In my hometown of Penang, near where I lived south of the Penang bridge, lay a Free Industrial Zone, home to factories like Intel, Broadcom, Kingston, Western Digital, Jabil, and many others. When I was fresh out of high school about to choose a degree to enroll in at university…

I passed both the AWS Data Analytics Specialty and GCP Data Engineer Professional certifications recently, and have held both AWS/GCP Professional Architect certs as well. Choosing between cloud providers is an important task, with their data capabilities often being a critical factor, so I wanted to jot down my thoughts…

The third round of registration in Malaysia for the AstraZeneca vaccine closed leaving many (including myself and loved ones) in frustration because the system was (again) unable to handle the load — “frustration” a bit understated here given how Malaysia is now leading the world in Covid cases per million. …

In part 1 I wrote about the challenge of minimizing costs for content websites, in this piece I focus on maximizing performance. Frontend development is a curious beast. Much has been said of the proliferation of Javascript libraries and frameworks — my favourite quip (I can’t remember the source) being…

When some friends approached me recently to build a new site, I thought it would be a good chance to try out some development techniques that I had been itching to validate. After working off and on over the past couple months and in overdrive over the new year holidays…

Gitlab CE is one of the best options available today for self-hosting Git, and one of its best features is Gitlab CI, its continuous integration service. Gitlab CI works off decentralized runners. Your pipelines don’t run on your Gitlab instance itself, but on Gitlab runners that can be hosted in…

Instead of just for loops — Frontend Malaysia recently highlighted a post titled You don’t need Array.reduce() which attracted some minor controversy. The author tries to argue that Array.reduce() is always better simplified using simple for loops. In the example he cited, a dataset of trips needed to be summed up, with the result being the…

Behind the scenes at carpool.pulangmengundi.com — In the run-up to the 14th General Elections, I was part of pulangmengundi.com, an initiative created for Malaysians helping Malaysians home to vote. It was an incredible experience, and I thought I’d share what I learnt, from a tech perspective (although as you’ll see, the non-tech parts were even more…

This post was written for the Laravel Blog Contest , see the entries here and vote if you find this interesting! For small projects, pretty much anything will do to host Laravel. For larger organizations or complex apps spanning multiple services, these problems become common: How do you provision clusters…