Teochew Thunder: Year Nine (Part 2/2)

Much of this blogging year's content was strong. Few made it to extreme highs in terms of readership, or broke existing records. On the other hand, plenty of them garnered a respectable amount of views.

Red hot

Those posts in this category simply reinforce my point that it is my views about politics and the workplace, rather than my tech, that get the most attention.

Damn, that's hot.

Quiet Quitting: Do Or Do Not? examined the phenomenon of Quiet Quitting in the workplace.

Film Review: Black Mirror Series Three was a surprise - I didn't know people were that interested in a series that isn't even all that recent. It definitely overperformed.

The Real Reason Behind Political Resignation rode upon the wave of awareness generated by the recent (at the time) scandals in the Singapore Government.

Remote Work Is A Moral Issue For Elon Musk was basically me roasting the world's douchiest techbro millionaire. I don't know why, but people seem to pay more attention to these. That's sad.

Decent

These got a fair amount of attention - some of which was expected, and some which weren't.

Well done!

That Sinking Feeling At Twitter was a post talking about Elon Musk and Twitter (now X) and this always gets attention.

Film Review: M3GAN, Film Review: Missing, Film Review: Black Mirror Series Two and Film Review: Black Mirror Series Three, Redux were film reviews and these usually do well. No real surprise here.

Five New Workplace Buzzwords, Does Skin Art Affect Your Career Prospects?, What we think we deserve, does not matter, On job applicants who want work-life balance, Didn't get that promotion? Blame The Peter Principle and It's Not Personal were some of my views on the workplace. Could have done better, but I'm not complaining.

ChatGPT's capabilities and their implications in Software Development, Big Tech Layoffs in Progress!, From Twitter to X? and  TikTok Congressional Hearing: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly were about recent tech developments. I honestly expected these to do better, especially the last one. I mean, I worked really hard on the TikTok Congressional Hearing. Oh, well.

The How And Why Of One-Hot Encoding and Let's Unpack The CSS Box got a surprising amount of attention. I've never labored under the delusion that people bother about my more technical posts.

A Software Developer's Vacation in Kuala Lumpur was a WTF moment for me when I saw it had gotten this many views. I really wasn't under the impression that people care about my vacations, or about Kuala Lumpur. 

Meh

These were the underperformers. The ones that I expected a better reader reception for, and just didn't get it. Thankfully, there's not that many of them.

What a letdown.

Meta's new platform: Threads or Threat? now this one definitely underperformed. I don't know why.

Five Java Exceptions Personified was a fun listicle that bombed. I had higher hopes for this one.

Here's to Year Nine!

The blog has survived. It's often on life support, but it's there. I haven't been a huge success, but that was never the goal. The goal was to build muscle memory, keep me sharp, help me stay current and relevant. And on that front, it's worked wonders.

On cloud nine,
T___T

Teochew Thunder: Year Nine (Part 1/2)

Here it is - the big Nine!

Yes, it has been nine years since I embarked on the improbable journey that was this tech blog. At times, it has felt less like a tech blog and more like a philosophy or even political blog. But I suppose multiple things can be true at the same time. As long as this blog stays true to its mission of documenting my own little tech journey, I think all is well.

Happy ninth birthday!

That aside, the fact that this blog has gone on for nine years, staying on course with the same format as all the preceding years since 2014, is a testament to my consistency. Hey, it's one hell of a moment; I think I'm allowed a little self-congratulations. Still, change is inevitable, and in some cases, I think change can be beneficial. For example, I've been attempting to not swear so fucking much express my views in a less inflammatory and moderate manner, and since less posts now carry the Profanity Alert tag, I seem to have largely succeeded. Room for improvement, though!

A.I Image Generation

2023 is probably the year that A.I became mainstream, with text and image generators making their runds on the market. I've actually used both. Text generators such as ChatGPT to generate filler text for code, and image generators (sch as Imagine) to produce nice pictures for the blog.

Imagine

In recent years, I've been mostly using stock photos, but sometimes the search is long and the results are underwhelming. Being able to generate pretty much what I need with a reasonable degree of accuracy has proven to be an attraction too great to ignore. The problem with such images, however, it that people often look unrealistic and deformed. Thus, I've tried to limit such image generation to animals, plants and inanimate objects. Anything that absolutely requires human parts in the image, I continue relying on stock photos. I think it's an acceptable compromise.

Tech Content

As is par for the course with other years, much of my repertoire has revolved around HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and occasionally PHP. But true to form, I have been experimenting with other technologies. Not new programming languages, but new software.

Oracle APEX

Low-Code solutions was something I embarked upon after attending Oracle's CloudWorld Tour back in April. Oracle APEX sounded promising at the time, and after some tinkering, I have not found myself overly impressed. However, I have not been thoroughly underwhelmed either. And thus I have actually, as is my wont, used a technology I am learning, to create something I want. The result is last month's web tutorial.

This year, QBasic made the rare appearance in one of my web tutorials. There's quite the story behind that one, but go read the web tutorial if you want to know.

Other Content

There's been a fair bit brewing around the world. The rise of A.I, global unrest, and much moving and shaking in big tech. Stuff has happened in Singapore as well, but unless I can somehow tie it to a tech angle, I tend not to feature it on the blog.

Gobal news!

One point of evolution of this blog is that gradually, I have been screening out things that are big enough for me to talk about. If it's about tech, that's an obvious inclusion. If it's not so much about tech but more about Singapore or workplace issues, then it's still relevant as long as I can make it relevant. The rule is that I should not have to try too hard to make it relevant.

I've also gone into the process of tag removal. Over the years, the number of tags that simply were not important enough to warrant being repeated, has grown. In my defense, they seemed important at the time, and it's only with the benefit of hindsight that I realized a substantial amount of cleanup was needed. This is an ongoing process though, so bear with me!

My Equipment

As I write this passage, I am doing it on a creaky and flickering laptop that is undoubtedly on its last legs. This machine has served me since 2015, a few months after I embarked on TeochewThunder. It has been 8 years. Ah, the memories. The support on the Windows version has run out, and I'm dragging my feet on moving on to a new machine.

Thankfully, in 2020, I bought a MacBook Air and the little beauty's got some life in her yet. I expect that soon I will be moving on from presenting screenshots from my Windows machine, to taking screenshots from my MacBook Air.

Failing equipment.

My mobile phone is not what one would call state of the art and is in dire need of an upgrade. Still, thankfully, it seems to have weathered much abuse and should hold out for a while yet. Hopefully, the upcoming blogging break will give me ample time to transition to machines that aren't decrepit to the point of embarrassment.

Next

We examine the highs and lows of the blog.