Wednesday, March 11, 2020

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.

Thursday, February 13, 2020

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.

Wednesday, January 29, 2020

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