Mindmovers.PH Chess Club

The MindMovers.ph Chess Club is a non-profit organization with the following mission: To bring together all people, young and old, interested in chess and to provide a platform for all interested parties to meet regularly and enjoy chess. To promote the highest possible standards of chess. To promote the interest of chess amongst all its members. And to plough back into their community by using chess as a tool to make a positive impact in the lives of youngsters and other chess players. Visit: https://mindmovers.ph

Some people think the best way to stay fit is joining a gym/health club while

Some people think the best way to stay fit is joining a gym/health club while others think doing everyday activities such as walking and climbing stairs is sufficient. Discuss both views and give your opinion.

Most of the time people that go to gym have their specific goals in mind. Some of them wish to gain muscles. Others want increase their endurance and agility. Some people join to attend yoga classes or dance classes. Others want to lose their weight. All of these desires are obviously nice to have. And achieving them is an excellent motivation. Fitness just becomes a side-effect. Aside from that, they get to learn new things. They keep on improving on what they do and as a result gives them motivation and happiness. It is also said that performing rigid exercises reduces stress. Downside is it is much more difficult to maintain this lifestyle due to the fact that it is time consuming and is physically as well as more mentally challenging.

On the other hand, intentionally walking instead of talking the bus for example or climbing the stairs even when there is an escalator available means the person may at first consciously trying to stay fit for the sake of the person's well being. Eventually the person will get used on doing these activities and ultimately become part of their lifestyle. This route is good for people that do not have enough time and are not really keen attending gym related activities.

In my opinion both ways are different in their own style but are admirable approaches of becoming healthy. Other than exercises, eating nutritious food is a must and should always be included as part of the daily activities. As long as the person stays consistent, fitness is guaranteed.

Mock Interview

i am rafael. i have been a software engineer for the past 10 years. i specialized in java, spring boot and java related technologies. i have been closely following the latest trends in software development. i have experience building software with microservices, containers and kubernetes. i have experience doing integration with services such as kafka, redis, and cassandra. i am also interested in the best practices of building APIs particularly customer facing APIs.

i am a hands-on guy. i like doing architecture and design but as always the devil is in the details so a great deal of time i believe should be spent studying the implementation itself.

when i was im the product engineering team i lead the architecture and implementation of a gruelling 8 month long product development. i was in charge on what libraries to use and whatnot, which functionality goes into which microservice, api design and coding standards. since that time i know a lot more than my teammates, i also became the go to guy when dealing with business logic. we also did code reviews and the typical scrum meetings.

this past year i was assigned into the product research and incubation team to do RnD. The goal is to do research and development of potential products that would exploit or take advantage of our interconnection platform. We did PoCs, papers and patents. we also work with interns from NTU that are interested with the topics to help us achieve our goals.

My Work Experiences Part 1

My first job was working as a Software Engineer at a Japanese Company called Tsukiden. I was part of a project that simulates a networking protocol used in telecommunication systems. This is where I used C programming language in a real application and appreciated it very much. The company just like any other Japanese tech company was strict in when it comes to attendance and tardiness. Salary is deducted if you are often late. Overtime is a norm but is compensated. There are times that we would stay until midnight to do regression testing before a release. It took a lot of time to do testing during those days because it is manual and we just track the tests in an excel sheet. I met a good number of bright people in the company. The next company I worked for is a consultancy firm named Information Professionals Inc. I stayed there for a few months. The consultancy deployed me in an IT service company called Incuventure Partners Corporation. Most of the clients of Incuventure are government entities. I was assigned to the Land Transportation Office to help develop an internal reporting tool. I was also assigned to the Department of Budget and Management to fix few bugs here and there. This company is a little bit disorganized maybe because it merely a startup company during that time. When I joined the company they do not know where to put me. They randomly assigned me tasks. Sometimes they gave me unrealistic deadlines. One time they gave me tasks where it is too difficult for me as a junior developer. After working at Information Professionals I was hired as a web developer in Allsectech Manila Inc, a BPO company which happens to have an IT department catering US based clients. Our client maintains an e-commerce website where they just display products such as dresses, shoes, and other apparels and provide links to the websites that actually sells them. My job was to create scripts to scrape the item images, descriptions and other related content from those various sites and store them in our database. The data in turn is used to populate our own site. The script implementation may look simple but the devil is in details. There are a lot of custom code that only work on a specific site. Different tricks and regular expressions were made and multiple schedulers for code execution were configured and maintained. I quit from Allsectech and worked as an application developer at Texas Instruments in Baguio City. I was part of the product engineering team responsible for building applications used mostly by internal engineers. The project I had worked on is a tool to archive test data from the chip manufacturing system. Data is fetch from a transactional database and transferred in a data warehouse. This data warehouse is designed for fast data retreival, optimized for fast reads. The tool is basically an extract-transform-load type of software. It extracts data from a source, massage the data to conform to a specified archival format, and save it into a reporting database. I left the Philippines and went to Singapore in pursuit for better salary. I worked in a small local company called Solutions Lab. They run a stock exchange engine that is used by 60% of broker firms in Singapore. Few example of these firms are Lim & Tan Securities, Maybank Kim Eng and UOB Kay Hian. My overall experience here was very interesting. Until now, working in Solutions Lab is the most difficult company I have worked with. I often go to office on the weekends. My manager scolds not only me but also my colleagues. The environment is very stressful. My first three months there has been terribly bad I almost decided to go back to the Philippines. I learned a great deal of plain Javascript here. And my experience in Javascript here helped me tremendously during my next few years as a software engineer. Evvolabs. I was part of the project to re-write the backend of the SISTIC ticketing system. SISTIC is a major ticketing website in Singapore with thousands of daily users. I was responsible of creating its new fee calculation module as well as its reporting module. I learned plenty of good practices of using Spring framework in this project and also the internals of the framework. good exp. highlight. evvolabs uob - stagnant - waste of time dbs - unique. good equinix - another highlight uob again - interesting - spring integration - functional programming

Some people like to buy new phones

Some people like to buy new phones, new desktop or other latest devices. To what extent do you agree or disagree? I firmly disagree of always buying the latest devices. It is irrational to buy a new phone every year when this new phone will have almost the same features as the phone released the year before. Not only it is the same phone, but the price is extremely expensive, and you are paying for that price because it is the latest phone of its generation. I am happy that innovation led us to the state of technology that we are experiencing today, but excess of everything is bad. The problem is companies that are trying to sell us these things are good at creating an environment that will want you to always buy their products. This phenomena is sometimes called the commodification of technology. These latest phones or devices are not really commodities, but companies spends a lot of money and effort to make them look like commodities, by repeatedly telling us to buy the products using advertisements. The thing with repetition is sometimes your brain will think an idea or a concept is true or valid when it keeps on seeing or hearing them every time, and that is a bad thing. Advertisements come in different forms. They are pervasive and ubiquitous, meaning they are part of our daily lives that sometimes we just unconsciously accept them. So I personally believe that this trend that we are talking about is a bad idea. Let us buy stuff if it fits our needs, not because of some social pressure or any other reasons.

Nowadays the increased amount of garbage (waste) is a real concern

Nowadays the increased amount of garbage (waste) is a real concern. Why is this happening? What can be done to resolve this? Production of goods and services will always come out with waste material. And the more we produce, the more waste we generate. The increase of population, and the increase of the people' purchasing power, and the development of society in general all contributed to the continuing build-up of global waste. And as long as we progress, the only realistic thing that we can do is to minimize waste, instead of removing them completely. I will categorize the resolutions into two. The first one is individual resolution, through reusing and recycling. Even when we are kids we are told to do these things, specially on plastics, simple because it does not degrade well. Recycling and reusing are good ideas but they can only help in a certain degree as a whole. It has little effect on waste management, but it is has more personal connections with people, which make it look like it has a lot of impact in mainstream media as well as in social media. The second one is thru laws of states to reduce waste. Concrete recent examples are laws to ban single use plastics and laws to reduce overall carbon footprint. This I think is more important because it will reduce waste in order of magnitude compared to individual resolution, but at the expense of small revenue loss of few companies and organizations. In conclusion, both solutions is important and should work together side by side to attain the goal of minimizing waste all over the world.

In the past museums store information about culture and history

In the past museums store information about culture and history. However, nowadays this information can be found through Internet. And, therefore, there is no need in museums. Do you agree or disagree? It is true that access to information about culture and history is easily accessible on the Internet, but seeing actual things in a museum has more impact on a person compared to just reading something online. Particularly if a person has a very high interest on the topic or a study, the person would prefer to go and look at the real things in person. You can also think of the idea of just listening to a song versus going to a concert to watch the actual band, or going to a store to shop apparels rather than to just buy the clothes online. And there are reasons why people still go to church instead of just watch mass in a podcast or in a video stream. There are reasons why tourists flock to tourist spots when they can just read about them online, same reason why people are longing to meet friends in real life rather than to just communicate in social media. I personally disagree when they say that there is no need for museums. People who go to museums will have more personal connections to the things they see, and that makes them more interested, which in turn will want them to study more about these things. Seeing actual things makes them contemplate or reflect. It makes them emotional, but focused. In fact, most people in general retain memories for a long time about things they see in museums. So I don't see museums going away soon, I believe they will be here for a very long time.