Teochew Thunder

Years: 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019

ChatGPT's capabilities and their implications in Software Development

"However, as every software developer knows, writing code is only about ten percent of the entire job. And that's a generous estimate."

A Software Developer's Vacation in Kuala Lumpur

"Malaysia is looking increasingly like a good place to retire."

Quiet Quitting: Do Or Do Not?

"No employer is entitled to the extra mile. That is complete rubbish."

Film Review: M3GAN

"M3GAN had no surprises. No plot twists. It had no right to give me this much fun, but it did."

Five Java Exceptions Personified

"The exceptions listed below mostly occur in Java, but some are pretty general and should be encountered in basically any programming language."

Film Review: Black Mirror Series Three

"I was undeniably entertained and none of the episodes I've watched so far, strike me as particularly weak."

On job applicants who want work-life balance

"Work-life balance looks different to everyone. Never let anyone dictate to you what your balance should be, or worse, allow your employer to be in charge of it."

What we think we deserve, does not matter

"Focusing on what is possible is more productive than focusing on what is desired."

Film Review: Missing

"June uses a colorful MacBook but her mother Grace uses Windows?! Wow, way to age-stereotype!"

Big Tech Layoffs in Progress!

"Tech professionals who let go of this perception that career success only means working in big tech, will get on just fine."

TikTok Congressional Hearing: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

"If drug content is not present in China and Singapore, that is because these countries have no tolerance for that content. It's not that TikTok needs to do better (although they certainly do), but that America herself needs to do better."

Do Not Confuse Data With Information
"Yes, I'm writing a blogpost about Data Analytics on my wife's birthday. Talk about having a death wish."

Five New Workplace Buzzwords

"You know what's worse than being a stepping stone? Not being good enough to even qualify as one."

Sperminator: A TeochewThunder Project
"The idea was corny. Silly. Utterly ridiculous. And so me."

Techronyms and their place in the industry
"Maybe it's just me, but I would rather tech workers understand the concepts rather than simply being able to parrot the terms."

Film Review: Black Mirror Series Three, Redux

"After the slight disappointment that was Series Two, Black Mirror came back strong with plenty of content, all the while staying somewhat true to what came before."

Remote Work Is A Moral Issue For Elon Musk

"Years of watching Elon Musk make an absolute monkey of himself on Social Media has driven me to the conclusion that the man's a bit of an attention junkie."

Didn't get that promotion? Blame The Peter Principle

"The Peter Principle dictates that there is a chance that you might struggle if promoted."

An Examination of the CSS Display Property

"Yes, I used a picture of Donald Trump. He may as well make himself useful in this very educational blogpost."

Meta's new platform: Threads or Threat?

"People who feel differently about the issue may beg the question: why in the ever-loving Zuck do you need all that data, Mark?"

Let's Unpack The CSS Box

"If we think of everything as boxes, then we really need to understand the properties of those boxes."

It's Not Personal

"Why would this be personal? Are these employers laboring under the delusion that people work for them because they like them?"

App Review: Two Dots

"Two Dots is a puzzle game that doesn't require quick fingers or uncanny reflexes - just patience and perhaps a bit of luck."

The Real Reason Behind Political Resignation

"While Singapore is largely a meritocracy, suitability for a position does not consist of only professional competence."

From Twitter To X?

"Of all changes to take place, this stands out as a strange choice."

The How And Why Of One-Hot Encoding

"Yes, OHE, like all solutions, is not ideal for every situation."

A Comparison Between Tables and Divs

"Can tables be nested too? The answer is yes, and those seriously disturbed individuals who have attempted this will doubtless live to regret such depravity."

Fat Arrow Notation in JavaScript

"Good old Fat Arrow to the rescue!"

About the 2023 Singapore Presidential Election Sample Count

"Now, as a programmer, and by extension, a numbers and statistics nerd, I could not let this one go."

Ten Awesome Tech Tattoos

"Tech tattoos, on the other hand, should really occupy their own niche. The ones I managed to find in cyberspace are clever, quirky and just awesome."

Film Review: Target

"Emotionally, this movie had me by the balls."

Why I did it my way

"Even unpleasant employers were an experience. Not experiences I necessarily want to repeat, but valuable nonetheless."

Ode to my Lenovo

"The Lenovo handled it all like a champ. It was tireless, inexhaustible, like a stallion in its prime."

Whose fault is it, really?

"He had failed to understand the process. But see, understanding the process wasn't his job. It was mine."

Functions that handle NULL values in databases

"Handling NULL values is important. Whether you choose to handle them at the data entry level (not allowing NULL values in a column) or in a calculation (using the COALESCE() function), at some point you have to handle them."

Reference Review: Techlead
"Some complain about the monotonous, deadpan delivery. It's actually my favorite part."

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.

RATINGS

Some posts are more popular than others. Here are what the ratings mean.

All-time high viewership.

Wildly popular.

Decent viewership. Moderate popularity.

TAGS

Some of these tags crop up frequently. Here's what they mean...

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.

Five Software Development Takeaways From the COP Saga in 2021

"Passing off WhatsApp anecdotes as fact is the province of clueless Boomers, not an MP."

Functional Terminology
"Basically, the subprocedure would perform whatever operations the programmer put in it, and that would be the end of it. This has all but vanished from the programming landscape."

The Different Categories of Data Analytics
"The descriptive component explores the what, the diagnostic component generally explores the why, and the predictive component explores the what-if. The prescriptive component, however, adds value in the form of analyzing the gathered data to determine what steps could be taken to achieve desired outcomes."

Tech Wizardry in the Beijing Winter Olympics
"In the kitchens, orders were placed via a tablet, and robotic arms tossed vegetables in woks and prepared dishes such as claypot rice, burgers and fries."

Mean, Median and Mode in Python

"Whatever I have presented above is probably not an exact replica of how the NumPy and Statistics libraries perform ther calculations, but it is a pretty close match to how the average human brain would calculate these numbers."

The old-fashioned way to skirt the OCBC Phishing Scam

"Many people have questioned why I, as a software developer, do not engage in the convenience of Internet Banking. After news of the islandwide scams broke, they are no longer questioning."

Reference Review: The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers

"Martin's writing style is certainly lively and dramatic, and very often, he does come off as more than a little self-righteous. Ultimately, though, this adds to the experience."

A Year of Learning Data Analytics

"Generally, just in terms of syntax alone, Python gave me almost as much pleasure as Ruby."

Software Review: Power BI

"The screen can sometimes get a little crowded with the sheer amount of controls provided. Half of which I will probably never use."

Using Trello outside of the professional workplace

"This is important because while the overall status of a task remains binary (i.e, completed or not completed), there is a huge difference between 10% of a task having been completed, and, say, 90%."

Elon Musk and the Twitter Takeover

"While I'm not a big fan of Elon Musk, I am a big fan of being able to do whatever I damn well please with my own money."

Reading Books In Modern Technology
"While I acknowledge the use case of e-books - and you may feel free to call me old-fashioned here - there are many instances where I prefer having an actual physical book in hand as opposed to reading it off the screen."

Ten Pieces Of African Wisdom In Software Development
"After all, who can lay claim to all knowledge, past present and future, in the rapidly evolving arena of software development?"

App Review: Bazooka Boy
"The gleeful way that Bazooka Boy approaches violence, is a joy to behold."

Thoughts About HTML5
"I won't claim that it was love at the first sight, but once major browsers started getting their act together, things rapidly began falling into place. "

Different Number Types in Datasets
"Sometimes the data just happens to be a number, but may actually represent something other than an actual numerical value."

Ten Cheap Shots At Internet Explorer
"Suffice to say, my life as a web developer has been improved immeasurably by no longer having to support Internet Explorer."

Is the written component overrated in professional communication?
"Verbal communication is considered transient and informal. No corporation, for instance, would consider a verbal exchange a legally-binding contract."

Film Review: Black Mirror Series One

"Black Mirror is not only creepy little skits about tech, it's also full of very dark humor. Sometimes way dark."

Code indentation reduction using Guard Clauses

"Think of guard clauses as bouncers at a night club guarding against unruly patrons and ejecting them when necessary."

Trail of the Catfish

"There were way too many things about his story that stank. In fact, the entire story stank. It reeked like an open sewer."

Button and Input tags in HTML5
"Their use cases tend to overlap, but these are distinct tags and there are scenarios when one is more suitable than the other."

The Good Old Variable Swap, Redux
"In either case, at some point we are going to end up in a scenario where a division by zero would be attempted. And as we all know, once a division by zero is attempted, an exception occurs."

ONE Pass to rule them all

"I'm not a betting man, but I would wager my last Singapore dollar that the average shmuck ranting on Social Media about the ONE Pass, earns maybe a tenth of that."

Five Unpleasant Things About Working With Front-end Technology
"Mobile technology in the past decade has seen a proliferation of different screen sizes - tablets and phones - in addition to the standard screen sizes."

Joining Tables In SQL

"Joins are incredibly useful when data needs to be assembled. And often, this is necessary to create a coherent and comprehensive data set."

That Sinking Feeling At Twitter

"While Elon Musk probably isn't going to really axe two-thirds of staff (at least, not right away, that would be insane), expecting no layoffs at all is utterly unrealistic, and including this demand undermines the credibility of this letter."

A letter to a younger web developer

"Don't listen to yourself - you're young and stupid and you don't know shit."

Film Review: Black Mirror Series Two

"We have another three stories, all set in a reimagined UK where the prevalence of tech changes lives in the bleakest ways possible."

Film Review: Black Mirror Episode Special: White Christmas
"Overall, the dialogue was superb. It just served as good exposition, with a lot of foreshadowing baked in."

Does Skin Art Affect Your Career Prospects?

"In tech, if you do get that job, it won't be due to a lack of visible tattoos. It will not even be a consideration. No one cares."

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A phishy move by GoDaddy
"Show of hands - who's got GoDaddy as their hosting provider and is harboring some serious doubts now?"

Uproars over user data privacy
"Sure, I value my privacy. I just happen to value my civic duty a little more."

Why some things should not be automated, redux
"I don't think of it as laziness - rather, I think of it as pre-empting fatigue."

Some basic realities behind the WhatsApp exodus
"Nothing is for free. Ever."

The Big Tech Fallout From The Capitol Riots
"Tech companies can, of course, be trusted to make decisions according to objective fact. It's when they are called upon to make subjective moral value judgements on behalf of their very diverse user base, that we might want to start worrying."

Reference Review: How To Kill The Scrum Monster
"There's just something intensely relatable about defining Scrum as some kind of monster that needs to be killed."

Facebook's Fatal Flex at Australia
"Power is far more dangerous in the hands of those ill-equipped to handle it."

Who's Your Favorite Ninja Turtle?

"As with most questions of this ilk, the who or what is probably less important than the why."

Software Review: Tableau Desktop
"Tableau saves you the trouble of having to painstakingly set up data visualization, by taking care of most of the hard work."

Choosing between CSS and SVG
"SVG can be styled using CSS, and it's a killer combo - the power of SVG coupled with the organizational abilities of CSS."

Ten sketches of actual programming projects
"Notice how many of these sketches don't translate a hundred percent to the finished product. That's because requirements evolve."

Yes I'm a Software Developer; no I won't fix your WiFi
"Software is a totally different animal from hardware; and in this day and age there's absolutely no excuse for not knowing that elementary fact unless you're really young, really old, or just not the sharpest tool in the box."

Not a genius, but a grinder
"Work-life balance is for bitches. Real men have work-and-more-work balance."

Five Unintentionally Funny Email Typos
"It's all fun and games until a finger slips and you send the email."

The Personal Value of National Service

"What NS does, is provide perspective. Whether or not these young males put that perspective to good use, is a whole other matter."

Reference Review: Level Up Tutorials
"The sheer variety of software and languages that Level Up Tuts can teach you for free, is staggering. It really is the fledgling developer's wet dream."

Actual Requirements For Tech Expertise
"Useful practices can and should be adopted; the trick is figuring which practices are useful."

Using Chinese in application user interfaces
"The advantages of using Chinese as a medium for mobile apps, similarly applies to other Asian languages like Japanese, Burmese and Korean."

Five Dimensions of Competency, redux
"You see, as professionals, we have obligations other than writing and testing code."

Equal work, equal pay?
"Years of experience does not mean the same thing in the software industry as it does in many other industries, mostly because the software industry changes so fast."

Ten Hilarious Tech-related Drake Memes
"These side-splitting memes are something else. "

App Review: Alto
"If you play this game without sound, you're doing yourself a huge disservice. The audio is almost half the experience."

The differences between Posts and Pages
"Posts or pages are generally interchangeable in use, but they have specific use cases that apply in certain contexts."

A look at purchasing computer protection
"These days, antivirus software does pretty much the same thing, but unless the user intends to stay off the internet, that just isn't adequate anymore."

App Review: Clubhouse

"Clubhouse is a Social Media audio app - basically the voice-based version of IRC. You create or join rooms full of other users, hearing their voices as they speak. How awesome is that?!"

Some new features from ES2021 I really like

"These potentially make code more hassle-free and readable."

Writing Software and Fiction
"Writing software is not the same as writing fiction. It's still writing; it's still an act of creation, but there are fundamental differences."

When Zuckerberg Met(a) Facebook
"But what if Zuckerberg were able to pivot Facebook to a new kind of platform, one which wasn't dominated by Google and Apple?"

Discrete And Continuous Data Defined

"There are restrictions to the value that these data points can have. Usually, these restrictions take the form of the value being a whole number and not a fraction."

Ten Lessons From The Art Of War Applied To Software Development

"When you can make your job look easy, when you can make people think that any idiot could do your job, that is mark of a true master of his craft. "

Software Review: Tibco Spotfire
"If all you want is a fuss-free visualization tool, Spotfire is more than adequate. Anything more is perhaps pushing your luck."

Google moves to 2FA!

"Of course it would be a lot nicer to be able to access our accounts without that hassle. But things have arrived at a point where this is no longer a viable option."

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The GovTech Experience

"Son, you had me at Hello World."

An exploration of JavaScript's variable declaration keywords
"The looseness of JavaScript can be a boon in the sense that it's very forgiving, but in large-scale scripts, this can make errors hard to detect."

Film Review: Silicon Valley Season 5
"Not only do we get more of the same general tech-related hilarity, the team finally seems to be making strides after five entire Seasons of floundering."

Wuhan Coronavirus: A techie's random thoughts
"The Singapore Government will do what it deems fit, when it deems fit, which is pretty much their job in the first place."

Four Hundred Dollars Below Budget
"If there is a desirable result and you want to replicate it, it stands to reason that you have to repeat the process under the same conditions."

App Review: Paper Wings
"Paper Wings is a little more than your run-of-the-mill mobile game - it's a labor of love, and it shows."

POFMA saves the day... kind of
"Facebook doesn't have to like Singapore's laws - I'm not sure I'm entirely fond of them myself sometimes - but if Facebook wants to continue operating within Singapore, it is going to have to comply with those laws."

Five Good Questions To Ask Interviewers
"These are fair questions to ask, especially since interviewers consider them fair questions to ask you."

Some Rumination On Internal Links
"Internal Links aren't new. They've been around since HTML's birth."

More About Foreign Talent in the Tech Sector
"I see assimilating foreigners as a task akin to contributions into a code repository. The code comes from different developers, continuously, all from different backgrounds and programming styles, and is merged into a coherent whole that is far larger than the sum of all its parts."

Contact Tracing With TraceTogether

"TraceTogether is obviously a Minimum Viable Product that was hastily hammered out over the course of a couple sprints, and as such, there are sure to be a few rough edges."

A COVID-19 Election
"Some users only want security from a system as long as that security doesn't inconvenience them. Similarly, it seems some citizens are all for the concept of democracy but can't handle the ensuing obligations."

App Review: Wilderness Survival
"Make the wrong choice and you die. Make the correct choice and you might still die."

Google and Apple's Proposed Collaboration on Contact Tracing
"How do we balance a user's right to privacy with the immeasurable potential to save lives? There's no clear, correct answer."

Why some things should not be automated
"As outdated as I think my mother's worldview is, and as desperate as I am not to turn into my parents, I'm beginning to think Mom may have had a point there."

One Missing File
"As errors go, this was really elementary and I was horribly embarrassed."

Social Justice League: A TeochewThunder Project
"It's nothing more than an amalgamation of cultural references packaged in snarky homage to self-righteous SJWs everywhere. But I made it. It's mine."

Five ways to print a string ten times
"With any programming language, at your disposal, you have a set of tools - loops, variables, arrays, objects and functions - and with them, a programmer can solve problems."

Career Lessons From A Casanova
"If I want to interview successfully, interviewers have to be convinced that I genuinely want the job. And since I'm not that good an actor, I have to convince myself that I really fucking want that job."

App Review: Missing
"The creators of the game did a great job with the story here. It is kind of short, but compelling simply because it's based on real situations."

Making the contact tracing effort mandatory
"Maybe I haven't made myself perfectly clear the last few times I wrote about this, but fuck your precious privacy. Lives are at stake."

Code Cruft in the 2020 General Elections
"In other words, the assertion is that the Singapore General Elections are neither free nor fair, and your vote is not secret."

The Electoral Choice, explained in JavaScript
"Working to earn a vote that will never be given is nothing but a massive waste of time. Working to earn a vote that will always be given is also a colossal time-waster."

The Day The Penny Dropped
"That was when the lightbulb flickered. I was going about it all wrong."

GitHub's Arctic Archival
"Kind of like a time capsule with an apocalyptic twist."

Ten Problematic Tech Terms
"Naming things is one of the great struggles of software development. Congratulations, we just made it a whole lot harder."

When hubris is not a virtue
"People want to help you and share their know-how. All you gotta do is ask."

JavaScript array operations, the hard way
"Still, let's not let my youthful folly go to waste. Today, let's walk through how I managed to write functions to add and delete from arrays."

Reference Review: The Mythical Man-month: Essays on Software Engineering
"Brooks has an elegant yet chummy way of writing that puts you at ease, or to sleep - pick one."

The Math Behind the Halloween-Christmas Nerd Joke
"For years, I didn't get it, and honestly there were more fun things to do than obsess over this."

Film Review: Silicon Valley Season 6
"Silicon Valley is as loud and rude as ever, but it's (spoiler alert!) also pretty sad at the end."

Forty-eight hours with Red Airship
"I had everything to gain from this experience, and nothing to lose."

Five Ways To Reuse Tech Packaging Materials
"What if I told you there are uses for that shit? "

Cross-site Scripting Without JavaScript
"XSS is not about JavaScript."

A tiny Christmas e-commerce miracle
"Not only had it resolved the problem statement, it had exceeded my wildest expectations."

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App Review: Zombies, Run!

"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."

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Posts for 2023

Posts for 2022

Posts for 2021

Posts for 2020

Posts for 2019