other options. Initially, I experimented with whisper.cpp, a C++ implementation of the Whisper architecture. It’s a fantastic project, offering great performance and flexibility, especially on my work Macbook with Apple silicon.

However, I recently discovered Faster Whisper, a reimplementation of the Whisper model using CTranslate2. The key advantage? It’s incredibly fast, even on older hardware without dedicated GPUs. On my trusty old laptop with an Intel Core i5-7200U CPU, the small.en model loads in about 2 seconds and can transcribe 1-3 sentences in roughly 4 seconds. This makes it perfectly suited for my needs.

(more...)

My Productivity System for 2025

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 22:10:59 +0000

graph TD
    subgraph "Input"
      NEWS["News from Social media,<br>Podcast,Feedly"] -- Save for later --> POCKET["Pocket<br>(Read later)"]
      Perplexity --> READ
      POCKET
      TWBOOK[Taiwan Library Books]
      YouTube --> DeepSRT
      Ideas
      Meetings
    end
    subgraph "Logseq"
      JOURNAL[Daily Journal]
      KANBAN_LEARNING[Kanban - Learning]
      JOURNAL--> KANBAN_WRITING["Kanban - Writing ideas"]
    end
      Meetings --> JOURNAL
      Ideas -- (optional) AI formatter --> JOURNAL

    READ[Read & Digest]
    READ -- learnings --> JOURNAL
    READ -- Topic that needs further research --> KANBAN_LEARNING
    POCKET --> READ
    TWBOOK[Taiwan Library Books] --> READ
    DeepSRT -->READ

    KANBAN_LEARNING --> Research
    KANBAN_WRITING --> Research
    Research --> JOURNAL
    Research --> WRITER[AI writing assistant]

    subgraph "Output"
      WRITER[AI writing assistant] --> Blog
      WRITER --> Buffer --> SOCIAL[Social media post]
      WRITER --> Book
      WRITER --> Talk
      WRITER --> Email
    end

    Meetings -- action item --> BULLET[Bullet journal]
    Ideas --> BULLET
    BULLET --> CALENDAR[Google Calendar<br>Outlook Calendar]
    BULLET --> Research
    CALENDAR --> Research

This is an updated version of my pre-ChatGPT productivity post. The landscape of productivity tools has changed dramatically since the AI boom, and my system has evolved accordingly. The system is shown in the diagram above. Let me explain it in detail.

(more...)

Building a temporary camera app with Windsurf

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 03:16:38 +0000

Note: This post is written with the help from Gemini 2.0 Flash. Let me know if you like the style and tone.

Keeping a pristine photo gallery can be a challenge. I wanted a way to separate my permanent family photos from the everyday snapshots I take—parking spots, receipts, quick notes—things I only need temporarily. I wanted those transient images kept separate, ready for easy cleanup later. I remembered an Android app that did just this, but unfortunately, it’s no longer available on the Play Store, leaving me searching for a new solution.

TL;DR: Windsurf is cool! And you can try the app I wrote here: https://shinglyu.com/TempPhoto/.

(more...)

Beware of scammer who uses my identity

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 21:00:18 +0000

A scammer(s), with the name “Amrw Hoinc”, is trying to use my identity to sign up for multiple websites. Based on the IP and phone number, they is based in Algeria and speaks Arabic and French. They signed up for multiple website builder tool, AI customer service chatbot, form builder, content publisher, and all kinds of AI tool and games. I suspect they are trying to create fake websites with AI-generated content with chatbot and sign-up forms. I have reported this to Algerian police and international cybercrime prevention authorities. Amrw Hoinc, please stop.

If you came across anything that uses my name or email, please contact me immediately.

يحاول محتال باسم "عمرو هوينك" استخدام هويتي للتسجيل في مواقع ويب متعددة. استنادًا إلى عنوان IP ورقم الهاتف، فهم يقيمون في الجزائر ويتحدثون العربية والفرنسية. لقد اشتركوا في العديد من أدوات إنشاء مواقع الويب، وبرنامج دردشة لخدمة العملاء بالذكاء الاصطناعي، وبرنامج إنشاء النماذج، وناشر المحتوى، وجميع أنواع أدوات وألعاب الذكاء الاصطناعي. أشك في أنهم يحاولون إنشاء مواقع ويب مزيفة بمحتوى تم إنشاؤه بواسطة الذكاء الاصطناعي باستخدام برنامج دردشة ونماذج تسجيل. لقد أبلغت الشرطة الجزائرية والسلطات الدولية للوقاية من الجرائم الإلكترونية. عمرو هوينك، من فضلك توقف.

Un escroc du nom de « Amrw Hoinc » tente d’utiliser mon identité pour m’inscrire sur plusieurs sites Web. D’après l’adresse IP et le numéro de téléphone, il est basé en Algérie et parle arabe et français. Il s’est inscrit à plusieurs outils de création de sites Web, à un chatbot de service client IA, à un générateur de formulaires, à un éditeur de contenu et à toutes sortes d’outils et de jeux IA. Je soupçonne qu’ils essaient de créer de faux sites Web avec du contenu généré par l’IA avec un chatbot et des formulaires d’inscription. J’ai signalé cela à la police algérienne et aux autorités internationales de prévention de la cybercriminalité. Amrw Hoinc, arrêtez s’il vous plaît.

(more...)

CDK to Terraform Migration with Gen AI

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 13:03:36 +0000

I recently worked on a project to migrate a CDK project to Terraform, because the client want to standarize on Terrafrom. This could have been a time-consuming job, and it requires expertise on both CDK and Terraform, but with the help from generative AI, especailly Amazon Q Developer and Amazon Bedrock, it becomes quite easy. This article will walk you through how I performed the migration and the lessons learned through the process.

(more...)

My Wayland adventure

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 21:29:06 +0000

My Linux laptop is running the old Ubuntu 20.04 and is going to go out of support next year. I was planning to switch over to NixOS but I don’t have time right now to do a fresh reinstall and learn NixOS from scratch. That’s why I decided to simply upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 and switch to Wayland.

I was using i3 on X11, so switching to Wayland means I have to change many of my settings and switch to utilities that supports Wayland. This post is a rundonw of all the changes I’ve made to switch to Wayland. Overall, I enjoy the smoothness of Wayalnd (abiet barely noticable), and being able to use newer, more polished utiltity tools.

(more...)

Disable pycodestyle Check in SageMaker Notebooks

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 09:34:41 +0000

The solution in this post is originally proposed by MattC and krassowski in this StakeOverflow thread. I just added some screenshots. Thanks to Nadhya Polanco for pointing me to this solution.

(To view a larger version of a screenshot, right-click on the image and select Open Image in New Tab.)

By default, when you use JupyterLab in Amazon SageMaker Studio, you’ll see some Python code being highlighted with pycodestyle syntax check error. This can get distracting if you don’t care about them or have the checks in the CI/CD pipeline already.

Here is how you can disable it:

(more...)

How Many Models Can You Fit into a SageMaker Multi-Model Endpoint?

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 10:04:10 +0000

Recently, I’ve been working on a project that requires running thousands of models simultaneously. To save costs, we decided to run it on a SageMaker Multi-Model endpoint.

Here is the official definition of Multi-Modal Endpoint from the official AWS Documentation:

Some example use cases include:

House price estimation models for different cities
Machine anomaly detection algorithms for different machine configurations

These use cases have many models, with the same model algorithm and framework but trained on different dataset.

A key questions aries: “How many models can we fit into one instance, and what instance type do we need?”. This post demonstrates my experiment results to answer this quesetion.

(more...)

Demystifying The Options for Triggering AWS CodePipeline with Amazon S3 Events

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 20:32:31 +0000

Triggering AWS code pipeline when new files are uploaded to S3 is a very common use case. For example, when new data is uploaded, you can trigger a CodePipeline that triggers SageMaker model retraining or inference. However, the documentation and services involved in this process have gone through multiple updates, making it confusing for users to understand the current recommended approach. In this post, I will try to untangle the different options and let you know which one is the most up-to-date and recommended approach.

(more...)

Turning Hand-Drawn Architecture Diagrams into Digital Diagrams with Generative AI

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 10:26:00 +0000

Background

As an architect, whiteboarding is an essential part of the design and problem-solving process. However, once the whiteboard session is over, it can be challenging to translate those hand-drawn diagrams into a digital format that can be easily shared and collaborated on. Traditionally, this process involved manually recreating the diagrams using diagramming tools, which can be time-consuming and prone to errors.

My Approach with Generative AI

To streamline this process, I’ve adopted a new approach that leverages the power of generative AI. By combining a multi-model large language model (LLM) from Amazon Bedrock with the versatile diagramming tool draw.io, I can effortlessly convert hand-drawn architecture diagrams into digital diagrams.

(more...)

Streamline my local transcription command for Raycast

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0000

In my previous blog, I asked Raycast to create an iTerm2 terminal to run the transcription script. This was because I needed to press CTRL+C to stop the sox recording. However, I found that launching iTerm2 and zsh took a significant amount of time, sometimes up to 5 to 10 seconds, which was too slow for quickly jotting down thoughts.

To address this issue, I discovered a way to stop the sox recording without opening the iTerm terminal. Instead of using CTRL+C, I can send a kill signal to the sox process. To achieve this, I utilize some shell script tricks to save the PID (Process ID) of sox and display a macOS pop-up. When I press the pop-up button, it sends a kill signal to the sox process, effectively stopping the recording.

(more...)

Transcribe voice to text locally with Whisper.cpp and Raycast

Sat, 25 May 2024 19:34:00 +0000

Why local transcription?

In today’s world, many of us rely on cloud-based services for tasks like speech-to-text transcription. While these services are convenient, they come with drawbacks like high latency due to network transfers and potential privacy concerns as our audio data is sent to the cloud.

Local transcription addresses these issues by performing the speech recognition process entirely on your device, ensuring low latency and keeping your audio data private. This is where whisper.cpp comes in.

(more...)

Understanding SageMaker Project Template Internals

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Authors: Brajendra Singh, Shing Lyu

The blog post is derived from a workshop I built with Brajendra Singh, which was never published. I’m extracting the content to make a blog post. You will learn how to deploy the SageMaker provided MLOps template for model deployment and how the template works internally. If the screenshot is too small, right-click on the image and select Open Image in New Tab

MLOps is the one of the hottest topic in the field right now. Organizations are looking for ways to productionize their ML models, and MLOps is the key to repeatable results. Amazon SageMaker Projects is a feature that allows you to create a full MLOps pipeline in just a few clicks. You are going to create the MLOps pipeline using the SageMaker-provided MLOps template. This template creates the deployment pipeline, and creates a trigger to monitor if new models are approved in the SageMaker model registry, and use that as a signal to deploy it.

Why do you need a MLOps pipeline?

The MLOps pipeline you are going to deploy will help you build a robust foundation for your machine learning experiments. It automates the model deployment and testing processing so there is less room for human error. Once the model is approved in the model registry the model is deployed automatically to the staging endpoint, and an automated test is run against the staging endpoint. This help you catch problems with the model early and prevents you from deploying faulty model to production. You remain in control on what should be deployed to production, thanks to the manual approval step in the pipeline. All the pipeline configuration, CloudFormation templates and test script are managed as code in a CodeCommit repository, so you have repeatable deployment of the pipeline itself. By managing the pipeline as code, you also have better visibility on when and how the pipeline has changed. You can easily rollback any bad configuration. All these benefits gives your data scientists more confidence in experimenting fast and fail fast, because they know that they can easily rollback any failed experiments.

(more...)

Using LLM to get cleaner voice transcriptions

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 21:20:00 +0000

Transcribing natural speech is a challenging task for voice-to-text services. When using traditional transcription tools, speakers are expected to talk slowly and clearly, avoiding fillers like “um” and “uh” as much as possible. However, this puts a huge cognitive load on the speaker to monitor every word before it’s spoken. Suddenly, having a normal conversation becomes an artificial performance.

Recent advances in natural language processing have enabled a better approach - transcribing first, then cleaning up the transcript afterward using a language model. The key insight is that language models can leverage contextual information and an understanding of language semantics to automatically fix many common mistakes and disfluencies in a transcript.

For example, say I’m giving an informal presentation and say:

“The, uh, model, uh no, algorithm, um, is able to…correct itself, uh, when it makes erroneous, uh, predictions…”

A language model could process this rough transcript and output:

“The algorithm is able to correct itself when it makes erroneous predictions.”

(more...)

Summarize Text Quickly with Raycast and Amazon Bedrock

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 19:47:37 +0000

Raycast has become an indispensable tool in my workflow. The ability to quickly automate tasks and create custom integrations boosts my productivity daily. One common need I have is getting key summaries from long blocks of text. For example, summarize a long blog article I’m too lazy to read. Or quickly understand what is going on based on a long email thread. While there are pre-built Raycast AI extensions, I prefer to use Amazon Bedrock for privacy and security.

In the past, I used to copy the text and paste it into an AI chatbot, but this context switching was cumbersome and interrupted my flow. Raycast is a more natural way to summarize a piece of text I just copied.

(more...)

How to link to external files in Joplin

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 20:14:49 +0000

I have been using Joplin for work for two years now, and I love it. Joplin is a free and open source note-taking app that lets you create notes in Markdown format, sync them across devices, and encrypt them for privacy. Joplin is also very flexible and customizable, allowing you to use plugins, themes, templates, and more to suit your needs.

One of the features that I recently discovered in Joplin is linking to local files and folders on my computer. This allows me to access my work documents without storing them in Joplin’s database, which can get too large and slow down the app. It also allows me to organize my files and folders in my own way, and take advantage of file sync services like Dropbox or Amazon WorkDocs. In this blog post, I will show you how to link to local files and folders in Joplin, and how to quickly copy the full file path from your file explorer.

(more...)

Introducing the llm-chain-mock Driver for Cost-Effective LLM Testing

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 20:51:15 +0000

Llm-chain is a Rust crate that help you create advanced LLM applications such as chatbots, agents, and more. It supports various drivers, such as OpenAI, llama.cpp, and llm, that can connect to different APIs or run models locally. llm-chain allows you to easily switch between different drivers and options without a complete rewrite of your code.

One of the challenges of using llm-chain is the cost associated with invoking the LLMs. Depending on the driver you use, you may incur either an API fee or a compute resource cost for running your own model. The local models usually requires pretty powerful machines, and the setup process might be a little complicated.

(more...)

My New Book: Practical Rust Projects, 2nd Edition

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 20:05:15 +0000

Hi, everyone! I hope you are all doing well and enjoying Rust as much as I do. I have some exciting news to share with you today: I have just published my new book, Practical Rust Projects, 2nd Edition.

I would like to acknowledge the contribution of my co-author, Andrew Rzeznik, who took over the project after I had to stop for personal circumstances. He did a fantastic job in finishing the book and making it even better than I could have imagined. I am very happy with the final outcome of our collaboration, and I hope you will find our book useful and enjoyable. Thank you, Andrew Rzeznik, for your hard work and dedication!

(more...)

Getting Started with Rust llm-chain using the LLaMa driver

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 20:10:09 +0000

Recently I’ve been contributing to llm-chain, a Rust library for working with large language models (LLMs). It’s similar to Python’s LangChain. I contributed this tutorial to the official website for setting up a simple llm-chain using LLaMA models running locally using the llama.cpp project. I’m also publishing the same tutorial in this blog for archiving.

Tutorial: Getting Started using the LLAMA driver

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up an llm-project using the LLAMA drive. If you wish to use the other drivers you can skip this part of the tutorial.

(more...)

Using sepia theme in Brave's SpeedReader

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 20:10:54 +0000

I like Brave’s SpeedReader feature. It is a new approach to reader modes that removes unnecessary elements from pages it recognizes as articles and displays them in a simplified format as part of the rendering pipeline. Because it’s done during rendering, not after the page have rendered (as most reader mode extensions does), it delivers performance gain and reduce the network bandwidth required.

However, there is one thing that bothers me about SpeedReader. It follows the browser theme, so if you choose dark theme the SpeedReader theme is always white text on black, which is hard to read for me. I prefer a sepia theme for reading articles, as it is more soothing for my eyes. Unfortunately, there is no UI for changing the SpeedReader theme. However, I found this github issue. It shows that the theme has actually been implemented, but there is no way to access it from the browser settings. If you set the data-theme attribute on document.documentElement using JavaScript, you can toggle between dark, light and sepia themes.

(more...)

How to create your own private LLM using only AWS CLI

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 19:45:51 +0000

In this blog post, I will show you how to use AWS CLI and SageMaker JumpStart to create your own private large language model (LLM) on Amazon SageMaker. You will learn how to deploy a pretrained model from the Hugging Face Transformers library, and how to use it to generate text with custom instructions using AWS CLI.

(more...)

Disabling the Link Lost alarm on iTag BLE tracker

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 14:42:08 +0000

In this blog post, I will share my experience of using an iTag BLE tracker to find my lost TV remote and how I disabled the annoying link lost alarm feature.

What is an iTag BLE tracker?

An iTag BLE tracker is a small device that can be attached to any object and paired with a smartphone via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). It can be used as a key finder, anti-lost alarm, remote shutter, or voice recorder. It has a button that can trigger various actions on the smartphone, such as ringing, taking a photo, or recording a voice memo. It also has a built-in speaker that can beep when the Bluetooth connection is lost or when the button is pressed.

I bought an iTag BLE tracker because I often lose my TV remote in the house, most of the time hidden somewhere by my toddler son. I wanted to use it as a simple device that can help me locate my remote by making a sound when I press the button on my smartphone. I thought it would be a cheap and easy solution for my problem.

(more...)

Conferences are not about sessions

Tue, 02 May 2023 20:09:53 +0000

A few weeks ago, I attended KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2023, one of the largest and most popular conferences for cloud native technologies. It was an amazing experience, with thousands of attendees, hundreds of sessions, and dozens of exhibitors. I learned a lot from the speakers, the exhibitors, and the fellow attendees.

But there was one thing you might find surprising: I listen to very few sessions.

That’s right. I skipped most the sessions and focused on other aspects of the conference. Why? Because I realized that listening to sessions is not the most important thing to do at a conference.

Don’t get me wrong. Sessions can be very informative and useful. But sessions are not the only way to learn at a conference, especially when you are attending it physcially. Why? Because sessions often cover knowledge or topics that can be easily found online, such as on YouTube or blogs. And because sessions take a lot of time and effort to attend, they can take away from other valuable opportunities at the conference.

So what should you do instead of listening to sessions? In this article, I will share with you two things that I think are more important than listening to sessions at a conference: watching out for trends and networking. These two things can help you stay ahead of the curve in your industry and create new opportunities for yourself and your business.

Let’s dive in.

(more...)

Why Both Knowledge and Experience Are Critical for a Software Developer's Career

Sat, 08 Apr 2023 20:42:51 +0000

There is an age-old debate about whether theoretical knowledge or hands-on experience is more important for a successful software developer career. However, the reality is that both knowledge and experience are equally important and complementary to each other. When I was a student (a long time ago…), I was proud of my education and the knowledge and skills that I have acquired throughout my academic journey. However, I couldn’t help but feel frustrated that despite my academic achievements, I was still struggling to find a job due to a lack of experience. Many companies seem to be looking for candidates who have already worked in the industry, leaving fresh graduates like myself feeling left out in the job market. It’s a catch-22 situation: how can I gain experience if no one is willing to give me a chance? In this blog post, I want to share my thoughts and experiences on how to overcome this challenge and land a job despite not having any prior work experience.

(more...)

How to learn an AWS service quickly

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 21:52:56 +0000

In my day job, I have to consult customers on AWS services and design architectures on AWS. That means I have to have a basic understanding of almost every AWS service and be ready to dive deep into any of them on short notice. For that, I have a method for learning an AWS service in the most efficient way possible.

Read the product page.
Read the product FAQ.
Read the concept section(s) of the documentation.
Ask yourself key questions about this service.
Watch YouTube videos.
Follow a hands-on workshop.
Dive deeper.

Let’s assume that you need to learn AWS Lambda quickly, here is how you would do it:

(more...)

My Productivity System

Sun, 06 Mar 2022 11:10:03 +0000

(Right-click on the picture and select Open image in new tab to see the diagram in full size.)

After some recent discussion with a friend on note-taking methods, I decided to document my current productivity system for future reference. It is a combination of note-taking, time management, TODO list, project management, and writing combined. It has evolved over the years so I find it interesting to take a snapshot and look back a few years later.

(more...)

Consistent Hashing and why it might not be the correct answer to your system design interview

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 09:44:44 +0000

I’ve conducted many system design interviews in the past. Whenever I brought up the topic of database sharding, the candidates almost always shout out “Yes, yes I know! Consistent hashing!”. If you probe them further, they will draw this classic ring diagram on the whiteboard.

WikiLinuz, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

But if you have read Martin Kleppmann’s great book Designing Data-Intensive Applications, you might notice a sidenote:

Then why is every system design interview study guide tell you otherwise? Let’s dive into this topic in this post.

(more...)

Generating a notification sound in command-line

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 13:05:16 +0000

You want to play a notification sound in a Linux shell script, but don’t want to download any sound files (e.g. MP3, WAV, MIDI). Here is a script that generates the sound on-the-fly:

First install SoX, the Swiss Army knife of sound processing programs.

sudo apt-get install sox

Then:

play -n synth 0.3 pluck A3 vol -20dB repeat 2

play: the player command from SoX.
-n: Play a “null file”.
synth 0.3 pluck A3: Play the A3 (220.00 Hz) sound for 0.3 seconds, with a waveform that simulates a guitar string pluck.
vol -20dB: The default is too loud, reduce the volume by -20dB.
repeat 2: Repeat twice (i.e., total 3 times).

(more...)

How to import serde's custom derive macors properly?

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 21:05:05 +0000

TL;DR Follow the official documentation

(more...)

Caveats in Terraforming WAF V2 for CloudFront

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 18:55:16 +0000

If you want to add a WAF V2 (aws_wafv2_web_acl) to a CloudFront distribution (aws_cloudfront_distribution) using Terraform, there are a few caveats:

(more...)

Check MongoDB index usage statistics

Wed, 10 Jun 2020 16:57:50 +0000

Run this command to get the usage of each index:

(more...)

RFC2616 is dead, read RFC723X

Wed, 10 Jun 2020 16:32:27 +0000

While looking for the definition of HTTP Status Codes, I realize that RFC2616 is deprecated. You should look for RFC7231 instead.

(more...)

Lessons learned in writing my first book

Sun, 05 Apr 2020 08:42:16 +0000

You might have noticed that I didn’t update this blog frequently in the past year. It’s not because I’m lazy, but I focused all my creative energy on writing this book: Practical Rust Projects. The book is now available on Apress, Amazon and O’Reilly. In this post, I’ll share some of the lessons I learned in writing this book.

(more...)

Update AWS Security Groups with Terraform

Thu, 06 Feb 2020 15:40:58 +0000

In theory, Terraform is capable of figuring out the dependency between AWS resources and make updates in the correct order. However, AWS security groups often become a source of trouble if you don’t understand how Terraform handles it. If you are having issues modifying the security group because they are used by other resources, here are some ways you can mitigate that.

(more...)

Moving AWS Service across accounts using Terraform

Mon, 30 Sep 2019 12:39:00 +0000

Recently I was assigned the task to move our REST API hosted on AWS to a new account. The organization I worked for is moving to a one-account-per-team (or a few closely related teams) approach, as opposed to one account shared by all teams. Having one account per team helps reduce the clutter in the accounts because you only see your resources. It also helps the platform/SRE team to control the cost in a more fine-grain manner. Since we have everything in AWS, it also reduces the chance that we hit AWS resource limits.

The service we built is all provisioned using Terraform. They are tested and deployed with Drone CI tool. I’ll discuss key points to considerations when migrating accounts across accounts.

(more...)

Switching Between Multiple Local Backends in Terraform

Sat, 06 Apr 2019 18:39:24 +0000

Terraform has many backend types. The local backend stores the state on the local filesystem, so it’s ideal for quick local testing. By it’s not very obvious how to have multiple local backend and state, and how to easily switch between them. One use case for this is when you deploy the same set of resources to multiple AWS regions. Let’s say we want to create two API gateways and their corresponding DNS records to two regions. We use the aws_route53_record resource to deploy them:

resource "aws_route53_record" "api" {
  name    = "${var.api_url}"
  type    = "A"
  # the rest are omitted
}

And we want to set var.api_url to api-eu.example.com and api-us.example.com for Europe and US regions in two separate tfvars file.

Then if you try to apply them sequentially like so:

terraform init
terraform apply -var-file=eu.tfvars
terraform apply -var-file=us.tfvars

You’ll notice that the second apply will try to destroy your api-eu.example.com record, and replace it with an api-us-example.com record. This is because the states are the same, and the resource name is the same between two apply attempts, so terraform think you want to destroy the existing record and create a new one. There is also a problem when you try to destroy resources. Because the resources have the same name, so if you destroy them in one region, you won’t be able to destroy then in the other one. Because terraform assumes everything is already gone.

(more...)

Simplify Your CI Pipeline Configuration with Jsonnet

Thu, 28 Feb 2019 13:45:00 +0000

Most of the CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) tools nowadays supports some form of configuration file so you can properly version control them. For example Travis CI, Gitlab CI, Circle CI and Drone CI uses YAML file. Jenkins uses its own DSL. These YAML-based configuration files are easy to read and edit, but they don’t scale very well when the file grows big. This problem can be solved by using a nice data templating language called Jsonnet. In this post we’ll be demonstrating Drone CI v1.0 configuration file format, but the idea can be easily applied to other CI tool.

(more...)

Download JavaScript Data as Files on the Client Side

Sat, 09 Feb 2019 09:28:39 +0000

When building websites or web apps, creating a “Download as file” link is quite useful. For example if you want to allow user to export some data as JSON, CSV or plain text files so they can open them in external programs or load them back later. Usually this requires a web server to format the file and serve it. But actually you can export arbitrary JavaScript variable to file entirely on the client side. I have implemented that function in one of my project, MozApoy, and here I’ll explain how I did that.

(more...)

AWS Route 53 Load Balancing with Terraform

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 13:55:00 +0000

Terraform has some great documentation on Route 53, but it’s a little bit hard to understand how all the resources works together. So to demonstrate, we are going to build an REST API that is deployed to multiple AWS regions, which has one public-facing URL, which is load balanced through Route 53. There are some additional requirements:

API is done using API Gateway + Lambda
The same API is deployed to multiple AWS regions. To demonstrate this we’ll deploy to EU Frankfurt (eu-central-1) and N.Virginia, US (us-east-1).
The API in each region will get a public facing URL for easy debugging. So there will be https://api-eu.example.com and https://api-us.example.com pointing to the API gateway in each region.
There will be a global URL, https://api.example.com which points to the underlying https://api-eu.example.com and https://api-us.example.com endpoints.
The global URL will do a 50%-50% active-active load balancing to each region. In other words 50% of the traffic will go to each region.
The health of the regional APIs are monitored, if one of it goes down, all the traffic will be routed to the other alive one.
Everything is deployed with Terraform

(more...)

Counting your contribution to a git repository

Tue, 25 Dec 2018 11:00:27 +0000

Sometimes you may wonder, how many commits or lines of code did I contributed to a git repository? Here are some easy one liners to help you count that.

(more...)

New Rust Course - Building Reuseable Code with Rust

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 21:12:18 +0000

My first ever video course is now live on Udemy, Safari Books and Packt. It really took me a long time and I’d love to share with you what I’ve prepared for you.

What’s this course about?

This course is about the Rust programming language, but it’s not those general introductory course on basic Rust syntax. This course focus on the code reuse aspect of the Rust language. So we won’t be touch every language feature, but we’ll help you understand how a selected set of features will help you achieve code reuse.

What’s so special about it?

Since these course is not a general introduction course, it is structured in a way that is bottom-up and help you learn how the features are actually used out in the wild.

(more...)

Chatting with your website visitors through Chatra

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 18:59:29 +0000

Update (May 31, 2025): I’ve removed the Chatra chat widget from my website today. While it was a useful tool, I found that many users mistakenly thought it was AI-powered and would be quite rude when interacting with what they assumed was a chatbot. If you need to reach out, please feel free to contact me via email listed at the bottom of this website instead.

When I started the blog, I didn’t add a message board below each article because I don’t have the time to deal with spam. Due to broken windows theory, if I leave the spam unattended my blog will soon become a landfill for spammers. But nowadays many e-commerce site or brand sites have a live chatting box, which will solve my problem because I can simply ignore spam, while interested readers can ask questions and provide feedbacks easily. That’s why when my sponsor, Chatra.io, approached me with their great tool, I fell in love with it right away and must share it with everyone.

(more...)

How to Unit Test WebExtensions

Sun, 24 Jun 2018 19:44:13 +0000

We all know that unit-testing is a good software engineering practice, but sometimes the hassle of setting up the testing environment will keep us from doing it in the first place. After Firefox 57, WebExtension has become the new standard for writing add-ons for Firefox. How do you set up everything to start testing your WebExtension-based add-ons?

(more...)

如何貢獻開源專案？

Sat, 12 May 2018 15:55:42 +0000

貢獻開源專案是一個提高自己技能的好機會，同時也能提昇自己在軟體界的能見度與溝通技巧。以下是我貢獻 Mozilla 的 Servo 瀏覽器引擎的一些心得，提供想要一探開源的新手一些方向。

(more...)

Merge Pull Requests without Merge Commits

Sun, 25 Mar 2018 21:46:36 +0000

By default, GitHub’s pull request (or GitLab’s merge request) will merge with a merge commit. That means your feature branch will be merged into the master by creating a new commit, and both the feature and master branch will be kept.

(more...)

Minimal React.js Without A Build Step (Updated)

Thu, 08 Feb 2018 21:39:06 +0000

Back in 2016, I wrote a post about how to write a React.js page without a build step. If I remember correctly, at that time the official React.js site have very little information about running React.js without [Webpack][webpack], [in-browser Babel transpiler][babel] is not very stable and they are deprecating JSXTransformer.js. After the post my focus turned to browser backend projects and I haven’t touch React.js for a while. Now after 1.5 years, when I try to update one of [my React.js project][itinerary-viewer], I notice that the official site now has a clearer instruction on how to use React.js without a build step. So I’m going to write an update the post here.

You can find the example code on GitHub.

(more...)

Taking notes with MkDocs

Tue, 02 Jan 2018 20:14:58 +0000

I’ve been using TiddlyWiki for note-taking for a few years. I use them to keep track of my technical notes and checklists. TiddlyWiki is a brilliant piece of software. It is a single HTML file with a note-taking interface, where the notes you take are stored directly in the HTML file itself, so you can easily carry (copy) the file around and easily deploy it online for sharing. However, most modern browsers don’t allow web pages to access the filesystem, so in order to let TiddlyWiki save the notes, you need to rely on browser extensions or Dropbox integration service like TiddlyWiki in the Sky. But they still have some frictions.

So recently I started to look for other alternatives for note-taking.

(more...)

Make LastPass Work Across App and Website

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 18:59:46 +0000

The Problem: My stock broker outsourced their Android app to a third-party company, so LastPass treat the desktop website and Android app as different sites. Although I can save them separately in LassPass, their password won’t synchronize with each other.

(more...)

Porting Chrome Extension to Firefox

Mon, 07 Aug 2017 06:37:22 +0000

Three years ago, I wrote the FocusBlocker to help me focus on my master thesis. It’s basically a website blocker that stops me from checking Facebook every five minute. But is different from other blockers like LeechBlock that requires you to set a fixed schedule. FocusBlocker lets you set a quota, e.g. I can browse 10 minutes of Facebook then block it for 50 minutes. So as long as you have remaining quota, you can check Facebook anytime. I’m glad that other people find it useful, and I even got my first donation through AMO because of happy users.

Since this extension serves my need, I’m not actively maintaining it or adding new features. But I was aware of Firefox’s transition from the legacy Add-on SDK to WebExtension API. So before WebExtension API is fully available, I started to migrate it to Chrome’s extension format. But I didn’t got the time to actually migrate it back to Firefox, until a user emails me asking for a WebExtension version. I looked into the statistics, the daily active user count drops from ~1000 to ~300. That’s when I rolled up my sleeve and actually migrated it in one day. (Although later I found out that the drop is not entirely due to users upgrading to newer Firefox, is because of this change.) Here is how I did it and what I’ve learned from the process.

(more...)

退役了如何註銷護照上的出境管制章

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 05:39:40 +0000

祝大家退役愉快。護照上如果有退役前的「持照人出國應經核准，尚未履行兵役義務」章，雖然還是可以出國，但是據說海關要查比較久，而且可能會要求出示退役證明，所以還是去註銷比較方便。我是 2017 七月去辦的，最新規定請直接詢問外交部 (聯絡方式與營業時間)。另外以下是研發替代役的規定，其他兵種不確定，但應該差不多。

(more...)

Install Ubuntu 16.04 on ThinkPad 13 (2nd Gen)

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 07:48:30 +0000

It has been a while since my last post. I’ve been busy for the first half of this year but now I got more free time. Hopefully I can get back to my usual pace of one post per months.

My old laptop (Inhon Carbonbook, discontinued) had a swollen battery. I kept using it for a few months but then the battery squeezed my keyboard so I can no longer type correctly. After some research I decided to buy the ThinkPad 13 model because it provides descent hardware for its price, and the weight (~1.5 kg) is acceptable. Every time I got a new computer the first thing is to get Linux up and running. So here are my notes on how to install Ubuntu Linux on it.

TL;DR: Everything works out of the box. Just remember to turn off secure boot and shrink the disk in Windows before you install.

(more...)

An Overview of Asia Tech Conferences in 2017

Sat, 21 Jan 2017 08:22:34 +0000

I’ve been attending and even talking at tech conferences for some time. One of the challenge is to keep track of when those conference will take place. Also there is no single list of all conferences I’m interested. There are some website that collects them, but they often missed some community-organized events in Asia. Or there are some community-maintained list of open source conferences (Thanks Barney!), but they don’t include for-profit conferences.

Therefore I build a simple website that collects all conferences I know in Asia, focusing on open source software, web, and startup:

https://asia-confs.github.io/asia-tech-confs/

(more...)

Vim QuickFix for Rust and Servo

Sun, 25 Dec 2016 13:00:00 +0000

While working on a compiled language like Rust, a typical workflow is compile -> find the errors in the compiler message -> find the file containing the error -> edit -> re-compile. But usually there are lots of errors scattered around the compiler log, and to identify the filename and line number, and manually open the file to the correct line in an editor is a tedious job. Vim’s quickfix streamline the process by collecting the errors into the split panel in vim, and allow you to navigate through the errors using the :cnext (next error) and :cprev (previous command). While you navigate to an error, the corresponding source file will be opened in the main vim window and jump directly to the line where the error is.

(more...)

Beginner's guide to git rebasing and squashing

Tue, 08 Nov 2016 06:29:17 +0000

I wrote this post on the Servo wiki to help beginners getting started with rebasing and squashing, two of the most terrifying operations you’ll face if you are not familiar with git. I’m cross posting this here for people working on other projects.

Big thanks to Wafflespeanut who proofread the post, any error you found here is my own.

Suppose you’ve created a pull request following the checklist, but the reviewer asks you to fix something, do a rebase or squash your commits, how exactly do you do that? If you have some experience with git, you might want to check the GitHub workflow for a quick overview. But if you are not familiar with git enough, we’ll teach you how to do these common operations in detail.

(more...)

Mutation Testing in JavaScript Using Stryker

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 01:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year, I wrote a blog post introducing Mutation Testing in JavaScript using the Grunt Mutation Testing framework. But as their NPM README said,

So I’ll update my post to use the latest Stryker framework. The following will be the updated post with all the code example migrated to the Stryker framework:

(more...)

2016 COSCUP, Modern Web and Taiwan Code Sprint

Sun, 04 Sep 2016 12:40:00 +0000

August was quite a busy month for me. I went to two conferences and one workshop to promote Servo and Rust. Here are what I’ve observed in those events.

COSCUP

COSCUP is one of the largest volunteer-organized conference on open source software in Taiwan. When I was a student I tried to attend all the sessions, wishing to learn from the talks. But in recent years I realize that it’s really not about the talks, but more about meeting people. Half of the talks are about introducing people to new tools or libraries. You can learn them by yourself more efficiently by reading tutorial articles online. The most rewarding part is actually socializing with people. Because most of the open source participants will attended this conference, you can easily meet a lot of new friends through mutual friends. So this year I spend most of my time at social events, for example the speaker dinner party, Mozilla BoF (bird of a feather), and chatting with my friend’s friends.

(more...)

Identify Performance Regression in Servo

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 02:00:00 +0000

Performance has always been a key focus for the Servo browser engine project. But just measure the performance through profilers and benchmarks is not enough. The first impression to a real user is the page load time. Although many internal, non-visible optimizations are important, we still want to make sure our page load time is doing well.

Back in April, I opened this bug #10452 to start planning the page load test. With the kind advice from the Servo community and the Treeherder people, we finally settled for a test design similar to the Talos test suite, and decided to use Perfherder for visualization.

(more...)

Show Firefox Bookmark Toolbar in Fullscreen Mode

Mon, 20 Jun 2016 11:05:00 +0000

By default, the bookmark toolbar is hidden when Firefox goes into fullscreen mode. It’s quite annoying because I use the bookmark toolbar a lot. And since I use i3 window manager, I also use the fullscreen mode very often to avoid resizing the window. After some googling I found this quick solution on SUMO (Firefox commuity is awesome!).

The idea is that the Firefox chrome (not to be confused with the Google Chrome browser) is defined using XUL. You can adjust its styling using CSS. The user defined chrome CSS is located in your Firefox profile. Here is how you do it:

(more...)

驚爆！報稅軟體的低級錯誤

Sat, 21 May 2016 14:20:00 +0000

更新：經過我向客服中心反映，並透過朋友的幫助轉給了廠商，今天（5/23）早上國稅局客服中心打電話來確認說修復完成了，我實際檢查也確認修復了。辛苦了週末加班的工程師！

別誤會，我不是要教你什麼逃漏稅的方法，只是分享一下政府的報稅軟體是怎麼樣的低品質又缺乏測試。過去幾年都我一直用 Windows VM 安裝桌面版的報稅軟體，今年發現網頁版功能也完善了（主要是可以成功的匯入所得資料），於是想改用網頁版直接在 Linux Mint 上面用 Firefox 報稅，沒想到竟然是悲劇的開始。

(more...)

Rust Code Completion with YouCompleteMe

Fri, 13 May 2016 15:00:00 +0000

Every programmer knows that code completion can give you a productivity boost. Without code completion, you’ll have to read the documentation (or StackOverflow?) every time you forget what to type next. Since I’m a vim user and I worked with Rust very often, I’m glad to know YouCompleteMe (YCM), a powerful code completion plug-in for vim, officially supports Rust code completion (see this blog post). I’ll walk you through the process of installing YCM on Ubuntu/Linux Mint in this post.

(more...)

Visualizing Performance Data on Perfherder

Sat, 07 May 2016 13:20:00 +0000

At Mozilla, we use Perfherder to visualize our performance testing data. Perfherder is a dashboard for monitoring and analyzing performance metrics, which can include page load time, JavaScript benchmark score, build time, installer size, etc. Perfherder allow you to visualize the data as a line chart, compare performance metrics between versions and automatically create alerts for sudden change in performance metrics.

(more...)

Minimal React.js Without A Build Step

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 13:55:00 +0000

Update: There is an updated post here. Check it out! It has more up-to-date data and more information about how to use 3rd-party libraries.

Nowadays, starting a frontend project means setting up a complex build system with preprocessors, transpliers, compressors, packagers, and many more. Don’t you missed the day when you can just write <script src=”./jquery.js”/> and start coding? I love to build prototype or small tools using HTML and React.js, but the build system thing is killing me (the official documentation suggest you use browserify and babel). So I’m going to show you how to build a minimal react page without any of those distractions.

(more...)

How AlphaGo Can Teach Us About Software Testing

Sat, 19 Mar 2016 15:00:00 +0000

After Lee Se-dol lose his first match against AlphaGo, some memes appeared on the Internet calling Lee the “Senior QA engineer at Google”. I am both happy and sad about this meme. I’m sad because people still think QA is a less descent job than a Go champion. But I’m happy to see that Lee Se-dol demonstrated many good characteristics of a good software tester, and we can learn a lot from him. Here I will show you how this epic Go match can be related to software QA.

(The Chinese line translates to “Google Senior Softare QA Engineer, Lee Se-dol”)

(more...)

Dotfiles: Manage Your Development Environment Configuration in GitHub

Sat, 12 Mar 2016 15:00:00 +0000

Linux is my major development platform. Most of the tool I use (vim, zsh, i3 window manager) use configuration files located in your home directory (.vimrc, .zshrc and .i3/config). It is pretty hard to keep them in sync between your machines. And sometimes if you mess up with the configuration file it’s pretty hard to revert your changes.

(more...)

From 3D scanner to VR -- Introduction

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I’ve been invoved in a project called FoxEye. Our goal is to unleash the power of Computer Vision (CV) on the Web. But before we jump in and start writing JavaScript, I need to understand how all the algorithm works. Therefore I started to hack a simple small object scanner using the Point Cloud Library (PCL), which is written in C++.

(more...)

Mutation Testing in JavaScript Using Grunt Mutation Testing

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Update: Since the development on grunt-mutation-testing has moved to Stryker, I’ve rewritten this post using the new Stryker framework. Please checkout the updated post here.

(more...)

[HOWTO] Check MBR Infomation Under Linux

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

(more...)

[Ubuntu教學] Atheros AR2425/AR5007EG無線網卡驅動

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

(more...)

[Ubuntu教學] 用Ubuntu 寫C++

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

(more...)

UNIX好！

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

(more...)

[Ubuntu教學] 如何讓pidgin 的MSN有個人狀態

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

(more...)

[blogger] 如何製作最新回應欄位

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

(more...)

[Ubuntu教學]如何設定ThinkPad的指紋辨識

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

(more...)

[Ubuntu教學] Matrix樣式的終端機

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

(more...)

[Ubuntu教學]消失的解析度

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

(more...)