This story is originally published here.

Over the past few months, I’ve been building many side projects in my free time for learning apart from working full-time as a software engineer for the past 3 years. When building the side projects, I intentionally use many different technology stacks that I’m not familiar with in order to learn and make more informed choices in the future.

Over that period, I’ve developed my preferences towards the tech stacks of choice and approaches on how I’m gonna build my next project.

• Prefers API-first development that automatically generates API documentation for you. It’s always…

This is how I plan my future, and you should do it too!

This article is originally published here.

Twenty-five years old is quite a young age for software engineers. Mostly, 25 years old engineers are Computer Science graduate students who just graduated from university or have 1 to 2 years of experience. So am I. We are still in the early stage of our career.

I have plenty of time to pursue what I like. I have plenty of time to make mistakes and learn from them. More importantly, I have plenty of time to identify what I want…

I am amazed by how easy to build a web app using Django

This post is originally posted here.

For the past three months, I’ve been writing a web application using Django for our company’s new project. It hasn’t launched yet, so I couldn’t disclose too much information about it. However, I’ve learned a ton while working on this project while working on it along with the team.

Previously, I have been working with Flask, Cherrypy, and Bottle to build a small and simple web app for a particular need. I was shocked after a few weeks of writing the…

The picture above shows you what I’ve built after learning Vue.js and Nuxt.js in one week.

I am building an Instagram clone project called “Yet Another Free (OSS) Instagram Clone” (YAFIG). The front-end site is built entirely in Vue.js and Nuxt.js, in a week.

Who Am I

I am a full-time software engineer working on CDN products. I spent my entire professional career (~three years) working with back-end services, primarily in Python, Java, and Lua.

Sometimes I also work with DevOps toolchains (Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, Puppet, etc.). I have decent experience writing a server-side web app using Flask and Django.

However, one of…

This article was originally published on my personal blog here.

What Is a Message Queue in the First Place?

Message queues (MQ) are a fundamental concept in programming and software development. In a distributed system, a message queue is the backbone of the system. A message queue allows inter-process communication between services/applications in your system (eg. Service A can talk to Service B).

In MQ terminology, the service that emits the message is called the producer worker, while the service that listens and reacts to messages is called the consumer worker. This is how communication happens between the services.

You can scale up or down the number of producer…

This blog is originally published on my personal blog.

Why Golang?

I’ve wanted to learn Golang for a long time. According to a Stack Overflow survey, Golang was the third-most wanted programming language in the year 2019. Coming from a Python background, learning a new programming language like Golang gives me a unique perspective on how to write code.

I was inspired by a helpful tutorial by Keiran Scot. The following tutorial is heavily influenced by Keiran’s tutorial but is made to use MySQL instead of Mongo as part of my exercise to learn Golang.

Prsonally, I believe Golang is the…

For the past month, I’ve been researching for bare metal k8s distribution to use at our company. I’ve been using Rancher’s k3s, lightweight Kubernetes distribution, and I find it very light and convenient to setup. Together with a bunch of built-in tools bundled with k3s, I like its super cool storage provisioner the most. Thank you, Rancher, you guys rocks.

What we’ll learn here

• What it takes to provision a PV in Kubernetes dynamically
• What is Rancher’s Local Path Provisioner
• How to use Rancher’s Local Path Provisioner
• How dynamic storage external-provisioner works

Frankly speaking, I find it a bit hard for commoners like…

Kubernetes Dashboard lets you visualize your cluster interactively. Other than increasing your cluster observability, it allows you to interact with your Kubernetes cluster without memorizing the kubectl commands. If you are new to Kubernetes’ world, this is super convenient for you to get started by seeing what’s happening in your cluster.

There are many options available for Kubernetes Dashboard out there. VMWare Octant is one of the popular Kubernetes dashboards available for free as an OSS. I know that many Sysadmins and DevOps engineers would prefer to use the old-school kubectl commands instead of using the dashboard because they…