The TeochewThunder Logo Change

TeochewThunder's logo has changed. You heard it here first! Well, duh.

More than ten years have passed since I first started TeochewThunder. Back then, the logo looked like this.

I was going for something whacky in my favorite color, orange. Thus, the crying-face emoji "T___T" became my goto. And I used some super-basic text art creator (was it MS Word? I really can't recall) to put that cheeky bend on it.

The time has come for a slight change. I still want that "T___T", but I want the second "T" to look like a lightning bolt! Teochew "Thunder", right?

I'd been thinking about a brand renewal for a while now, but never quite got round to it. Mostly because while the first logo was a complete rush job and very casually done, it really grew on me the last decade. Especially when I saw it in browsers or on my mobile.

The Favicon in browser.

The Favicon in mobile.

The end result was that I kept putting off the task of creating a new logo, and implementing the change. Why fix it if it ain't broke, amirite?

That one final push

As it turned out, the choice was made for me. My trusty faithful Lenovo died, and with it the source file for the logo. This meant that if I ever wanted a fresh copy to resize or whatnot, I would have to work off existing exported images. Not exactly ideal.

Thus, I bit the bullet. This time, I created an SVG. This meant that as long as I had the formula for the SVG, I could recreate it from anywhere. All I had to do was save it to my GitHub account, and I was good for eternity. And also, being an SVG, it could be scaled up and down infinitely with no loss in quality.

New Favicon in browser.

New Favicon in mobile.

The rest of the month was spent replacing the logo everywhere I found it. I replaced it on GitHub, Trello, and on the signoffs of my blogposts. And of course, the Favicon. However, I'm too fond of the old logo to totally let it go. What I'm going to do is leave it as legacy, but use the new logo for all other content moving forward.

Keep Thundering On!

When I first learned how to make SVGs, it wasn't with this express purpose in mind. But I'm glad I invested that time and effort.

Stay iconic,
T___T

TeochewThunder: Year Eight (Part 2/2)

For this blogging year, the usual features were there - reviews, web tutorials, listicles and so on. I'm glad to report that the popular posts didn't all fall into one category or other. At the very least, it indicates that readers appreciate a variety of blogpost types. Well, except for web tutorials. The readership for those were consistently low.

Viewership for blogposts usually peak at the two-week mark, so they will be judged based on that. The statistics are from LinkedIn and Google.

Top Picks

These are the blogposts that were the cream of the crop. They hit high viewership numbers. Half of them were about current affairs. The rest were made up of a listicle, a review and a dry technical piece.

Crowd-pleasers!

ONE Pass to rule them all was one of my most recent blogposts. I used no profanities in there, but damn, the shade I threw would make an umbrella blush.

The old-fashioned way to skirt the OCBC Phishing Scam was written as a thought piece on something that happened in Singapore last xxx. No surprises there; this was a hot topic on our little island.

Reference Review: The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers; now, this one was a surprise. My reviews generally haven't had all that much success. Add to the fact that I wasn't excessively complimentary towards Uncle Bob...

Ten Lessons From The Art Of War Applied To Software Development, a fun listicle I put together after attending some rooms on the Clubhouse app.

Discrete And Continuous Data Defined is a headscratcher. This was a dry a piece as I've ever done and honestly I'm not at all sure why it got so popular.

Elon Musk and the Twitter Takeover was an expected hit; after all, it was the topic for a while there regardless of whether or not you were a techie.

Excellent Response

This group encompasses blogposts that got a decent amount of readership, though not enough to propel them to the next tier.

Cleared that bar.

Using Trello outside of the professional workplace was a little geek-out piece of how I used this software in my everyday life.

Software Review: Power BI had a decent enough amount of clicks, which was probably better than I hoped for.

Google moves to 2FA! underperformed, really. Maybe it just wasn't that interesting.

Five Software Development Takeaways From the COP Saga in 2021 was a piece about Singapore politics, though I tied it into tech practices.

Film Review: Black Mirror Series One astonished me because I didn't think people would be interested in a series that premiered so long ago.

Trail of the Catfish was something I wrote about an experience I witnessed and was only peripherally involved in. It had a fair bit of traction on Facebook (because people who use Facebook love that shit) but not so much on LinkedIn.

OK-ish

These posts got a bit of attention, but statistically they got the short end of the stick. Most of them were dry technical blogposts, so no surprise there.

Good reads.

Tech Wizardry in the Beijing Winter Olympics and Ten Pieces Of African Wisdom In Software Development were pieces I felt deserved more views, but it is what it is.

Functional Terminology, The Different Categories of Data Analytics, Mean, Median and Mode in Python, Thoughts About HTML5, Different Number Types in Datasets and Code indentation reduction using Guard Clauses were wholly technical, nothing exciting here.

Reading Books In Modern Technology was something whimsical I did. Probably could have written it better.

App Review: Bazooka Boy was a mediocre review about a mediocre app. Probably got the views it deserved.

Special Mentions

These were blogposts that were especially poignant in the year 2022. They might not have obtained all that much traction, but I'm going to mention them here because they were personally important to me.

Spotlight!

How I became a Married Software Developer chronicles the arduous years leading up to my marriage, and is closely tied to my career as a software developer.

Ten Cheap Shots At Internet Explorer is a glorious, glorious day for me and I refuse to let the lack of views dampen it.

That's all for now!

It has been a pretty decent year, considering this is the eighth straight year I'm doing this. It's not been an outstanding year by any means, but I like to think I at least met a certain standard. If you're reading this, kudos for your continued support!

Thanks for your kind 8-tention!
T___T

TeochewThunder: Year Eight (Part 1/2)

2022 so far has had me working from home, just like 2021. The main difference that my wife has been back from China since the last quarter of the previous year. And my efforts to acclimatize to the inevitable changes in my lifestyle could fill an entire book, never mind a blogpost.

Suffice to say, my blogging and coding time has met a few roadblocks, because there are times my duties as a husband take precedence. As they should. I'm happy to say, however, that I've managed to stay pretty constant, even though the average length of my blogposts has significantly decreased. Part of that could also be due to a conscious effort towards brevity. Honestly, I take no pleasure in droning on like some pompous, oblivious jackass.

No more commute!

This is the third year in a row I spent the majority of my time working from home. This gave me greater freedom to blog, or at least research new ideas. At least, the time I saved on commuting definitely contributed.

As soon as the workday is done, I can go right to coding, or blogging, instead of waiting to get home, and probably getting physically drained from the commute. It can't be overstated how much this has improved my work on the blog.

Trello

If anything good came from the utter shitshow that was my job at this company, it was that I took careful note of all the tools they used, and adopted those practices as much as I could. One of these tools was Trello. It's no exaggeration to say that it practically runs my life now.

I have written a blogpost about how I use Trello outside of the workplace. It helps greatly in keeping consistent, which is a giant step in trying to achieve any kind of success, no matter how small. Perhaps I'll elaborate on this sometime later in the year.

My blogging and coding tasks are now scheduled via Trello. I'm having a blast, though a one-man experience for Trello probably is not conducive to training for a real team environment. Still, it's something.

Audio Social Media

A large part of last year and the entirety of this year was spent weaning myself off of Facebook and using the app known as Clubhouse. And to a lesser extent, LinkedIn. If I'm to be perfectly honest, my distancing from Facebook began more than a few years back, and my introduction to Clubhouse pretty much accelerated the process.

On Clubhouse, I've found myself moving in several circles - American, African, Japanese, Chinese and Malaysian - and the subsequent conversations I've had, have spawned a multitude of ideas. These ideas sometimes translate into blogposts (see Ten Lessons From The Art Of War Applied To Software Development and Ten Pieces Of African Wisdom In Software Development) or code projects (notably The Japanese Language Trainer App). Upon the relaxation of border controls, I've even had friends from Clubhouse come to Singapore to meet up offline.

All in all, my time on Clubhouse has been pretty fruitful, despite it often looking otherwise.

LinkedIn

As mentioned previously, there has been a conscious move from Facebook to LinkedIn. A large part of this reason is audience.

While I used to share completed blogposts on Facebook, at some point I began to realize that I was preaching to the wrong crowd. Facebook users pretty much just want to watch funny cat videos and share memes. The content of my blogposts can sometimes be very technical, and consequently pretty dry. I've found that sharing my blogposts on LinkedIn, where the majority of my connections are professional rather than personal, have gained greater traction.

Now, when I have blogposts that add value to my professional profile, I share them on LinkedIn. My rather more spicy rants about employers have been confined to Facebook, where they gain plenty of traction on their own.

Next

Let's take a look at how popular some of this year's blogposts were.

Using Trello outside of the professional workplace

As Project Management tools go, Trello by Atlassian is probably one of the best-known ones out there. It is used by both tech practitioners as well as business people. Trello is an online version of the Kanban Board popularized by the Japanese. And for the entirety of 2021, I have been using it to manage my non-professional projects; i.e, my personal life.

I will show you how soon, but first things first...

What is a Kanban Board?

This link can probably explain it better, but here goes: the Kanban Board is a visualization that represents the progress of a task, or a series of tasks. These tasks are placed on the board at positions that denote the stage at which the progress of that task has arrived at. For example - Backlog, In Progress, Completed.

A typical Kanban Board.

The tasks are then moved when progress takes place, until the tasks are completed. The overall effect is a visual of where each task is at, at the current time.

Now that this is hopefully clear, let us examine how the use of this tool can be used in the personal life of a tech professional.

What does Trello manage for me?

What I have used Trello to manage all the fun little code projects I work on, the blogposts that make it onto this blog, some crafts projects and learning assignments.

Chores managed by Trello.

Also, I use Trello to schedule my weekend household chores. Dental. Banking appointments. All that mundane stuff.

Breakdowns into sub-tasks

Checklists can be used in each card to break the task down into smaller chunks. When items in the checklist are checked, there is an indication on the card reflecting how much of the task has been completed. 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%.

Checklists

Also, breaking a task down makes it more manageable. I get to tackle bite-sized chunks instead of an entire otherwise gargantuan task. Take for example, a task like "Learn Japanese". Learning an entirely new language is daunting in itself. But if we broke it down into multiple checklists for reading, writing and speaking, with each checklist further broken down into different sub-tasks, it now looks doable. And these tasks are segregated into logical groups, which lets me see which parts of Japanese I am progressing in more - reading, writing or speaking. What I may want to concentrate on more - vocabulary or grammar. It provides significantly more insight into the task than simply "Learn Japanese".

Daily tasks

Daily tasks are a list of things I want to work on or get done on any given day. They could be an existing card on the board that I need to do work on. They could be some entirely new items that needs to be done on that day, like laundry or grocery shopping.

Miscellaneous tasks

In the case of the latter, those tasks take priority because they have to be finished on the day itself. Therefore I would recommend that there is a limited number of these such items on any given day.

In the case of the former, it is a little more nuanced. The objective is not to finish the task, but rather do work on it. So if I do enough work for one or more items on the checklist to be checked off, it counts. How much work I do on that task does not matter; only that I spend time on it. If I spend time on that task but do not actually manage to check off any items, then obviously I did not break down that task thoroughly enough. Therefore, if I follow my own rules, this forces me to at least do one thing on the checklist. If I do this consistently, eventually, the task gets completed. This serves to enforce discipline.

Overall benefits

I've explained how Trello helps in organization of my personal life and all my required tasks. That is an undeniable benefit, especially since I have to break down tasks to fit into the Kanban Board system, and group these sub-tasks logically. This also means that I get real practice using a system like Trello.

Task management.

As mentioned, Trello (or other systems like it) are in use professionally for task management. Being familiar with something like that lends me a professional edge.

Not only does Trello play a role in my professional life as a software developer, it also plays a role in my personal life. In the larger picture, Trello has kept me pretty much on track.

Completed,
T___T