Cryptocurrencies are all the rage now. They promise a lot of things, one of them being the delivery of more freedom in the financial sector and the removal of pesky rent-seeking middlemen as well as hyperinflating fiat of governments. Since by this point in my life I have learned that nothing in life is for free and it's all about tradeoffs, I thought it might be a good idea to learn more about the tradeoffs to be had with cryptocurrency asset storage.

A quick overview post on how to do simple monitoring on GCP with Google Kubernetes Engine and Stackdriver via the Prometheus format

I recently decided that I wanted to learn more about the world of stream processing. I felt quite comfortable in the world of CRUD but knew that if I wanted to elevate as a software engineer, I couldn't ignore the tremendous progress and change that is happening when it comes to dealing with unbounded and plentiful data.

Being a data-driven organization has become more important, yet it is still very difficult to attain because data access is fundamentally hard to establish. But what if it does not have to be

Transit is a web application that fetches schedule and in some cases real-time information from your favorite transit agencies so that you no longer have to stand in the rain wondering where ths next bus is.

Let's face it, you are probably not documenting as much as you should. However, code is read a lot more than it is written. We often think about the computer executing the code, but how often do you think about your fellow co-workers/co-programmers when writing your code?

It's been a while since I have blogged and a lot has changed. Last time on here, I wrote about the the choices I have made post-college to create the optimal lifestyle for me and how I thought more people might want to consider such lifestyle. As per usual, I've been learning a lot, thus been readjusting what the optimal lifestyle means to me. Some of those learnings I want to share here.

In this post, I'm talking about the setup of my life after college. Warming: A bunch of generalizations and strong opinions

In this blog post, I show up to build a web application that combines the benefits of server-rendered HTML and client-side JS

I had some thoughts laying around, so I finally put it in a presentable form.

This post presents some tools you can use to put that knowledge you have learned into play to finally book your flight.

Whatever people are willing to pay for, Airlines try to extract as much revenue from that as possible. One way to do it is to account for variable demand by place of booking, departure and arrival. Let’s see how you can reduce your airfare by optimizing all three

This article is about how airfare is influenced by date and time, both for the time of booking as well as the time of travel.

San Francisco has always something exciting to offer.

A simple improvement to devise

I just wanted to start a chrome extension and figured I should check out what all the hype with the frontend tooling scene is all about. The ecosystem looks pretty amazing, however, it seemed like there wasn't a lot of content out there on how to make the chrome-extension work with require-js for modular JS, so I figured i'd write it down here.

One of my greatest sources of frustration is my inability to travel spontaneously and freely due to my Vietnamese citizenship. I compiled a list to make my existing visas more useful.

This is a companion post to our Tale of Credport post in which I will go into further detail about the technical problems we had and decisions we made. You probably want to read that one before this one. Credport’s evolution in technical design on both the front-end and the back-end effectively coincided with our evolution from Boston/Webcred to Berlin/Credport.

Get ready for this 4000+ word behemoth that tells the story of Credport. This is a post that recaps the product and business decisions we made over the course of Credport. Prepare for a long post with a mix of high-level overview and deep comments.

Instead of going home to Boston after showing my parents NYC and DC, I decided to hop on the flight to Costa Rica the next day. Read about some thoughts while they are fresh

It's been a while since my last post on the topic, so I figured I give some sort of status update. While things are not 100% set and obvious yet, I feel a sense of clarity and comfort that I haven't felt in a while. I'd like to share what led to this.

With the series final still in somewhat fresh memory, I wanted to write down some words on what I can only describe as a profound emotional reaction I had last night.

In a recent project of mine I had to implement an activity feed. I have been meaning to try out the proposed solution by GiveGab which was a response to ThoughtBot's approach. I especially liked GiveGab's elegant solution to address the issues ThoughtBot had with the fan out on read approach by using Enumerations with findeachin_batches in the background to do the heavy-lifting in the database.

A repost from my final paper for my 'Introdution to Ethics' class.

For quite some time now, I have seen people become more and more interested in startups and buildings products. There are many reasons why startups are becoming hip but I believe a fundemental one is the sheer reduction in resources needed to get something out of the door. I attribute a lot of my experience to the fact that I stumbled upon the powerful combination of Ruby on Rails and Heroku, so I decided to give back and give people the opportunity to be enlightened as well :)

If you have read my last post, you know that I'm on a mission to address my fears of regret and failure. The game plan is to trust and do. So why on earth do I think college would be a good place to do so?

In this post, you get a glimpse into the inner workings of my brain and how I currently feel about my situation of having incredibly opportunity, but hints of self-doubts.

It's this time of the year again. Every once in a while comes that twitch, that realization that maybe, I should redo my website. Said and done, you are looking at the fourth revision of it. It all started with a Wordpress Blog for Maps Offline, then a Joomla CMS for Nam's Remote, then an iWeb site, then a basic Rails site and now hopefully a slightly more polished version. Back then, I also had very modest site titles such as "Nambrot.com - Showcase of Incredibility".

I wanted to take this opportunity and talk a bit about how I have approached this redesign.

Over the course of Credport (which is nearly a year now), I have made some very invaulable experiences in terms of disagreeing with your partner that I'd like to share for people who may be in the similar situation.

For a couple weeks, I have been working on an idea that I hope will develop into something greater in the next months. While that idea involved mainly theoretical and operational issues, I wanted to keep my practical skills inline and since I have been reading a lot about web applications and especially Backbone.js, I decided to just play around with it. I ended up writing a small prototype for a Facebook Photo Browser based on the Graph API.

How to get more out of your Heroku Dyno