Latest Blog Posts

• Zn Reviews: Race for the Galaxy

  On today’s edition of Zn Reviews, we’ve got the classic euro board game, Race for the Galaxy! First released in 2007, this old soul of a game ranks 7.8 on BoardGameGeek and with a weight rating of 2.99/5. This means that it isn’t the most beginner friendly board game and isn’t really something that you should bust out when you are first introducing people to board games. Despite the high rating on BoardGameGeek, I have a love-hate relationship with this game.

  Sep 11, 2022 Read more...

• Integrating n8n with Google Sheets using Oauth2

  So, I’ve been playing around with n8n and I’m a big fan of it, I’ve been following the project’s progress ever since it was initially announced on HackerNews all the way back in Oct 2019. However, I did face some difficulties in figuring out how to enable the Google Sheets API for interacting with my personal Google Drive (even with the very detailed docs here and here) Here’s a simple summary:

  Sep 10, 2022 Read more...

• Erlang :global Resource Locks (Elixir)

  Today, we’re talking about something that isn’t really well explained in the Erlang documentation — resource locking. What is a resource lock? A resource lock ensures that only the requestor of that lock can access the locked resource at a point in time. A simplified analogy would be where there are many people trying to call a phone number at a time. The owner of the phone number can only speak to one person at a time, hence the first person to reach through the line would lock the line.

  Sep 6, 2022 Read more...

• Fast Wiktionary Omnibar Searching for Language Learning (Firefox)

  So…I have just started learning German just for fun, and I’ve started to get clicking fatigue from clicking through so many dictionary webpages for every single new word that I’m learning. Typing words into a search bar and then scrolling down to your desired language takes up a lot of time. In particular, I’m using Wiktionary as my reference dictionary, and due to the massive number of languages that they support, it is quite easy to find yourself with a table of contents that looks something like this:

  Mar 27, 2022 Read more...

• Hosting Your Private NPM Packages on GitLab's Private NPM Registry

  You’ve got some shared front-end code that you would like to share between different projects. You want to abstract this shared code out into a library, thereby making it easy to install, share, or even pick-and-choose which JS modules to import. Sounds enticing, right? Yes, it most certainly is. There are many benefits of doing so, such as separation of concerns, code organization, etc… So you’re convinced. You’re sold. You head to the GitLab NPM registry documentation page and immediately, you’re discouraged.

  Jul 21, 2021 Read more...

• Optimizing Your Learning and Thinking

  I think that it pays to have an optimized workflow of the actual learning process. After all, if you learning efficiency is only at 60%, then that means that out of 10 hours that you put into learning a particular piece of knowledge, you would only retain 60% of the information spread out across those 10 hours, leaving gaps within your knowledge after that 10 hours (meaning that you would have to go back and revise parts that you are not sure of again…).

  May 3, 2021 Read more...

• Using A Hunky Poolboy To Manage Your Python ErlPort Processes in Elixir

  So, you’ve got lots of Python code being executed from your Elixir app, and lots of ad-hoc calling of your Python code. On one hand, you want to dynamically scale to manage demand, but at the same time, you don’t want to accidentally crash your application by starting too many Python processes. So… what what’s a frazzled developer gotta do to save himself some headache? The key problem that we are trying to solve here pooling, which is the the management of limited resources kept at the ready for any ad-hoc requests for usage.

  Apr 25, 2021 Read more...

• Why Erlang/Elixir? A Fanboy's Argument for Scalable, Distributed, Concurrent Programming While Staying Sane

  I think that it isn’t a well kept secret that I’m a fanboy of Elixir. Almost half of my blog posts (at point of writing) are related to Elixir and its ecosystem. But, how exactly did I get to this point? And why? In this post, let’s deep dive into what makes Erlang/Elixir so special and why the latest innovations out of this ecosystem keeps me coming back for more.

  Apr 23, 2021 Read more...