Teochew Thunder

Years: 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014

"Functionally, it's like a fitness app had a one-night stand with a radio programme and this is the illegitimate offspring."

Pay Platforms: Provider or Police?
"We need to break out of this childish mentality that bad things are good when done to bad people."

A Change of Perspective with The Look-ahead Strategy
"Your suffering isn't for nothing; all that frustration serves a purpose in the larger picture."

How Apple came to pull the plug on Facebook and Google
"The battle of the tech giants started a while back, but now shots have been fired. And some have landed."

Thoughts about the LearnToCode Hashtag
"Software development is not only about coding (though a sizeable part is) and anyone who thoughtlessly simplifies it to merely 'coding' does us all a disservice."

Film Review: Silicon Valley Season 3

"Silicon Valley finds a clever a natural way to add to the diversity quotient: have an offshore team!"

The Sixth Pillar of Total Defence
"This Sixth Pillar business feels awkward and tacked-on, and is uncannily reminiscent of some backward practices I've observed in companies I've worked in."

An Extraordinary Day In the Life of an Ordinary Developer
"Skill can be taught. Enthusiasm can't."

Women Can Code, Get Used To It

"That's because software developers are people. And people come in all shapes and sizes."

Five Comparisons Between Contract and Permanent Roles
"Anyone clueless enough to measure your career progress by what's printed on your business card, probably doesn't have anything meaningful to add to the conversation."

Why I don't call myself a Full-stack Developer
"No manager in his right mind is going to place Lionel Messi in defence, Sergio Ramos as central striker, or David Villa in goal."

Fiction Review: The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
"The authors are probably brilliant VPs, Managers and Directors... but they aren't novelists, that's for sure."

Your Place in the Food Chain
"Needing to not starve is a perfectly legitimate reason to do any job."

On the new online laws in Singapore...
"Considering that other countries already have their own laws that lead to Internet censorship, it's really rather surprising that a country as supposedly draconian as Singapore has taken this long to "

FEAR: Forget Everything And Run
"Fear of rejection is arguably more harmful than rejection itself."

App Review: Apocalypse Runner
"The cawing of the crows, the constant sound of rushing water as the tidal wave chases you, the buzzing of saws, the crunch when your avatar runs face-first into a rock outcropping... you're in "

There's working hard... and there's 996
"Any idiot can be hardworking. It is the lowest form of value an employer can expect."

Tough Times Ahead For Huawei?
"China has weathered many a storm over millennia, and this latest thing is merely a blip in a long history full of violence and turmoil."

Ten tech languages that may resemble people you know
"At the heart of it all, JS is one hell of a capable woman who can get serious and professional with you, yet cut loose like a wild thing in a different setting."

The Good Old Variable Swap
"It reinforces my belief that you don't have to be a rocket scientist to learn programming."

Film Review: Silicon Valley Season 4

"The ubiquity of Internet devices is going to play a very big part in this Season as Richard hits his stride..."

An amusing but frustrating JavaScript episode
"Sure, there was some unnecessary concatenation, but since they were split into different lines, I figured it should be harder to screw something up this way."

Fake news? No, fake nudes!
"This app is deeply sexist not because of misogyny. Not because it shows women nude. But because it doesn't do the same for men."

Film Review: Child's Play (2019)
"If you're watching a Chucky movie, plot twists are probably not all that high on your list of priorities."

Factors In Tech Career Progression
"We're talking about an industry where things get outdated quickly and change happens at a breakneck pace. Thus, the ability to learn, unlearn and relearn is vital."

Much Ado About FaceApp
"It's good silly fun, though it was kind of disturbing to see how eerily like dear old Dad I looked when I aged my own photo."

App Review: Sara Is Missing
"From the get-go, you're immersed in a mystery that progressively gets more sinister as the player gets deeper into the storyline."

What I Learned From Playing FIFA 09
"Bosses are in the business of making money. They're not in the business of being fair to their software developers."

Ten Inspirational Film Moments For A Web Developer
"Yes! I am invincible!"

On Apple's decision to remove HKmap.live
"Apple isn't interested in protecting the lives of the Hong Kong Police. They're interested in staying on the right side of the law in the territories in which they operate."

An intolerance for the untalented?
"Being paid to code is a privilege that too few people actually try to earn."

Food Delivery hits a PMD-shaped roadblock!
"Remember, one can always ask the Government to help take care of you. But no one takes care of you better than you."

Ways of Using Cascading Style Sheets
"Properly implemented CSS will require a bit more effort up-front, but the maintenance benefits are worth it."

Here's Why You Shouldn't Take Tech Career Advice From Your Friends
"I'm honestly baffled at the number of people who have seen fit to advise me on how to build my career in my own industry without having worked a single day in it."

INFO

A collection of technical snippets and ruminations on the web industry and tech in general. Much of it is opinion-based, and as such, I fully expect people to disagree.

As with most opinion-based content, your mileage may vary.

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App Review
Where I share my thoughts on certain mobile apps I've used.

Applied Tech
Ruminations on tech happenings around the world and in society, how software technology has impacted us, and whether it's a good or bad thing.

Fiction Review
My findings in tech fiction.

Film Review
Movies or TV shows that revolve around technology.

Life As An Economic Digit
My thoughts on working life, specifically tech working life, though some of it is applicable generally - office politics, code of conduct, career thoughts.

Listicle
Little fun lists, because thoughts are easier to organize that way.

Profanity Alert
Sometimes the language I use isn't fit for polite company. You've been warned.

Redux
On the occasion that I revisit a previous blogpost, or issue a continuation of one.

Reference Review
Sources of information, be they programming books or online video tutorials.

Sexism In Tech
While I'm not a feminist or a raging SJW, I do firmly believe that coding is a gender-neutral pursuit.

Software Review
Mostly desktop software, or any software that isn't a mobile app.

War Stories
Not literally, but anecdotes I recall when I want to make a point.

Hackers and Bugs and Bounties, oh my!
"This is an event where white hat hackers and security specialists are invited to probe a given site for security vulnerabilities. Rewards are offered to participants for each vulnerability found."

An Argument About Arguments
"So now, think of parameters as parking spots and arguments as cars!"

Ten Principles of Adult Learning Applied to Software Development

"People can memorize stuff - it's just not a terribly effective way to retain knowledge."

App Review: ActiveSG
"Pro-tip: Anything that forces the user to tap extra times, is a huge no-no."

Revenge of the Damore
"Whether or not the Googlers are sensible enough to realize that they come off as a bunch of utterly unprofessional, foot-stamping snowflakes, is besides the point."

Film Review: Silicon Valley Season 2

"This is one of the most masterful digs at Silicon Valley's pretentiousness towards diversity. Ever."

App Review: Father And Son
"There are some games that will keep you busy for months, or at least weeks. Father And Son is not that kind of game, and it's not meant to be."

Five Dimensions of Competency applied to Web Development
"There's a lot more to competency than simply being good at something, or being able to do something to a certain standard."

Tech Terms and why we should use them right
"Don't let a couple of incorrectly used words detract from the brilliance of your ideas."

Plugging those Knowledge Gaps
"You can never eliminate all your knowledge gaps - but you can ensure that the knowledge gaps that you have today, aren't exactly the same ones you had last year."

The WSQ Way to Self-improvement
"Honestly, having no knowledge of HTML while trying to learn scripting, is the software equivalent of attempting the hundred meter dash without learning to walk first."

Rise of the Bike-sharing Phenomenon
"Bike-sharing's here to stay, that's for sure. However, with the rising costs of a bike-share, along with up-front payment implemented by many vendors, casual users are being put off, while serious use"

Restricting Input Lengths
"Users generally have more confidence in a system when it performs as expected."

Microsoft's Acquisition of GitHub
"Perhaps Microsoft has finally cottoned on to the fact that a sizeable chunk of the world's developers, perhaps even a staggering majority, all benefit regularly from open-source code."

Reference Review: Java SE 7 Programming Essentials
"It's not an easy read by any means, but it's a lot easier than many other Java books would be."

The Buzz About FizzBuzz
"Why are people who can't program, applying for programming jobs? Because hirers advertise for degrees in Computer Science, not the ability to solve FizzBuzz."

Data Theft At SingHealth
"Be vigilant, paranoid even, and don't make the mistake of thinking something is safe simply because it's stored by the Government. That's one of the first places they attack."

Film Review: Unfriended: Dark Web
"It's not a revenge flick about a wronged ghost... this time."

Google's Fair Use Defense Overturned
"Yep, that one piece of documentation turned out to be Google's undoing and now they owe Oracle about 9 billion dollars."

A Look At User Authentication Factors
"An authentication system is made out of authentication factors. There may be multiple factors, but whether a system is Single-factor Authentication, Two-factor Authentication (2FA) or Three-factor Aut"

Five Examples of Terribly Useless Commit Remarks
"Committing changesets to a code repository is one of the ways a developer collaborates with others. And to do that well, at the very minimum, one needs to understand the art of writing useful commit remarks."

Online Lynch Mob Activated!

"This is Singapore, and as much as I love her, she's filled with chickenshit keyboard warriors who talk a good game behind a computer screen but totally lose their nerve when their bluff is called."

The Need For Foreign Tech Talent
"Software development, and arguably all tech, is a profession where change is the only constant, and the notoriously conservative mindset of Singaporeans simply does not lend itself to this paradigm."

Film Review: Searching
"At its core, Searching is a heartwarming story about family wrapped in a crime thriller and delivered via the medium of modern technology."

A Walkout Against Tech Discrimination
"Google does not need less men or more women; they need more employees who don't disrespect their colleagues, period."

Misfiring On User Experience
"When it gets to the point where the user is just randomly clicking around to see what happens, the system is failing."

Insertion The MySQL Way
"It's elegant, more robust than the other examples, and close enough to the UPDATE statement to make it relatable."

My Year In Training And Assessment
"However, being a WSQ instructor is not just about having the skills and knowledge in facilitation of learning. Like many other professions, it is also about having the correct temperament."

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The Misinformation Age
"Gone are the days where people dwelled in cloistered communities and passed bias and ignorance from generation to generation without interacting with the outside world. Now with Social Media, you can reach out to people half a world away and share your bias and ignorance!"

Paper clip Power
"I may be biased here, but I find it's better to stick paper clips in a CD ROM drives than your ears."

Working While Unwell
"Walk it off, pussy. It's a sore throat, not a broken neck."

Shopify stands steady

"Tech platforms should be free to serve without being forced to take sides. Tech is about logic. We don't deal in feelings."

A very unsexy sexism scandal for Uber
"Now, I've never been under the illusion that Human Resource was on the employee's side. I've long accepted that HR is on the side of management in most cases, and the sooner one comes to terms with th"

Cyber-secure Nation

"This may be one of the few military vocations that have an actual equivalent outside of the military."

The Myth of Tech Meritocracy
"I think we can all agree that Apple isn't some benevolent mobile tech Santa giving us awesome products for the sheer joy of it. No, like all credible tech companies, Apple is a business, and is motivated by desire for consumer dollars."

App Review: One-man Army: Epic Warrior
"Your chubby little hero stumbles dramatically when hit by javelins, blasted by bombs and roasted by dragon fire. He scratches his arse while waiting, blocks incoming spears like a pro, prances like a ballerina and defies the laws of physics with his bomb-repelling shield."

The Case For Stored Procedures
"Of course, if you're suicidal enough to write a Stored Procedure that drops all your tables, all bets are off."

Why you should love your job
"Guess what will always do better than you, at tolerating your job?"

Frameworks in Perspective, redux
"If your organization tells you they need a responsive website, they don't care if you use Bootstrap or Semantic UI, code it the hard way, or ask your dog to do it for you. They just want a result, and they want it yesterday."

An Instructional Experience
"Before I continue, I want to stress that this wasn't an altruistic act of nobility on my part, nor do I have some bombastic virtue-signalling reason behind doing this gig. My motivations were completely selfish. "

Enter The Console Object
"The console object uses methods such as log(), error() and warn() to display messages."

Keep Calm and Carry On
"People say stupid shit and make utter fucking fools of themselves when they're angry. It's one of the unshakeable laws of the universe. Just because someone is being stupid doesn't mean you need to join them."

Macintosh Matrimony

"Dudes, they say the path of true love never did run smooth. In your case, it traveled the goddamn globe and back."

App Review: AndroIRC
"AndroIRC is basically just an IRC client put on mobile, with a typical mobile interface. Instead of clicking on stuff and typing on a physical keyboard, now you tap, swipe and use an on-screen keyboard."

Job Security: The Real KPI
"Job security is not about ensuring that your company will always need you. Job security is about ensuring that in the event that your company no longer needs you, ten other companies do."

Five comparisons between Twitter Bootstrap and Semantic UI
"Personally, I'd take Semantic UI any day of the week. It's got features I need, and I don't have a problem with using jQuery. But Twitter Bootstrap might be better for people who want decent results with a minimum of fuss, and more if they're willing to cough up the cash."

App Review: Zombie Defense
"Zombie Defense is a zombie-themed Tower Defense game. Two of my favorite game genres rolled into one app."

Bracket Like An Egyptian
"The K&R style is also known slangily as Egyptian Brackets. Because, if the brackets were hands, the pose would resemble a very stereotypical Egyptian dance pose."

Fancy, but ineffectual
"Now, I'm not saying that the UI in Vivocity was a bad idea. It was a pretty nifty idea. With a shitty-as-fuck implementation."

Textboxes and the Wrap Attribute
"What I would like to do here, is illustrate the difference between a Soft Wrap and a Hard Wrap."

Mozat's Culture Of Sharing
"This was what impressed me. Not his knowledge. Knowledge is comparatively easy to obtain - read the right sources, put in your hours, pay your dues. No, it was his unselfishness that impressed me. "

James and the Giant Echo Chamber
"No, Google didn't drop the ball. They weren't even playing ball. Hell, they weren't even on the friggin' pitch. From that business point of view, they did the only thing they could have done."

A Storm Without A Cloud
"The Left and Right are missing the point entirely, but that's OK. They're laypeople, and missing the point is practically an obligation."

Five things to check when your mobile is not charging
"There are multiple points of possible failure between the wall outlet and your phone. Each of these should be investigated if your phone refuses to charge."

Cracking the QBasic Color Code
"The eureka moment hit me recently, years later after I typed my first 'Hello World' in QBasic, when I was staring at the table again, and realized that it had made sense all along - I just hadn't seen it."

The Problem With Streaming

"This is probably just my opinion, but I've always felt that Singapore's educational system puts just a little too much emphasis on streaming."

War of the Programming Languages
"Has choice of a programming language or platform suddenly become some kind of religion?"

Ruminations of a 40-year old Geek
"Succeed or fail, life goes on. And if you disagree, feel free to shoot yourself in the head next time you fall short."

Film Review: Silicon Valley Season 1
"This is a really smart statement on the state of Silicon Valley."

Ten Absolutely Terrible Code Puns
"Due to the nature of reserved words being used in code, sometimes puns get worked in between the lines."

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FreeBas(ic)ing the Facebook way
"The problem is that a sizable percentage of India's population do not have the means to pay for long-term internet access, and lack of access to information and services will further disadvantage the poor. "

The Jover Touch
"At this point, Jover Chew had gone too far. He had made himself impossible to ignore."

How your Mobile Apps are made
"Of course, since the app is created in a native language and can interface with the device's operating system and hardware directly, it has a distinct advantage in terms of speed and versatility."

Rise of the Handphone Vigilante

"Singaporeans have grown into a timid, repressed lot who somehow come alive on the Internet due to the delusion of anonymity."

Instant gratification and a quick Fixx
"There is no such animal as a developer who already knows everything he needs to know and can get by without learning new things."

Ten ways to hone your craft
"Don't be afraid of coming across like a noob. There are plenty of developers blogging on the internet and gleefully making fools of themselves. Join us!"

Software Review: Sublime Text
"Sublime is a joy to use and is free for life if you don't mind the occasional guilt trip the trial version lays on you."

Programming Equivalence
"When you use the === operator rather than the == operator, you are testing for one more condition - that not only must $a and $b be numerically equivalent, they must be of the same data type."

Why Emails Bounce
"Basically the terms Hard Bounce and Soft Bounce are meant to categorize the reasons why your email to this address is not being delivered."

Film Review: Friend Request
"Fortunately though, this film is so utterly predictable and lacking in depth that not spoiling it wouldn't make a whole lot of difference."

Film Review: Grace

"Don't piss off Thai women. They're fucking nuts."

Data Transport Methods Across Webpages
"The GET method has a well-deserved reputation for being widely used - sometimes overused."

Google and the Fair Use Defense
"Because while Google was ostensibly the winner in this bout, make no mistake - had Google lost, it would have been a sad day for those of us peddling open source."

What do Web Developers and Wrestlers have in common?
"When you're working for people who aren't technically inclined, they process only the visual component of your work. They see that the interface looks nice and the color scheme is great. scheme is great. They see the flashy stuff, the bells and whistles."

No internet for public sector?
"I have refrained from commenting thus far because it is way too easy to get caught up in criticizing the Government (not that they don't deserve it) before one has all the facts. And because - bear with me here - this might not be as crazy as it sounds."

The Ratings Game
"When I asked that question, some interviewers have told me to just rate myself from my point of view. And that's exactly why it's meaningless."

Three Great Virtues

"If you remember nothing else about programming, remember this: minimum input, maximum output."

Film Review: Nerve
"Nerve is a cautionary tale against putting too mch personal information online. Or, at least, it tries to be. As a thriller, thrill it certainly does."

Pokémon Go Fever
"In the startup I'm currently working for, the tech lead takes us out on Pokémon hunts during lunch break. Oh, the Pokémonity."

WhatsApp and the Great Privacy Controversy
"Don't like it? Still miffed? Want to stick to those principles? There are always other messaging services."

Social Media Mishap
"As far as I'm concerned, HR did more or less what one should expect of HR. Between the company and you, whose side does one realistically expect HR to take? Here's a clue - not yours."

On the fast track: Project Nilgiri
"Why did Google succeed where Facebook failed so spectacularly?"

Film Review: I.T
"Could have been better. Way better. For a movie that dragged on almost two hours and boasted a cast consisting of Pierce Brosnan and Michael Nyqvist, I sure expected a hell of a lot more than tech-guy-makes-dick-boss's-life-miserable-because-he's-a-nutcase."

Denial of Service Attack on Dyn!
"What happens is that attackers make use of several computer terminals to send requests over the Internet to their target, flooding it with traffic and eventually causing it to stumble (or even crash) under the load."

No-show Nodevember

"Yep, apparently the word promiscuous was too harsh for some very easily offended souls in the audience. In a world now filled with trigger-free zones and political correctness, being outraged appears to be the in-thing now."

Website Building in the New Millennium

"The end game is for a user to be able to maintain and update the content of a website, without the need for the user to know anything beyond how to type."

App Review: Alien Creeps
"Earth is under attack by monstrous aliens and it's your job to keep them at bay."

The Quest For Mobile Knowledge
"Getting by was never the point. Graduating and obtaining the certification was never the point. Even having good grades was never the point. Learning was the point of all this."

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Film Review: Blackhat
"Nice idea. Had its flaws. Could've been done better. And sure as hell didn't require the presence of Tang Wei's character. Kept me entertained, but not a show I'd watch again."

Overcoming Developer's Block
"Take a walk. Have a smoke. Go cake the porcelain. Or take a walk to the loo and have a smoke while caking the porcelain."

Dissecting the RGB Color Model
"What if you don't have an online connection, or simply can't be arsed to fire up a memory-intensive program just to pick a color?"

The Impending Demise of Internet Explorer
"The demise of what could arguably be the most despised browser on the Internet (after Netscape Navigator, that is) was reported last month."

Whitelisting - a Paler Shade of Security
"Whitelisting is a technique that ensures that the values of the parameters conform to a specific range of values."

The Prime Minister's New Sudoku
"It's common knowledge that our PM is a bit of a math prodigy. And while it would be a fallacy to say that all good programmers are also great mathematicians or vice versa, the two disciplines are somewhat interlinked."

Film Review: Unfriended
"Which brings me to my next point - this film will hit you particularly hard if you are a teenager brought up in today's viral cyberworld."

The Taming of the Image Background
"There's a CSS property that's going to save you a whole lot of frustration. The background-size property."

Taxi Turmoil
"Some cabbies have expressed the opinion that independent operators driving rented vehicles are taking away a substantial piece of their pie without having to conform to strict licensing and regulations."

An Eventful JavaScript
"The Event object is what holds information about JavaScript events such as onload, mouseover and so on."

When to avoid AJAX
"If, for example, you're running a news blog and your articles are generated by AJAX, all robots are going to pick up are the generic HTML templates that's used to house your AJAX content. Kind of like getting the donut without the jelly."

Film Review: Pixels
"There's nothing to spoil. This movie is as shallow as it gets. Adam Sandler movies have very few redeemable artistic qualities about them, and this one is no exception."

Holy Radical Randomizers, Batman!
"I used a line of code to generate random numbers. It worked. But it was hellishly difficult to read. And that kind of gets in the way if you're trying to explain a concept."

App Review: Agent Alice
"The art department outdid itself there. The scenes are beautiful (though they get rather cluttered at the higher levels due to the sheer amount of objects you have to find), and the characters are very quaintly rendered."

Google's Logo Switcheroo
"Two other web companies that changed their logo these past few years - Microsoft and Yahoo!. It's worth noting because the changes, including Google's, reflect a trend."

Steve Jobs: Love What You Do
"Yes, spending more time in the office can be a result of loving what you do. But loving what you do should never be confused with loyalty to the company."

Frameworks in Perspective
"Here are some reasons why I would prefer to do without frameworks."

Stored Procedures vs SQL Injection
"Stored Procedures, like any tool, can be used or misused. Stored Procedures can prevent SQL Injection. It's a matter of how they're used."

Watch the Language!
"It's far trickier to use a natural language than a computer language. Which could account for the stereotype that programmers are bad at social interaction."

Ten Great Tech Puns
"Care for some... refreshments?"

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The Ecology of the Modulus
"Beyond the obvious function of giving you the remainder when a is divided by b, The Modulus helps you determine if a given number is odd or even."

To the Strong and the Bold
"Of course, one could argue that we could just solve this thing with CSS (and you'd be quite right), but CSS is not the subject matter here."

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